In all the phenomena we have so far examined, I have employed the category of «openness» to define widely differing situations, but on the whole the sorts of works taken into consideration are substantially different from the postWebernian musical composers whom I considered at the opening of this essay.
From the Baroque to modern Symbolist poetics, there has been an eversharpening awareness of the concept of the work susceptible to many different interpretations. However, the examples considered in the preceding section propose an «openness» based on the theoretical, mental collaboration of the consumer, who must freely interpret an artistic datum, a product which has already been organized in its structural entirety (even if this structure allows for an indefinite plurality of interpretations). On the other hand, a composition like Scambi, by Pousseur, represents a fresh advance. Somebody listening to a work by Webem freely reorganizes and enjoys a series of interrelations inside the context of the sound system offered to him in that particular (already fully produced) composition. But in listening to Scambi the auditor is required to do some of this organizing and structuring of the musical discourse. He collaborates with the composer in making the composition.
None of this argument should be conceived as passing an aesthetic judgment on the relative validity of the various types of works under consideration. However, it is clear that a composition such as Scambi posts a completely new problem. It invites us to identify inside the category of «open» works a further, more restricted classification ‘of works which can be defined as «works in movement,» because they characteristically consist of unplanned or physically incomplete structural units.
In the present cultural context, the phenomenon of the «work in movement» is certainly not limited to music. There are, for example, artistic products which display an intrinsic mobility, a kaleidoscopic capacity to suggest themselves in constantly renewed aspects to the consumer. A simple example is provided by Calder’s mobiles or by mobile compositions by other artists: elementary structures which can move in the air and assume different spatial dispositions. They continuously create their own space and the shapes to fill it.
If we turn to literary production to try to isolate an example of a «work in movement,» we are immediately obliged to take into consideration Mallarme’s Livre, a colossal and farreaching work, the quintessence of the poet’s production. He conceived it as the work which would constitute not only the goal of his activities but also the end goal of the world: «Le monde existe pour aboutir a un livre.» Mallarme never finished the book, although he worked on it at different periods throughout his life. But there are sketches for the ending which have recently been brought to light by the acute philological research of Jacques Scherer.’
The metaphysical premises for Mallarme’s Livre are enormous and possibly questionable. I would prefer to leave them aside in order to concentrate on the dynamic structure of this artistic object which deliberately set out to validate a specific poetic principle: «Un livre ni commence ni ne finit; tout au plus faitil semblant.» The Livre was conceived as a mobile apparatus, not just in the mobile and «open» sense of a composition such as Un coup de des, where grammar, syntax, and typesetting introduced a plurality of elements, polymorphous in their indeterminate relation to each other.
However, Mallarme’s immense enterprise was utopian: it was embroidered with evermore disconcerting aspirations and ingenuities, and it is not surprising that it was never brought to completion. We do not know whether, had the work been completed, the whole project would have had any real value.
It might well have turned out to be a dubious mystical and esoteric incarnation of a decadent sensitivity that had reached the extreme point of its creative parabola. I am inclined to this second view, but it is certainly interesting to find at the very threshold of the modern period such a vigorous program for a work in movement, and this is a sign that certain intellectual currents circulate imperceptibly until they are adopted and justified as cultural data which have to be organically integrated into the panorama of a whole period.
In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality. The closed, single conception in a work by a medieval artist reflected the conception of the cosmos as a hierarchy of fixed, preordained orders. The work as a pedagogical vehicle, as a monocentric and necessary apparatus (incorporating a rigid internal pattern of meter and rhymes) simply reflects the syllogistic system, a logic of necessity, a deductive consciousness by means of which reality could be made manifest step by step without unforeseen interruptions, moving forward in a single direction, proceeding from first principles of science which were seen as one and the same with the first principles of reality. The openness and dynamism of the Baroque mark, in fact, the advent of a new scientific awareness: the tactile is replaced by the visual (meaning that the subjective element comes to prevail) and attention is shifted from the essence to the appearance of architectural and pictorial products.
It reflects the rising interest in a psychology of impression and sensation—in short, an empiricism which converts the Aristotelian concept of real substance into a series of subjective perceptions by the viewer. On the other hand, by giving up the essential focus of the composition and the prescribed point of view for its viewer, aesthetic innovations were in fact mirroring the Copernican vision of the universe. This definitively eliminated the notion of geocentricity and its allied metaphysical constructs.
In the modern scientific universe, as in architecture and in Baroque pictorial production, the various component parts are all endowed with equal value and dignity. and the whole construct expands toward a totality which is close to the infinite. It refuses to be hemmed in by any ideal normative conception of the world. It shares in a general urge toward discovery and constantly renewed contact withreality.
In its own way. the «openness» that we meet in the decadent strain of Symbolism reflects a cultural striving to unfold new vistas. For example. one of Mallarme’s projects for a multidimensional. deconstructible book envisaged the breaking down of the initial unit into sections which could be reformulated and which could express new perspectives by being deconstructed into correspondingly smaller units which were also mobile and reducible. This project obviously suggests the universe as it is conceived by modern,nonEuclideangeometries.
Hence, it is not overambitious to detect in the poetics of the «open» work—and even less so in the «work in movement»— more or less specific overtones of trends in contemporary scientific thought. For example. it is a critical commonplace to refer to the spatiotemporal continuum in order to account for the structure of the universe in Joyce’s works. Pousseur has offered a tentative definition of his musical work which involves the term «field of possiimbues.» In fact, this shows that he is prepared to borrow two extremely revealing technical terms from contemporary culture. The notion of «field» is provided by physics and implies a revised vision of the classic relationship posited between cause and effect as a rigid, onedirectional system: now a complex interplay of motive iforces is envisaged, a configuration of possible events, a completepdynamism of structure.
The notion of «possibility» is a hiloso hcal canon which reflects a widespread tendency contemporary orary iscience; the discarding of a static, syllogistic view oforder, and a
corresponding devolution of intellectual authority to personal decision, choice, and social context.
If a musical pattern no longer necessarily determines the immediately following one, if there is no tonal basis which allows the listener to infer the next steps in the arrangement of the musical discourse from what has physically preceded them, this is just part of a general breakdown in the concept of causation. The twovalue truth logic which follows the classical autaut, the disjunctive dilemma between true and false, a fact and its contradictory, is no longer the only instrument of philosophical experiment. Multivalue logics are now gaining currency, and these are quite capable of incorporating indeterminacy as a valid steppingstone in the cognitive process.
In this general intellectual atmosphere, is peculiarly relevant: it posits the work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions, works in which the performer’s freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics recognizes, not as an element of disorientation, but as an essential stage in all scientific verification procedures and also as the verifiable pattern of events in the subatomic world.
From Mallarme’s Livre to the musical compositions which we have considered, there is a tendency to see every execution of the work of art as divorced from its ultimate definition. Every performance explains the composition but does not exhaust it. Every performance makes the work an actuality, but is itself only complementary to all possible other performances of the work. In short, we can say that every performance offers us a complete and satisfying version of the work, but at the same time makes it incomplete for us, because it cannot simultaneously give all the other artistic solutions which the work may admit.
Perhaps it is no accident that these poetic systems emerge at
