Though it is commonly believed that avantgarde artists are out of touch with the human community in which they live, and that traditional art remains in close contact with it. the opposite is true. In fact, only avantgarde artists are capable of establishing a meaningful relationship with the world in which they live.’
By now it should be fairly obvious why the formal structures of contemporary art keep challenging our language as well as other traditional systems. If it is at all possible to speak of the emergence of the open work in painting as well as in poetry, in cinema as well as in theater, it is because certain artists acknowledge the new vision of both the physical and psychological universes proposed by contemporary science, and realize that they can no longer speak of this world in the same formal terms that were used to speak of an orderly cosmos.
At this point, however, the critic of contemporary poetics might suspect that such undue attention to formal structures means contemporary art is much more interested in abstractions and abstract speculations than in man. This misunderstanding would be merely another expression of the belief that art can speak of man only in a traditional form—which essentially means that art can speak only of yesterday’s man. To speak of today’s man, however, art has no choice but to break away from all the established formal systems, since its main way of speaking is as form.
In other words and this amounts to an aesthetic principle—the only meaningful way in which art can speak of man and his world is by organizing its forms in a particular way and not by making pronouncements with them. Form must not be a vehicle for thought; it must be a way of thinking. A few years ago, Sidney Finkelstein, a British music critic, published a little book in which he set out to tell the public at large «how music expresses ideas.» Most of the book dealt with the possibility that Brahms, because of his interest in the seventeenth century, was a «reactionary» musician, and that Tchaikovsky, because of his interest in popular issues, was a «progressive» musician. No need to resort to aesthetics to discuss such a point.
Suffice it to say that, despite Tchaikovsky’s popular concerns, highly melodic compositions have never been able to change the viewpoint of the bour geoisie who favored them, whereas Brahms’s «return» to the seventeenth century may have been crucial in giving music the direction it took at the end of the century. But Brahms notwithstanding, a musician can be considered «progressive» to the extent he manages to translate a new vision of the world into new musical forms. Schonberg, in his Warsaw Survivor, is able to express an entire culture’s outrage at Nazi brutality: having worked on forms for a very long time, he was able to find a new way to look at the world musically.
Had Schonberg used the tonal system he would have composed not the Warsaw Survivor but the Warsaw Concerto, which develops the same subject according to the most rigorous laws of tonality. Of course, Addinsel was not a Schonberg, nor would all the twelvetone series of this world suffice to turn him into one. On the other hand, we cannot attribute all the merit of a composition to the genius of its creator. The formal starting point of a work often determines what follows: a tonal discourse dealing with the bombing of Warsaw could not but lapse into sugary pathos and evolve along the paths of bad faith.
This brings us closer to the heart of the matter: it is impossible to describe a situation by means of a language that is not itself expressed by that situation. All language reflects a system of cultural relationships with its own particular implications. I cannot, for instance, translate the French word esprit from a positivist text as the English word «spirit,» whose implications are profoundly idealistic.
This also applies to most narrative structures. A novel that begins with the description of a place or a situation, followed by the physical and psychological description of the main characters, automatically implies that its author believes in a certain order of things— in the objectivity of a natural setting in which human beings move and act, in the psychological and ethical dimension of physiological traits, and, finally, in the existence of precise causal relationships that will allow the reader to deduce—from the nature of the context, the peculiarities of the characters, and other concomitant factors—the univocal sequence of events that is most likely to follow.10
The moment an artist realizes that the system of communication at his disposal is extraneous to the historical situation he wants to depict, he must also understand that the only way he will be able to solve his problem is through the invention of new formal structures that will embody that situation and become its model.
The real content of a work is the vision of the world expressed in its way of forming (modo di formare). Any analysis of the relationship between art and the world will have to take place at this level.
Art knows the world through its formal structures (which, therefore, can no longer be considered from a purely formalist point of view but must be seen as its true content). Literature is an organization of words that signify different aspects of the world, but the literary work is itself an aspect of the world in the way its words are organized, even when every single word, taken in isolation, has absolutely no meaning, or simply refers to events and relationships among events that may appear to have nothing to do with the world.»
With the foregoing premises. it is now possible to examine the situation of a literature which, aware of the existence of an industrial society, purports to express this reality in both its possibilities and its limitations. The poet who, having sensed the alienation suffered by man in a technological society, decides to describe and denounce it by means of a «common» language (that is to say, the kind of language that can be understood by everybody), used referentially as a vehicle to communicate a «subject» (say, the situation of the worker in contemporary society), can be at once commended for his generosity and condemned for fraud. Let’s now try to analyze the communicative situation of a purely imaginary poet necessarily emphasizing to an extreme point its defects and contradictions.
Our poet thinks he has identified a concrete situation shared by all mankind. And he may be right. But he also thinks that he can describe and judge it by using a language that is totally exterior to the situation, and this is where he becomes the victim of a double misunderstanding. If the language allows him to grasp the situation, then it reflects the situation and must be affected by the same crisis. If, on the contrary, his language is exterior to the situation, then it will never be able to fully grasp it.
Let’s now examine how someone who specializes in description of this sort of situation—say, a sociologist, or better yet an anthropologist—would deal with the problem. If he (or she) tries to describe and define the ethical relationships of a primitive community by relying on the ethical categories of Western society, he will no longer be able to understand the situation or to make it intelligible to others. The moment he defines a particular rite as «barbaric» (the way a nineteenthcentury traveler would), he fails to help us understand the cultural model in which that rite finds its raison d’źtre.
On the other hand, if he chooses to adopt the notion of «cultural model» without any reservation (that is, if he decides to see the society he wants to describe as something absolute, with no relation to other social situations), he will have to describe the rite as the natives see it and will thus be unable to explain it to us. He must therefore realize that since our categories are inadequate to the task, his only other option is to translate, through a series of mediations, the natives’ own categories into something analogous to ours, while constantly reminding us that what he is proposing to us is a paraphrase and not a literal translation.
His description will thus rest on a sort of metalanguage that will force him to walk a tightrope between two possible pitfalls: on one side, the risk of judging the situation in Western terms, and, on the other, that of alienating himself entirely to the native mentality and of quite defeating the purpose of his work.
In other words, on one side we have the aristocratic attitude of the oldfashioned traveler who passes from one «primitive» civilization to the next, and, being unable to understand any, tries to «civilize» them all in the worst possible fashion—which is to say, he tries to «colonize» them. On the other side, we have the skepticism of some anthropologists who, considering each relativistic cultural model as a selfexplanatory and selfjustifying entity, provide a series of descriptive vignettes that will never enable anybody to bridge the gap between two different cultures.
The best solution, although the most difficult, is, of course, that of the sensitive anthropologist who, in formulating
