To say that «there is value in every experience» means, to a certain extent, that in the realization of a perceptual experience there is always an artistic component, an «action with creative intentions.» As R. S. Lillie once said, «The psychical is foreseeing and integrative in its essential nature; it tends to finish or round off an uncompleted experience. To recognize this property as having its special importance in the living organism is not to ignore or undervalue the stable physical conditions which also form an indispensable part of the vital organization.
In the psychophysical system which is the organism, factors of both kinds are to be regarded as equally important and as always supplementing one another in the total activity of the system.» Or, as we might say in words less fraught with biological and naturalistic connotations: «As human beings we can sense only those ‘togethernesses’ that have significance to us as human beings. There are infinities of other togethernesses that we can know nothing about.
It will be generally agreed that it is impossible for us to experience all possible elements in any situation, let alone all the possible interrelationships of all the elements.» This is why, time after time, we end up relying on our experience as the formative agent of perception: «Apparently the organism, always forced to `choose’ among the unlimited number of possibilities which can be related to a given retinal pattern, calls upon its previous experiences and ‘assumes’ that what has been most probable in the past is most probable in the immediate occasion … In other words, what we see is apparently a function of some sort of weighted average of our past experiences.
It seems that we relate to a stimulus pattern a complex, probabilitylike integration of our past experience with such patterns. Were it not for such integrations, which have been labeled assumptions, the particular perceptual phenomenon would not occur. It follows from this that the resulting perceptions are not absolute revelations of `what is out there’ but are in the nature of probabilities or predictions based on past experience.»»
In a different context, Piaget also devoted a great deal of attention to the probabilistic nature of perception. In contrast to Gestalt theoreticians, he viewed the structure of a sensorial datum as the product of an equilibration depending on both innate factors and external factors that constantly interfere with one another.» Piaget’s notion of the «open,» dynamic nature of the cognitive process is even more exhaustively treated in his analysis of intelligence.»
Intelligence tends to compose «reversible» structures whose balance, arrest, and homeostasis are only the terminal stage of the operation, indispensable to its practical effectiveness. In itself, intelligence reveals all the characteristics of what I have defined as an «open» process. The subject, guided by experience, proceeds by hypotheses and trialanderror to find not the preconceived, static forms of Gestalt theoreticians but reversible, mutable structures that allow him, after he has linked two elements in a relationship, to pull them apart again and go back to where he started. As an example, Piaget cites the relationship A + A’ = B, which can also be expressed as A = B — A’, or A’ = B — A, or even B — A = A’, and so on. This set of relationships does not constitute a univocal process, such as the one found in perception, but rather an operational possibility that allows for various reversals (not unlike those occurring in a twelvetone musical series that lends itself to a variety of manipulations).
As Piaget reminds us, in its last stage, the perception of forms involves a number of recenterings and modifications that enable us to see the ambiguous outlines of psychology textbooks in different ways. But a system of reasoning involves more than a «recentering» (Umzentrierung); it involves a general decentering that permits something like the dissolution, the liquefaction, of static perceptual forms, thus facilitating operational mobility—and thus creating infinite possibilities for new structures.
Though it lacks the reversibility characteristic of intellectual operations, the perceptual process does involve certain regulations, partly influenced by the contributions of experience, which already «sketch and prefigure the mechanisms of composition that will become operational once total reversibility is possible.»34 In other words, if at the level of intelligence there is an elaboration of variable and mobile structures, at the level of perception there are a number of uncertain, probabilistic processes that help turn perception itself into a process open to a number of possible solutions (and this despite the perceptual constants that our experience does not allow us to question). Both cases involve constructive activity on the part of the subject.»
Having thus established that knowledge is at once a process and an «openness,» we can now pursue our discussion along two lines of thought that correspond to a distinction I have already proposed.
I. Psychologically speaking, the aesthetic pleasure evoked by any work of art depends on the same mechanisms of integration characteristic of all cognitive processes. This kind of activity, fundamental to the aesthetic appreciation of any form, is what, elsewhere, I have already defined as openness of the first degree.
- Contemporary poetics places greater emphasis on these particular mechanisms, while situating aesthetic pleasure less in the final recognition of a form than in the apprehension of the continuously open process that allows one to discover everchanging profiles and possibilities in a single form. This may be termed openness of the seconddegree.
Following these two directions, one realizes that only transactional psychology (more interested in the genesis of forms than in their objective structure) can allow us to fully understand this second, and more complete, sense of «openness.»
Transaction and Openness
Let us first examine how art in general depends on deliberately provoking incomplete experiences—that is, how arc deliberately frustrates our expectations in order to arouse our natural craving for completion.
Leonard Meyer has provided us with a satisfactory analysis of this psychological mechanism in his book Emotion and Meaning in Music,36 where he uses Gestalt premises to build an argument concerning the reciprocal relationship between objective musical structures and our patterns of reaction—that is. how a message conveys a certain amount of information which, however, acquires its value only in relation to the receiver’s response and only then organizes itself into a meaning.
According to Wertheimer, a thought process can be described as follows: given a situation S„ and a situation S, which represents the solution of S, (its terminus ad quem), what we call «process» is the transition from the first situation to the second—a transition during which S,, structurally incomplete and ambiguous, gradually finds a definition and a solution as S,.
Meyer applies this same definition to his analysis of musical discourse: a stimulus catches the attention of the listener as incomplete and ambiguous, leading him to expect a resolution, a clarification, which arouses his emotions because it is delayed. In other words, the listener’s need for an answer is momentarily frustrated or inhibited, and he finds himself in a state of crisis. If his expectations, his need, were satisfied immediately, there would be no crisis and no emotion.
This game of postponement and emotional reaction is what provides musical discourse with a meaning. Whereas in daily life numerous critical situations are never resolved and end up disappearing as accidentally as they appeared, in music, the frustration of an expectation becomes meaningful for the very reason that it makes the relationship between expectation and resolution explicit before bringing it to a conclusion. But it is precisely because it eventually arrives at a conclusion that the cycle stimulus-crisis-expectation-satisfaction-
reestablishment of an order acquires a meaning. «In music, the very stimulus, music itself, provokes expectations, inhibits them, and then provides them with meaningful solutions.»»
How is an expectation created? What does a crisis consist of? What kinds of solutions can satisfy the listener? For Meyer, all these questions can be answered by Gestalt theory. The psychological dialectics of expectation and satisfaction is, in fact, determined by formal laws: laws of pregnancy, of the good curve, of proximity, of equality, and so on.
The listener expects that the process will reach its conclusion according to a certain symmetry, and that it will organize itself in the best possible way, in harmony with the psychological models that Gestalt theory has discerned in both our psychological structures and external objects. Since the emotional response is provoked by a blockage of the regular process, the listener’s dependence on the right form and his memory of previous formal experiences intervene to create expectations—predictions of a solution, formal prefigurations through which the inhibited tendency will find satisfaction.
While there is inhibition, there is also the pleasure of expectation, a feeling of impotence in front of the unknown; and the more unexpected the solution, the greater then it is obvious, as Meyer points out, that the laws of form preside over musical discourse only on condition that they be constantly violated during its development.
The solutions the listener expects are not the most obvious but rather the least common, a transgression of the rules that will enhance his appreciation of and the pleasure in the final return to legality. According to Gestalt theory, the «right» form is the one that natural data assume by necessity the moment they organize in unitary complexes. Does musical form also manifest the same tendency toward an original stability?
At this point, Meyer tempers his Gestaltism and admits that the notion of optimal organization, in music, can refer only to a cultural datum. This means that music is not a universal language,
