A Redescription of "Romantic Art"

Abstract

A sociologist taking up a theme like romantic art should endeavor to add nothing new to the subject matter itself. Faithfulness to the object is called for-even if only in the ordinary sense of empirical. In what follows it is therefore not a matter of competing with literary or aesthetic inquiry or of offering new interpretations of Romantic texts or other contemporary works of art. Nor shall I intervene in the broad discussion bearing on the relationship of Romanticism, and above all early German Romanticism (Fruhromantik), to modern society and its self-description as modern;1 this discussion is too dependent on crude evaluations (for example, irrationalism) and will necessarily remain controversial as long as the concept of modernity itself remains controversial. It is, then, not a question of hermeneutics, not a matter of 'knowing better' in the domain of the critical analysis of art; in fact it is not even, at least not directly, a question here of a more adequate understanding of key Romantic concepts such as poetry (Poesie), irony, arabesque, fragment, criticism. Such may emerge as a byproduct of our investigation. But disciplinary discourses operate in their own specific recursive networks, with their own intertextualities, their own selffabricated pasts, which, for instance, determine what one has to do in order to assume the standpoint of second-order observation and to remain intelligible-regardless of whether one continues the discursive tradition or suggests particular changes. And, as is well-known, it is dif-