And, indeed, both kinds of art, equally heteronomous, would seem to find their very justification and validity in sharing the same cultural context: on one side propagandistic appeal; on the other, philosophicalscientific reflection. There have been other times in history when two different artistic tendencies, instead of asserting their own autonomy and selfsufficiency, ended up depending on this sort of reciprocally exclusive rapport.
Second Hypothesis: The Recovery of Aesthetic Value
All this talk about autonomy and heteronomy, however, should make us very suspicious about a possible conclusion that we might otherwise have accepted without hesitation. If the contemporary work of art reduces itself to a declaration of poetics, and, through this, to a philosophical declaration concerning its vision of the world—if, in other words, the work of art becomes another prop for knowledge—then how will its procedures differ from those of science or philosophy? If, in the abstraction of its rationalized struc cure, the work of art expresses a particular notion of time and space, how will this notion differ from the one elaborated by other disciplines?
The defender of contemporary art could reply that when a work of art expresses certain ideas about the world, or man, or the relationship between the two in the way in which it is constructed, it always does so in a «total» sense, as if the work, or the structural model the work realizes, were a compendium of reality (as seen, for instance, in Finnegans Wake), whereas both science and philosophy (at least nonmetaphysical philosophy) seem to proceed in terms of partial definitions, allowing us only a temporary knowledge of separate aspects of reality—since they cannot afford to give us a comprehensive synthesis, or they would become works of imagination and move into the realm of art. For the sake of synthesis, such an answer could be translated into the following one: art offers us an organic knowledge of things in other words, it acquaints us with things by gathering them into one form. The structural model envisioned by poetics and revealed by the critical discourse is just a configuration, a Gestalt, that can be seized only in its totality.
It must not be verified in its isolated elements, but rather accepted as the proposal of an intuitive vision, valid at the level of the imagination, even if rationally analyzable in its various aspects. This sort of answer would lead us back into an autonomous zone reserved exclusively for artistic discourse. And we would realize that if it is true that in contemporary art the formed object tends to disappear behind the formal model it is supposed to express, it is also true that this model assumes all the prerogatives that once belonged to the formed object, and, as a result, it can be not only «understood» but also «enjoyed» for its organic qualities and, therefore, appreciated in an exquisitely aesthetic sense.
In other words, to some the most relevant aspect of Finnegans Wake is not the work itself but the project that underlies it. Finnegans Wake speaks of the structuring of a circular universe in which it is possible to establish multiple relationships among the various elements, and in which every element can assume different meanings and relational capacities depending on how we want to understand the context—and vice versa. What attracts us most in this text is not so much an actual pun as the possibility of a complete language based on puns, a multiformity of language that will almost appear as the image itself of the multiformity of real events.
But this entire structural design can itself be enjoyed as a complex and wellcalibrated organism, which, when understood, can release the same imaginative mechanisms, the same schemes of intelligence. that presided over the contemplation of the harmonic forms of a Greek temple. Does this mean that we may have recovered aesthetic value in a different way, at a level of greater intellectual rarefication? Or are we speaking of aesthetic value the way we do when we say that a difficult equation, brilliantly solved, has aesthetic value for a mathematician who understands and appreciates it?
But, once again, just as we are about to find an answer to an extreme question, we realize that there is something that does not jell. Is it true, really true, that the only thing we enjoy in our reading of Finnegans Wake is the poetics that sustains it, and that the concrete expression of the linguistic event leaves us entirely indifferent? Generally speaking, it is true that the vast array of critical introductions has made it much easier for us to understand the structural mechanism of the work than to delve into the work itself; on the other hand, it is also true that, once we have understood the structural mechanism of the work and have summoned up enough courage to venture into the pages of the book, we keep encountering new incarnations of its structure which make us realize that this is really the first time we have truly savored it.
Which, of course, does not mean that we can appreciate the work only when we bump into such individual instances of intense corporeality, and that only those instances allow us to tolerate without irritation the rest of the work and what underlies it. Such an interpretation would commit the same error made by the idealist aesthetics that broke down the entire Divine Comedy into «structure» (tolerated as a nonartistic framework) and «lyrical flashes» (the only enjoyable fragments). But there is no contradiction in assuming both (a) that one must appreciate the whole structure of a work as the declaration of a poetics, and (b) that such a work can be considered as fully realized only when its poetic project can be appreciated as the concrete, material, and perceptibly enjoyable result of its underlying project.
To appreciate a work as a perceptible form means to react to the physical stimuli of the object, not just intellectually but also—so to speak—physically. Fraught with a variety of responses, our appreciation of the object will never assume the univocal exactitude characteristic of intellectual understanding and will be at once personal, changeable, and open. Romantic aesthetics defined the appreciation of art as an act of intuition, precisely in order to underline the fact that the proper understanding of a form involved a number of factors that could not be reduced to a mere intellectual understanding—factors which, together, constituted an organic reaction that could be analyzed only a posteriori. We could easily define such an experience as an aesthetic emotion—if only it involved, as the Romantics thought, an emotional, nonconceptual response.
On the basis of all this, we can conclude that contemporary works can be evaluated critically in terms of success and failure only if we take these terms in their most organic sense (to replace the vague dichotomy between beauty and ugliness, poetry and nonpoetry).
Which in turn means that even in those cases in which the structural model of a work appears as the primary value realized and communicated by the form (in other words, when the work appears mostly as a vehicle for a poetics), the work fulfills its fullest aesthetic value only insofar as the formed product adds something to the formal model (so that the work manifests itself as the «concrete formation» of a poetics). The work is something more than its own poetics (which can be articulated also in other ways), since the very process by which a poetic model acquires a physical form adds something to our understanding and our appreciation.
This characteristic was present even in those historical periods in which art appeared as an incorporeal rational construct devoid of all emotional function and impermeable to intuition. Medieval man appreciated a work for its combination of allegorical meanings and rational declarations, but even in his time it was generally understood that underlying any appreciation of a beautiful form was a visio, a sensual act, a physical relationship not just with the abstract form of the object but with its complex structure, its substance.
Thus, the aesthetic categories more likely to afford us an evaluation, a judgment, of a work of art are the very ones that have been in constant elaboration ever since De Sanctis, namely: (a) a form is a realized, concrete fusion of «contents» (which, before becoming form, were either intellectual abstractions or obscure psychological urges); (b) a work of art is a fusion, an «assimilation» between a psychological/cultural universe and a matter capable of assuming a particular, irreplaceable form; and (c) a work of art is the result of a formative activity that has been implemented for its own sake.6
This notion of form would solve the problem of contemporary artistic phenomena, just as it had solved other problems before. Formerly it was seen as a concrete solution of the «quarrel» between «form» (here understood as the exterior manifestation of a cultural or psychological content) and «content» (here understood as an ensemble of cultural and emotional elements capable of existing also outside the work in the forms of logical reflection or psychological effusion). Now it appears as the concrete solution of the «quarrel» between
