The Romantic Circumstance: Novalis between Kittler and Luhmann

Abstract

The Romantic Circumstance Romanticism was a philosophical movement concerned with the question of orders—orders of things, of persons, of being. Friedrich von Hardenberg, the Early German Romantic who called himself Novalis, writes that “only [the infinite stone] is firm (in itself) // it is the dos moi, pu sto [give me a place to stand] of Archimedes” (Hardenberg III 91). It is strange to find, among the foundational texts of Early German Romanticism, anything having to do with foundations. The movement has often been characterized as “anti-foundational” (Frank, Philosophical Foundations; Frank “Ordo inversus”) and even occasionalist (Schmitt). And yet statements revealing a fascination with figures of intervention, revolution, and altering are hardly rare in Novalis’s works. Novalis often speaks of a basis for such intervention, for complex attempts to intervene in the unstable natural and political orders already in transformation around him. Those orders set the rules for communication and action—they mediated philosophy, art, and politics. For Novalis, the very fabric of thought—and any possible Archimedean efficacy—would have to engage at the level of that mediation. Can there be a tool that crosses orders, that mediates or alters the rules for mediation? The answer, as I will suggest below, lies in the notion of mediation, and the possibility of altering the rules for media themselves. These concerns would coalesce in Novalis’s writings around the term “organ.” There is in Novalis’s thought a media-theoretical core that surpasses even the important and neglected readings of his work by Friedrich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann. A historiographical point—namely, that Romanticism has plenty to do with the “new” problematics emerging from the New German Media Theory conjuncture—will be complemented here by a philosophical point: that, at least in the case of Novalis, Romantic thought offers something media theory has not (and perhaps did not intend to). Novalis engages media down to the very fabric of his writings, a point on which both Kittler and Luhmann agree; he also, I claim, offers a written fabric meant to observe and effect medial change, and to move between emergent orders of media.1