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If there is an art of erasing art in what have been called the "self-erasing narratives" of postmodernism,1 those kinds of art call attention to the very form of art, as that which differentiates art from everything else, namely non-art. What postmodern art aims at, then, is art's mode of presentation or of observation, which, as Niklas Luhmann has suggested, is to observe the unobservable. Art would be concerned with observing the blind spot or the form of other, first-order observations. For Luhmann, art is thus a second-order observation which unfolds a paradox that itself escapes observation and, especially in modern and postmodern art, aims at being observed as an observer by unfolding such paradoxes of observation.2 Modern and postmodern art does not emphasize what it observes; it wants to show how it observes. These forms of art are no longer referential: they do not imitate nature or the world, they observe observers in a world that in its turn is constructed only through recursive observations. Art's reference to "world" shifts with the transition from "object art," which is still embedded in a representational world view, to what Luhmann calls "modern art," which constructs a world that is contingent on its observations. According to Luhmann, this transition takes effect with Romanticism and its focus on the lacunae of cognizing cognition or presenting its own mode of presentation.3
Drawing on the terminological register of the sublime and Kant's notion of negative representation, Lyotard has also foregrounded the particular tendency of postmodern art to present its own mode of presentation, to present nothing but its form. While modern art presents the unrepresentable, while it tries to make something visible which cannot be visualized-while it observes the unobservable, we could also say-postmodern art folds back on the modern, as it were, to present nothing but modernism's mode of presentation, or, as Lyotard says, to put "forward the unrepresentable in presentation itself." Postmodernism thus sets itself up at the heart of modernism, and what it represents is the very paradox of modernism, or "the unrepresentable of the form" of modernism itself.4 For Lyotard, postmodernism is thus not opposed to the modern, it also does not succeed modernism, marking its end, but it paradoxically precedes modernism in the temporality of...