Aesthetic modernism as a macro-epoch. Part 2

интертекстуальность.

III. Emergence of the current concept of modernism: Autonomy, self-reflexion and a new consciousness of time

The application of these possibilities is the essence of the third phase in the history of the concept of “modernism”. Its beginnings can be found around the turn of the century in 1800, which proves, from a number of perspectives, to be a decisive time in the history of the concept and idea of modernism. The following thesis postulates that modernism became modern in this third phase: around and after 1800, definitions of modernism can be seen to develop which we still feel to belong to our own understanding of our epoch. This, in Gadamer’s sense of melting horizons, is of utmost relevance to the analysis of our present situation.

The French Revolution, as an epochal event in European history, also demarcates a profound shift in the history of the idea and concept of modernism. The historical experience of abrupt and radical disruptions, the sudden ripping apart of supposedly fixed and guaranteed strains of tradition, created not only an utterly new future horizon, open to being shaped and created, but also a radically strengthened sense of discontinuity in relation to the past. In Germany, where decisive political changes were not to be expected in the French manner, and after the reign of terror and the execution of Louis XVI were also not considered to be particularly welcome, there were nonetheless major social changes happening around 1800 but the revolutionary impulse was primarily taken up

in the aesthetic realm.

Two studies about the relationship of modernity to antiquity can be seen as parallel pertinent catalysts for this new development: Friedrich Schiller’s essay On naive and sentimental poetry from 1795-96 and Friedrich Schlegel’s On the study of Greek poetry, which appeared one year later. Both works contain an avid expectation of an aesthetic revolution and both follow entirely new paths towards an autonomous definition of the modern. One essential condition for this autonomy can be located in the massive appearance around 1800 of self-reflexion in discourse pertaining to the modern. At this point, focus shifts from content-related fulfilment of the barely reflected comparative concepts “anti-quus” and “modernus” to cultural-historical, psychological and epistemological conditions and implications in the concept of the modern. Particularly for Schiller, the modern is no longer primarily a construction of historical relationships, but the analysis of one’s own consciousness of the present, thus being transformed from a historical to an anthropological category. In this sense, Friedrich Schlegel’s review of Herder’s Letters for the advancement of humanity in 1796 argues that “the concepts of the antique and the modern” should be derived “from human nature itself,” [Schlegel 1958-1980, II, 48] rather than from epochal relationships. Seemingly following this call, Schiller developed an initial theory of the consciousness of the modern by first asking what exactly it is that fascinates us about antiquity today. His methodological approach is particularly interesting and of analytic value. In opposition to the proponents of the Querelle and their followers, he no longer sought to establish the aesthetic superiority of antique culture over modernity by means of artistic or cultural-historical analysis. Rather, as a proponent of the late 18^th century who had engaged deeply with Kant’s transcendental philosophy, he asked what the necessary conditions might be that would enable a positive experience of antiquity. His answer: that we perceive antiquity just as we occasionally perceive nature:

“There are moments in our life where nature in plants, minerals, animals, landscapes, and human nature in children, in the customs of rural peoples and the primeval world - not because it does our senses good, also not because it satisfies our reason or our taste <...>, rather simply because it is nature, we dedicate to it a type of love and poignant respect. Every finer person not entirely lacking in sensitivity experiences this when walking in the open air, when living in the countryside or when observing the monuments of ancient times, briefly, when being astounded by the naivety of nature in artistic relationships and moments”.

Furthermore:

“This kind of interest in nature [and as heard above in the testimonials of antiquity] only happens under two conditions. First, it is entirely necessary that the awe-inspiring entity is nature or is seen as such; secondly, that it must be (in the broadest sense of the word) naive; i.e. that nature stands in contrast to art and puts it to shame. As soon as the latter conjoins with the former, and not before, nature becomes naive” [Schlegel 1958-1980, V, 694].

For Schiller, this way of perceiving becomes naive at exactly the moment when we see nature as that which is perceived as natural, untouched, pure and free from all negative implications of civilizations or - in his own words - experience it “as the voluntary existence, the being of things by their own means, their existence according to their own and unchangeable laws” [Schiller 1980, 694] that we conceive these conditions as opposite to our own situation - to be more precise, that we discover in it a lost ideal that needs to be regained. “They are”, write Schiller in his concluding sentence, “what we were; they are what we should become again” [Schiller 1980, 695].

The development of such a notion of a lost natural paradise or, as Schiller writes, the “portrayal of our lost childhood” [Schiller 1980, 695] is the basic requirement for sentimental thought and as such for Schiller the basic essence of modernism. A simple “back to nature” as “back to state of naivety” cannot happen because what strikes us as naive always developed without choice or reflection, simply evolving according to its own laws of development: nature is naive from this perspective because it follows its own laws, children’s games are naive because they are yet untouched by the corruption of the adult world, and the culture of antiquity is naive because it was the early pinnacle of perfection in the natural development of humanity. It is worth recalling in this regard Winckelmann’s speech about the “noble naivety” of the ancient Greeks and Werther’s reading of Homer in bucolic surroundings, which filled him “with a silent, true sensation <...> of the features of patriarchal life” [Goethe 1985 1998,1 (2), 217].

Reflexion and ethical choice are the dominant features of the modern, its lifeblood and basic capital that entirely precludes a return to naivety. For Schiller, modernism should and does not want to return. Instead, according to the maxims cited above: “they are what we were, they are, what we should become again”, modernism in fact now takes up the idea of the naive against the background of thorough reflexion and as a free ethical choice, and attempts to unite it with its own faculties:

“We are free, and they are necessary; we change, they remain one. But only when both are connected with one another <...> does the divine or the ideal emerge. We eternally glimpse in them that which we miss but which we are challenged to fight for and which, even if we shall never achieve it, we nonetheless hope to attain in eternal progress” [Schiller 1980, 695].

In the history of the concept and idea of modernism, this is momentously decisive. On the one hand, the category of the sentimental, to which Schlegel developed the parallel notion of artistic education, makes possible for the very first time an autonomous definition of modernism developed out of a singular awareness of one’s own present; on the other hand, modernism is first described here with reference to the future, considering that both Schiller’s and Schlegel’s treatises main interest was to posit a design for future modern poetry.

However, the awareness of the modern around and after 1800 cannot be

sufficiently described with sole reference to this accentuation of progressivity and future expectations. Schiller’s and Schlegel’s analyses of the modern are in the first instance analyses of a loss whose irretrievability results in a specifically modern longing. Schiller speaks of “our lost childhood, that remains eternally our most treasured thing; thus it fills us with a certain melancholy” [Schiller 1980, 695], whilst Schlegel diagnoses the “lack of character” as the “character of modern poetry, confusion [as] the common element of its mass, lawlessness [as] the spirit of its history, and scepticism [as] the result of its theory” [Schlegel 1958-1980,1, 222]. Even the

“most excellent poems of modernity whose great art and power demand reverence often unite the spirit only to tear it apart all the more painfully. They leave behind a wounding barb in the soul and take more than they give. Satisfaction is only to be found in complete enjoyment where every excited expectation is fulfilled, even the smallest disquiet is dissolved; where all longing is silent. This is what the poetry of our age is missing!” [Schlegel 1958-1980,1, 217].

For both writers, this specifically modern feeling of loss or decadence is compensated by a future modernism that will reunite the lost ideal and contemporary reflectivity on a higher level. However, the analysis of decadence and hopeful or utopian future designs do not necessarily fit or belong together. The high expectations for the future inherent in the revolutionary new literature found an early end for both authors; yet the analytical power of Schiller’s and Schlegel’s analysis of decadence is in no way exhausted by this fact. On the contrary, Schiller’s analytical conceptual instrument of the naive as a category for that which had been lost and his use of sentimentality to describe the sentiment of the spirit in a state of this loss remains highly contemporary, despite or precisely because of the fact that in the aftermath of the collapse of our secularized history of healing processes, of the teleological philosophy of history and against the backdrop of the ecological crisis, the last remnants of our euphoric expectations for the future may well be considered to be lost. Indeed, our own time might be seen to be far more sentimental than Schiller’s. We no longer call nature naive but we do call it good, exemplary, self-contained, unblemished, worthy of protection, etc. - particularly when we picture it undamaged by the consequences of the industrial revolution - or what we imagine these to be -and our perspective remains unchanged and sentimental in Schiller’s sense of the word:

“It is not these objects, it is the idea they portray, that we love in them. We love in them the silent creating life, the calm effect of them, the existence according to their own laws, the inner necessity, the eternal unity with themselves” [Schiller 1980, 695].

The fact that Schiller’s analytical instruments feel more modern in our own sense than his easily destructible utopian designs once again connects us in our consciousness of the present with the critical self-reflexion of modernist

consciousness that set in around 1800. For if modernism can no longer define itself with reference to its difference or differentiation from other epochs, it must derive new descriptive criteria from the process of self-reflexion and adjust its relationship to other epochs along these lines, without orientating itself along the lines pertaining to any previously existing traditional or metaphysical framework. Universal self-referential designs that develop on the basis of self-analysis are, however, always subject to the principle of self-doubt and as such destructible by the very critical reason that constructed them. Friedrich Nietzsche can be seen as the grand master of self-exposure and destruction in the process of a meaningful search for the modern, but the first clear indications of this tradition, as will be demonstrated below, emerge in the early Romanticism of Berlin. In Nietzsche’s middle, critical phase, the modern perspectives that are exposed as illusions become, for him, “emetics” [Nietzsche 1968, 404], and against such modernism he stylizes the “uncontemporary”. Thought through to the end, Nietzsche would in fact have had to expose his own theory of per-spectivism as perspectivism itself, and as such have been forced to destroy the critical instrument of destruction [Maurer 1979; Japp 1988, 239]. This exposes an aporia from which the self-defining freedom of modernism that grows out of autonomy cannot escape and which explicates the dialectical envelope of this freedom as an extremely problematic self-explanation compulsion. Friedrich Schlegel’s image of the “infinite row of mirrors” with which “poetic reflection... potentiates itself’ [Schlegel 1958-1980, II, 182] constructively encounters its antithesis here in an infinite series of self-analyses that exponentially destroy critical reflexion. This dialectic casts light on a tension-fraught series of alternations and switching between the poles of euphorically welcoming new free spaces and the melancholy angst of being lost in these very spaces that is visible in all areas of modernism since 1800. Here, the sense of loss written into the epochal concepts of antiquity find their modern counterpart.

The same is true when we question the consequences of the idea of autonomy in relation to aesthetic modernism. As early as 1794, Friedrich Schlegel prized the Beautiful as a “true firstborn child of human nature” with an “equally valid right to obey nobody other than itself’ [Schlegel 1958-1980,1, 24]. In the early romantic theoretical phase that followed shortly after this, the idea of autonomous art, which is to say, self-reflectivity and creativity in art, became the crystallisation point of a conception of art that imbued it with a highly charged right to knowledge and an inherent truth value - in the Jena tradition through the unification of poetry and philosophy, in Berlin through the idea of a quasireligious revelatory function of art. This recalls Wachkenroder’s evocation of an independent “language of art” that transmits the Absolute hieroglyphically and his talk of a “magic mirror” in the soul of the artist that grants him access to the numinous. Wackenroder’s writing also contains elements of the critical self-reflection of this model, though, and the fear of destructibility of this perhaps hypertrophic self-description of Art. Art, according to the Brief Joseph Berglingers,

“is an illusory, fraudulent suspicion; we think to behold in it the ultimate, most intimate humanity and yet it only ever foists a beautiful human work on us, containing all of the self-addicted, self-satisfactory thoughts and feelings” [Wackenroder 1991, I, 225].

This doubt as to whether the highly charged construction of the spirit of art might eventually collapse into a conceited fiction in the service of “self-oriented pleasure” [Wackenroder 1991,1, 225] not only elevates the Berglinger character to the position of the first artistic figure of modernism but also defines Wacken-roder’s Breif Joseph Berglingers as perhaps the earliest critical destruction of artistic self-design on the basis of autonomous thought.

It is only when the concept of autonomy demonstrates this self-reflexive and self-critical side that it actually enters into the discourse pertaining to aesthetic modernism. Even if the autonomous postulate of the process of literary emancipation had already emerged in the middle of the 18th century, this self-critical aspect only appears to have become apparent during Early Romanticism.

A fundamental shift of the implicit time perspective occurred in the concept of modernism parallel to the growing autonomy of the concept. Under the auspices of the leading categories of perfectibility and progression, the semantic core of the category shifts the focus from a description of the past to a description of the present and that which will affect the future. Thus the functional aspect of the concept shifts from a category of ordering past and present times to a definition of future expectations, and to a description of the genetic principle that this future will bring. Put simply, the modern now defines itself less in terms of what it just was or is and more in relation to what it expects to be or hopes for.

Schiller describes this future expectation in his concept of “infinite progress”; Schlegel makes recourse to the technical term employed by Enlightenment philosophers of history, “perfectibility” [cf. Behler 1989]. Taking both these basic conditions as the blossom of the concept and the idea it described in the second half of the 18th century, it becomes clear that the problematic horizon of our own modernity does indeed begin around 1800. Theologically, the notion of perfectibility presumes the end of a Christian design of an eschatologically contained cosmic time; in the context of the philosophy of history, it implies forfeiting cyclical models in favour of dynamic linear progression.

Reinhart Koselleck described the consequences of the end of the Christian design of an eschatologically contained cosmic time in a three-phase model [Koselleck 1992, 17-37]: until well into the 16th century, the generally prevailing Christian anticipation of the future was defined by the imminent eschatological expectation, the end of time, on the one hand, and the experience of its constant postponement on the other. In this vision of the future, the period of the experienced and historically surveyed past clearly dominates over the expected future, whilst the expectations for the future become ever shorter. For Koselleck, the period between the Reformation and the French Revolution saw the phase of the specifically modern temporalisation of history and the gradual abandonment of Christian temporal limits in favour of a design governed by state planning and politics that opened up a limited future horizon. In the modernism that came to light with the French Revolution, the relationship ultimately shifts radically away from experience and expectation to an entirely open expectation of the future which predicates an infinite malleability of the future and acceleration of the shaping process.

This new vision of the future also saw a parallel abandonment of cyclical notions of history in favour of dynamic linearity. The final defences of the notion of the four global empires [Trieber 1892, 321-344] appeared shortly after 1700, the last of which being the Roman Empire that was equated with the Christian empire, which would fall with the apparition of the anti-Christ and the establishment of the Reign of Christ. As the political and religious significance of the realm faded, so the final historically healing model of a shortening future broke down and was replaced by the guiding light of perfectibility, taken on from the empirical sciences, with its dynamic linear models of the historical logic of the Enlightenment.

The specifically modernist connection between the notions of perfectibility and acceleration came about in the decade following the French Revolution at the epochal threshold around 1800. On the 10th May 1793, Robespierre called for a revolutionary constitution:

“The time has come to incite everyone to their own true calling. The progress of human reason laid the ground for this great revolution and it is you who are obliged to accelerate it” [Koselleck 1992, 21].

Schlegel refers to the “principle of reason of the necessary infinite perfectibility of humanity” [Schlegel 1958-1980,1, 263] in his essay Studium, where he celebrates the expected acceleration of the development of modern or - for the early Friedrich Schlegel it was identical - Romantic literature in the image of “double[d] progression”:

For the power of man grows in doubled progression, in that every progress not only guarantees greater power but also provides new means for further progresses. The driving reason can damage itself as often as it may as long as it remains inexperienced: there must come a time when all its errors are richly replaced. Blind superiority must finally submit to the reasonable opponent.

-Nothing is as evident as the theory of perfectibility [Schlegel 1958-1980,1, 263].

The same openness to the future and temporalization characterizes aesthetic modernism. The historocentric orientation of the antiquus / modernus dichotomy is replaced by an orientation towards the future of a modernism that is still waiting to fulfil itself. This is significantly already true of the “original systematic programme of Romantic aesthetics”, as Diana Behler [Kindlers 1988-1998, XIV, 978] describes Friedrich Schlegel’s Studium essay. Here, Schlegel claims, with his analysis of “objective” and “interesting” art and the design of a future synthesis as announced in Goethe’s work,

“to have located the progress of aesthetic culture, to have happily discovered the sense of the history of art to date, and so to have found a great vision for its future” [Schlegel 1958-1980,1, 354].

In this conception of the modern as a future and yet-to-be-redeemed programme there is a mirror image of the prevailing philosophy of history which created the incisive formal expression of the phenomenon of the anticipatory programmatic design that imbues the aesthetics of modernism. However even after its supposed or actual end, the function of the concept that emerged in the period around 1800 - the formulation of the genetic principle from which the consciousness of the present and, in increasingly limited measure, the expectation of the future can be derived - are still contained in this term, even if the result of a long process of the disillusionment [cf. Heidbrink 1994] of our expectations of the future has lost its teleological long-term perspective and authority.

IV Aesthetic Modernism since 1800 as exemplified by its relationship to tradition

From today’s perspective, the century of Enlightenment can also be described as the century of criticism of tradition, even if the Enlighteners engaged less with the concept of tradition itself [Wiedenhofer 1980, 629] than with the pejorative term they derived from it: prejudice [cf. Schneiders 1983]. Recourse to tradition was at the centre of all criticism, where it functioned as a strategy of legitimisation, where authority was derived from tradition, and new thought needed at least to prove itself not to be in contradiction to tradition. This tradition-authority scheme devised from the paradigm of theology was opposed by the new mathematical and scientific thought of protagonists such as Galilei and Giordano Bruno; in the middle of the 17^th century Blaise Pascal [Pascal 1908, II, 127] already differentiated methodologically between traditional sciences (terminology according to [Wiedenhofer 1980, 628]) and their focus on books and authors on the one hand, and natural sciences rooted in experience and reason on the other. The bright rays of their declaration of independence from traditional authority and their liberation from the antiques / modernus dichotomy even shone on the theological core of traditional sciences in the 18^th century and gave rise to the tension between dogma and historical descriptions of dogma or Christology, and Enlightenment research into the Life of Jesus. At the end of the century, Kant includes imitation and particularly “imitatio veterum" [Kant 1968, 79] along with habit and inclination in his “primary sources of prejudice” [Kant 1968, 76]. From a general cultural historical perspective, this has been diagnosed as “the source of the contemporary lack of tradition” [Schneider 1995, 414] but in the aesthetic realm the development was quite different.

At the height of the “Querelle”, around the transition from the 17th to the 18th century, aesthetic reflexion, as demonstrated above, freed itself from its 60

relational connection to antiquity so that an entirely new relationship to literary and artistic tradition could establish itself in the course of the 18^th century. If Rhetoricism can be seen to have bound modernity to an imitating-and-emulat-ing relationship with antiquity, imposing on its practitioners a certain kind of adaptation-of-the-traditional as a norm and rule, then the aesthetics of genius that imbued the Sturm and Drang can be identified as extreme opposites to such normative expectations. The speaker at Zum Shakespeares Tag claims “my heart would have burst... had I not declared a feud against the [masters of these rules] and did not daily strive destroy them.” [Goethe 1887-1919, XXXVII, 131] This gesture of negating tradition is upheld by Goethe retrospectively in the seventh book of Dichtung und Wahrheit in his characterisation of the development of his own early work. “The literary epoch into which I was born developed from a previous contradiction” [Goethe 1887-1919, XXVII, 72] - i.e. a contradiction to a “watery, vague, null epoch” [Goethe 1887-1919, XXVII, 88]. As effective as this negation of tradition may have been in the 19^th and 20^th centuries too [cf. Barner 1987], nonetheless, the new relationship to tradition that is specific to the aesthetics of modernism is not sufficiently described by the concept of negation. The proponents of the Sturm and Drang also constructed their own tradition; with Homer, Ossian and Shakespeare they established their own canon or anti-canon and at the same time propagated an entirely new way of handling this tradition. If the Rhetoric had passed on their idols to the young generation as referential greats made noble by their origins who had to be imitated, then the Sturm und Drang proponents’ traditional horizon cannot be seen as the result of a traditional postulate but instead an autonomous choice of tradition, guided by aesthetic reflexion alone. Similarly the relationship to any respective traditional horizon can be characterized thus: if the guiding poetics demanded a normative imitating-and-emulating relationship to tradition, the aesthetics of genius replaced it with the principle of congeniality which reveals its own kind of emulation of one another’s genius or indeed of the creative force nature itself [cf. Bauer 1992, 177]. The decisive factor in our context, though, is that after the cessation of the normative antiquus / modernus dichotomy, the Sturm and Drang period points for the first time towards an aesthetic of autonomously chosen and in the broadest possible sense philosophically derived approaches to tradition that are an essential constituent of aesthetic modernism. Their earliest theoretical reflexion of this paradigmatic shift is to be found in Friedrich Schlegel’s essay Studium (1795), where he describes aesthetics of mimesis as a precursor to philosophical aesthetics from the perspective of the development of perfectibility:

“During the period of childhood of the governing reason, when the theoreticizing instinct is not yet capable of begetting an independent product of itself, it tends to attach itself to an existing perspective, in which it identifies a general relevance. Thus the conspicuous imitation of the ancient that all European nations fell into and with the most constant stamina adhered to and to which they repeatedly, after brief respite, returned anew. <...> The childish reason promotes a single example to the status of general rule,

ennobles its origins and sanctions its prejudices. The authority of the ancient (the less it was understood, the worse it was copied), is the first fundamental principle in the constitution of the most ancient aesthetic dogmatism which was a mere precursor to the actual philosophical theory of poetry” [Schlegel 1958-1980,1, 237].

In the Athenaeum, in the Discourse about poetry. Schlegel already consistently uses the newly won space to create new horizons of tradition. Where rhetorical tradition had demanded that the measure of contemporary poetry must be derived from history, Schlegel turn this relationship around programmatically by defining the current level of knowledge and reflection as the yardstick or constituent element of history. “Art rests on knowledge”, he explains programmatically, “and knowledge of art is its history” [Schlegel 1958-1980, II, 290]. In practice, this means:

Philosophy and poetry, the highest powers of man, that even in Athens at its highest blossoming was earned out by each for themselves, now intertwine in order to enliven and develop one another in eternal interaction. The translation of the poets and the reconstruction of their rhythms has become art and criticism has become science, the old errors have been destroyed and new glimpses into knowledge of the ancient world have opened up in whose background an entire history of poetry reveals itself [Schlegel 1958-1980, II, 303].

This constitutional view of tradition grown out of aesthetic theory serves in the first instance as a self-reassurance and development of a contemporary understanding of poetry that was born of philosophical and aesthetic reflexion [Behler 1994, 176-183]. Thus a great deal of the writing of Romantic literary history can be seen to explicate Romantic theories of poetry.

An enlightening fact in our context is further the condition that Friedrich Schlegel embedded the conquest of new horizons of tradition in his theory of modernism. In his Discourse about poetry he says:

“I seek and find the Romantic, amongst the older modernists, in Shakespeare, Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that time of knights, love and fairy-tales from which the thing and the word derive. This is to now the only thing that can provide a contrast to the classical poetries of antiquity” [Schlegel 1958-1980, II, 335].

This is spoken from the perspective of a young contemporary who no longer accepts the traditional burdens imposed by a supposed authority, but instead freely, from the pool of his own field of interest, freely chooses the tradition in which he wished to be anchored.

This brings with it new and, for aesthetic modernism, specific forms of in-ter-textuality. If the commandments of imitatio and aemulatio focused on style and material, the new guiding categories that allow for an adaptation of a foreign text, or a continuation of a foreign text, enable an inter-textual relationship encompassing experiment and play. The resulting consequences for the idea

of authorship, completeness or the truth of a literary text can already be found in early Romanticism and as such, post-modernism - which (also) engages in this sense with a specifically modern problematic context - can be seen to have merely taken up these themes anew in a radicalized manner.

So-called traditionalists also make use of the theory-led choice of tradition in modernism as sketched here. As conservative as they may claim to be, these traditionalists are in no way un-modern. Thomas Mann’s early work, for example, derives the oft-described traditional horizon of 19th century bourgeois cultural institutional enshrinement from the cultural and philosophical criticism of what he sees as the destructive and threatening cultural tendencies of Western civilization. He held fast to this choice of traditional horizon, which remained at the core of his self-styled intellectual aristocracy, when the original theoretical basis became untenable in the process of his political transformation and had to be changed. In this context, the only un-modern aspect would be an un-reflected reference to tradition or such a reference on the sole basis of the authority of a predominant canonization.

In fact, here too the concept of choice conceals its dialectical opposite in the form of an inescapable compulsion to engage with tradition. The fact that a modern artist is free from normative obligations to a certain given tradition does no place him outside any tradition. Rather, he loses - to formulate it ex nagativo - nothing but his legitimized system of orientation within an incalculable multitude of streams of traditions that engulf him. To separate his own artistic creativity from this tradition, to identify this Other as something Own, Individual and New, is a problem of aesthetic modernism that must not be under-estimated. Harold Bloom described it poignantly in his formulation Anxiety of Influence and in his study of the same name [cf. Bloom 1994] identifies six fundamental figures in the contemporary artists’ unavoidable struggle to defend themselves again the influx of tradition that threatens to overwhelm them.

Going much further than Bloom, Niklas Luhmann described the process of self-discovery and self-description in the being-other from traditional structures as a “decisive feature of modernism” [Luhmann 1980-1995, III, 155], which he sees, from a sociological perspective, as having begun during the epochal threshold around 1800. Whilst in older, stratified social systems the individual found their social location on the basis of the extent of their belonging to layers, castes or classes, which in turn enabled his self-discovery and self-description, the modern individual first defines himself through a principle of being different and thus wins the freedom to fulfil diverse functions in diverse social systems and sub-systems. This does not have to be explicated further insofar as we are only concerned with Luhmann’s concept of modernist exclusionist individuality which helps to illuminate the problem of tradition within modernism. Since the Sturm und Drang and early Romanticism, a basic feature of artistic self-perception has been a rejection of the inclusive offer of the respective dominant traditional strain, involving a primary definition of one’s own creativity through this rejection in order to then chose other traditional strains and to approach them in a highly individual manner. This was already true of the Shakespeare fascination of the Sturm und Drang and certainly explicit in both Wackenoder’s and Tieck’s exemplary introductions [cf. Kemper 1993, If] to the first literary text of early German Romanticism, the Herzensergiefiungen eines kunstlieben-den Klosterbruders. The friar of the title programmatically explains how his texts are “not written in the tone of today’s world” [Wackenroder 1991, I, 53] and specifies further precisely with traditional strain of Berlin’s late Enlightenment he wishes not to engage with: “the so-called theorists and system-ists describe to us the artists’ enthusiasm from hearsay <.„>”. [Wackenroder 1991, I, 55] Here, exclusion becomes a principle of identity construction and the receptive attitude requested of the reader, when the friar explains: whoever “loves the writings of H. von Ramdohr <.„> may immediately lay down what I have written, for it will not please him”. [Wackenroder 1991, I, 53] Instead, in an explanation of the newly selected traditional strain that will be elaborated in the following text, the reader is invited to refer to the artistic histories of Giorgio Vasari and others - but not with a source-critical scalpel of contemporary art history a la Fiorillo (Exclusion from the dominant paradigm of the developing field); rather, with an attitude of love and receptiveness for the hidden hagiography of art [cf. Kemper 1993, 261-268].

The freedom of autonomous and, in the broadest sense, philosophically derived choice of tradition is the foundation of aesthetic modernism as a macroepoch. In opposition to more traditional, micro-epochal concepts of modernism that focus on the criterion of a radical break from tradition [Fulleborn 1988, 11], this definition has the advantage of being able to integrate much more subtle forms of the new and specifically modern approach to tradition that was already visible in the writings of Wackenroder. Furthermore, it makes transparent the historical roots of the lack of tradition, or indeed the post-modern - purported -arbitrariness of tradition that defines our consciousness of our own present.