In any case, the artistic process that tries to give form to disorder, amorphousness, and dissociation is nothing but the effort of a reason that wants to lend a discursive clarity to things. When its discourse is unclear, it is because things themselves, and our relationship to them, are still very unclear —indeed, so unclear that it would be ridiculous to pretend to define them from the uncontaminated podium of rhetoric. It would be only another way of escaping reality and leaving it exactly as it is. And wouldn’t this be the ultimate and most successful figure of alienation?
VII. Form and Interpretation in Luigi Pareyson’s Aesthetics
To the idealistic notion of art as vision, Pareyson’s theory of formativity opposes the concept of art as form, in which the term «form» means organism, formed physicality with a life of its own, harmoniously balanced and governed by its own laws; and to the concept of expression it opposes that of production as forming action.
Formativity
According to Pareyson, all human life is the invention and production of forms. Everything mankind does, whether on an intellectual, moral, or artistic level, results in forms—fullfledged, organic, autonomous creations, endowed with a comprehensibility of their own. This includes theoretical constructs as well as civic institutions, daily achievements as well as technical endeavors, paintings as well as poems.
Since every form is an act of invention, the discovery of the rules of production required by the object that is being made, all human work is intrinsically artistic. But once the artistic element in every production of forms is established, it becomes necessary to find the principle of autonomy that distinguishes the work of art from any other kind of form.
Croce’s idealistic philosophy defined art as the intuition of a feeling, thereby clearly implying that it had nothing to do with either morality or knowledge. Pareyson, instead, insists on the «unitotality» of the individual, who, in turn, lends his (or her) forming activity a speculative, practical, or artistic direction while retaining a unity of thought, morality, formativity: «Only a philosophy of the individual can account for the unity and the difference of every human activity, since, starting from the indivisibility and the initiative of the individual, it tries to explain how every action demands at once the specification of one activity and a concentration of all the other activities. If action were absolutely spiritual, there would be no distinction between one activity and the next, since all activities could be reduced to one and the same.»
Just as any speculative undertaking involves simultaneously an ethical commitment, a passion for research, and an artistic sensibility capable of directing the research and organizing its outcome, so artistic action involves morality (not as a set of binding laws but rather as a commitment that turns art into a mission and a duty, and prevents the formative activity from following any law other than that of the work to be realized), emotion (not as the exclusive constituent of art, but rather as the affective tinge that the artistic commitment assumes and into which it evolves), and intelligence (as a constant, conscious judgment presiding over the organization of the work, as a critical check which is not extraneous to the aesthetic operation but accompanies the forming activity from within and is finalized in its outcome).
Given the presence of all these activities in the individual at work, what distinguishes art from other personal initiatives is the fact that in the artistic process all an individual’s activities share in the same purely formative intention: «In art, the formativity that invests one’s spiritual life and allows for the exercise of other specific operations acquires a certain specificity itself, by assuming an autonomous direction while dominating all the other activities and subordinating them to itself … In art, the individual forms for the sake of forming, thinks and acts in order to form.»
All these assertions, along with the definition of art as «pure formativity,» are likely to be misunderstood, and particularly so if read in the fading light of the eternal opposition between form and content and form and matter. On the other hand, the concept of form as organism should be enough to quiet all formalist objections. For Pareyson, form is a structured object uniting thought, feeling, and matter in an activity that aims at the harmonious coordination of all three and proceeds according to the laws postulated and manifested by the work itself as it is being made.
Moreover, «to form for the sake of forming» does not mean «to the subject of its narration. The forming artist is revealed by the work as style, as a way of Conning. The artist is present in the work as the concrete and extremely personalized trace of an action. «The work of art reveals the entire personality of the artist, not just in its subject or its theme, but first and foremost in the unique and very personal way in which it has been formed.
This definition renders meaningless all the debates concerning terms such as «content,» «matter,» and «form.» The content of a work is its creator, who at the same time is also its form, since the artist gives his creation its style—this being at once the way the artist forms himself in his work and the way the work manifests itself as such. Thus, the very subject of a work is none other than one of the elements in which the artist has expressed himself by giving himself form.
The Matter of Art
Art understood as form cannot but have a physical existence. The Crocean illusion of an interior figuration, whose physical exteriorization is only a corollary event, deliberately ignored one of the richest and most fruitful areas of creativity. According to Croce, intuition and expression were indistinguishable (it was, therefore, impossible to distinguish between an image and the sound or the color that expressed it; indeed, the image was itself an expression), but expression and exteriorization were two separate things—as if an image could be born as sound or color without the reference, the support, and the suggestion provided by a physical operation.
It is for this reason that at the very moment Crocean aesthetics was at its most influential (and despite its influence), numerous artists and philosophers turned the question of matter in art, the dialogue with matter that is indispensable to any artistic production, into the object of scrupulous analysis. Physicality, here understood as resistance, is necessary to the formative action both as a motive and as an obstacle.
These are the issues that concern Pareyson when he investigates the dialogic activity by which the artist, in the restraint imposed by the obstacle, finds his truest freedom; for this is what allows him to move from the vague realm of aspiration to a concrete awareness of the possibilities of the material at his disposal, whose laws he gradually reinserts into an organization that assumes them as the laws of the work. Pareyson’s analysis rests on a vast amount of documentation drawn from the experience of various artists, from Flaubert to Valery and Stravinsky.
Matter is therefore an obstacle to the inventive activity which will eventually resolve the laws of the obstacle into those of the work. Given this general definition, one of the most personal aspects of Pareyson’s doctrine consists in bringing together, under the rubric «matter,» all those realities that clash and intersect in the world of artistic production: «means of expression,» techniques of transmission, codified precepts, all the traditional «languages,» the very instruments of art.
All this is included in the general category «matter,» the exterior reality on which the artist works. An ancient rhetorical tradition can thus play to a writer the same role as a piece of marble plays to a sculptor: that of an obstacle chosen to suggest action. The very aim of a functional work must be considered as «matter»: a set of autonomous laws which the artist must be able to interpret and turn into artistic laws.
According to the aesthetics of formativity, the artist, in forming, effectively invents totally new laws and rhythms, but this novelty does not come out of nothing. It consists of a set of suggestions that both a cultural tradition and the physical world have offered to the artist in the initial form of resistance and coded passivity.
This leads us to yet another aspect of Pareyson’s aesthetic doctrine: artistic production is a matter of «trying,» of proceeding by means of proposals, drafts, and other patient interrogations of «matter.» But this creative adventure has both a point of reference and a term of comparison. The artist proceeds by trial, but every trial is guided by the work as it is to be—that is, by the appeals and the demands which are intrinsic to the process of forming and which direct the productive process. «Trying, therefore, is based on a criterion that is at once indefinable and yet quite firm: an intuition of the outcome, the divination of the form to be.» Pareyson calls the form toward which the artist strives «forming form.»
The Forming Form and the Formative Process
The concept of «forming form» entails a new concept of the «work» as the guide of its own empirical realization. We might, at first, be puzzled by assertions according to which a work exists from the very start as a «cue,» a germ that already possesses within itself the possibility of expanding into a complete form—in other words, as a work in
