Brecht’s plays appear to elicit free and arbitrary response on the part of the audience. Yet they are also rhetorically constructed in such a way as to elicit a reaction oriented toward. and ultimately anticipating. a Marxist dialectic logic as the basis for the whole field of possible responses.
All these examples of «open» works and «works in movement» have this latent characteristic, which guarantees that they will always be seen as «works and not just as a conglomeration of random components ready to emerge from the chaos in which they previouslystood and permitted to assume any form whatsoever.
Now, a dictionary clearly presents us with thousands upon thousands of words which we could freely use to compose poetry, essays on physics. anonymous letters, or grocery lists. In this sense the dictionary is clearly open to the reconstitution of its raw material in any way that the manipulator wishes. But this does not make it a «work.»
The «openness» and dynamism of an artistic work consist in factors which make it susceptible to a whole range of integrations. They provide it with organic complements which they graft into the structural vitality which the work already possesses, even if it is incomplete. This structural vitality is still seen as a positive property of the work, even though it admits of all kinds of different conclusions and solutions for it.
The preceding observations are necessary because, when we speak of a work of art, our Western aesthetic tradition forces us to take «work» in the sense of a personal production which may well vary in the ways it can be received but which always maintains a coherent identity of its own and which displays the personal imprint that makes it a specific, vital, and significant act of communication. Aesthetic theory is quite content to conceive of a variety of different poetics, but ultimately it aspires to general definitions, not necessarily dogmatic or sub specie aeternitatis, which are capable of applying the category of the «work of art» broadly speaking to a whole variety of experiences, which can range from the Divine Comedy to, say, electronic composition based on the different permutations of soniccomponents.
We have, therefore, seen that (1) «open» works, insofar as they arc in movement, are characterized by the invitation to make the work together with the author and that (2) on a wider level (as a subgenus in the species «work in movement») there exist works which, though organically completed, are «open» to a continuous generation of internal relations which the addressee must uncover and select in his act of perceiving the totality of incoming stimuli. (3) Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective, or personal performance.
Contemporary aesthetics has frequently pointed out this last characteristic of every work of art. According to Luigi Pareyson:
The work of art . . . is a form, namely of movement, that has been concluded; or we can sec it as an infinite contained within finiteness . . . The work therefore has infinite aspects, which are not just «parts» or fragments of it, because each of them contains the totality of the work, and reveals it according to a given perspective. So the variety of performances is founded both in the complex factor of the performer’s individuality and in that of the work to be performed . . . The infinite points of view of the performers and the infinite aspects of the work interact with each other, come into juxtaposition and clarify each other by a reciprocal process, in such a way that a given point of view is capable of revealing the whole work only if it grasps it in the relevant, highly personalized aspect. Analogously, a single aspect of the work can only reveal the totality of the work in a new light if it is prepared to wait for the right point of view capable of grasping and proposing the work in all its vitality.
The foregoing allows Pareyson to move on to the assertion that all performances are definitive in the sense that each one is for the performer, tantamount to the work itself; equally, all performances are bound to be provisional in the sense that each performer knows that he must always try to deepen his own interpretation of the work. Insofar as they are definitive, these interpretations are parallel, and each of them is such as to exclude the others without in any way negating them.»
This doctrine can be applied to all artistic phenomena and to artworks throughout the ages. But it is useful to have underlined that now is the period when aesthetics has paid especial attention to the whole notion of «openness and sought to expand it. In a sense these requirements, which aesthetics has referred widely to every type of artistic production. are the same as those posed by the poetics of the «open work» in a more decisive and explicit fashion.
Yet this does not mean that the existence of «open» works and of «works in movement» adds absolutely nothing to our experience because everything in the world is already implied and subsumed by everything else, from the beginning of time, in the same way that it now appears that every discovery has already been made by the Chinese. Here we have to distinguish between the theoretical level of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline which attempts to formulate definitions and the practical level of poetics as programmatic projects for creation. While aesthetics brings to light one of the fundamental demands of contemporary culture, it also reveals the latent possibilities of a certain type of experience in every artistic product, independently of the operative criteria which presided over its moment of inception.
The poetic theory or practice of the «work in movement» senses this possibility as a specific vocation. It allies itself openly and selfconsciously to current trends in scientific method and puts into action and tangible form the very trend which aesthetics has already acknowledged as the general background to performance. These poetic systems recognize «openness» as the fundamental possibility of the contemporary artist or consumer. The aesthetic theoretician, in his turn, will see a confirmation of his own intuitions in these practical manifestations: they constitute the ultimate realization of a receptive mode which can function at many different levels of intensity.
Certainly this new receptive mode visavis the work of art opens up a much vaster phase in culture and in this sense is not intellectually confined to the problems of aesthetics. The poetics of the «work in movement» (and partly that of the «open» work) sets in motion a new cycle of relations between the artist and his audience, a new mechanics of aesthetic perception, a different status for the artistic product in contemporary society. It opens a new page in sociology and in pedagogy, as well as a new chapter in the history of art. It poses new practical problems by organizing new communicative situations. In short, it installs a new relationship between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art.
Seen in these terms and against the background of historical influences and cultural interplay which links art by analogy to widely diversified aspects of the contemporary worldview, the situation of art has now become a situation in the process of development. Far from being fully accounted for and catalogued, it deploys and poses problems in several dimensions. In short, it is an «open» situation, in movement. A work in progress.
II. Analysis of Poetic Language
Contemporary poetics proposes a whole gamut of forms—ranging from structures that move to the structures within which we move— that call for changing perspectives and multiple interpretations. But, as I have already pointed out, a work of art is never really «closed,» because even the most definitive exterior always encloses an infinity of possible «readings.»
If we want to pursue our analysis of the «openness» proposed by contemporary poetics, and establish the degree of novelty it has brought to the historical development of aesthetics, we must first find out what, in fact, distinguishes the intentional «openness» advocated by contemporary art movements from that which we consider typical of all works of art.
In other words, we shall examine how every work of art can be said to be «open,» how this openness manifests itself structurally, and to what extent structural differences entail different levels of openness.
Croce and Dewey
Every work of art, from a petroglyph to The Scarlet Letter, is open to a variety of readings—not only because it inevitably lends itself to the whims of any subjectivity in search of a mirror for its moods, but also because it wants to be an inexhaustible source of experiences which, focusing on it from different points of view, keep bringing new aspects out of it. Contemporary poetics has long dwelled on this point, and has turned it into one of its main themes.
The very concept of universality that we often apply to an aesthetic experience refers to this particular phenomenon. The statement «The square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the sum of the squares
