Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is such a piece of music because of the originality of its composition and the freshness with which it translates popular American material into unexpectedly new forms. But the moment this composition is played in a traditional concert hall, by a conductor in tails, for the kind of audience one commonly finds at a classical concert, it inevitably becomes Kitsch because it tries to stimulate reactions that are not suited to either its intentions or its capacities. It is decoded according to an alien code.
Gershwin’s dance music, in contrast, will never be Kitsch for the very simple reason that it has always done, and still does, what it set out to do, and does it to perfection. Gershwin never saw his Lady Be Good as anything but a means of escape, a stimulus to dance, and that is precisely why he wrote it and how he sold it.
At which point one may legitimately wonder whether this kind of escape is conducive to a balanced life, or whether the kind of love inspired by syncopation is anything more than a superficial flirtation. But this is an altogether different question. If we are ready to accept a situation in which this sort of music is capable of eliciting a particular kind of physiological and emotional excitement, then we have to admit that Gershwin’s music fulfills its task both tastefully and appropriately.
Similarly, the above quoted passage from The Leopard, very honest in its intention to entertain its public, may seem exceedingly pretentious when it is proposed as a poetic message, as the original revelation of certain aspects of reality that had presumably remained unexplored until its appearance. But in this case, the responsibility of having produced Kitsch is not so much the author’s as the reader’s—or the critic’s, if he is the one who has decoded the message in such a way as to present the mouth with the taste of strawberries, the eyes as green as those of statues, and the nocturnal hue of the hair as the stylemes of a message whose worth resides in the originality of its vision.
Given the spread of mass culture, it would be impossible to say that this sequence of mediations and loans is a oneway street: Kitsch is not the only borrower. Today, it is often avantgarde culture which, reacting against the density and the scope of mass culture, borrows its own stylemes from Kitsch. This is what Pop Art does when it chooses the most vulgar and pretentious graphic symbols of advertising and turns them into the objects of morbid and ironic attention by blowing them up out of all proportion and hanging them on the walls of a museum. This is the avantgarde’s revenge on Kitsch, as well as a lesson for it, because in most cases the avantgarde artist shows the producer of Kitsch how to insert an extraneous styleme into a new context without abandoning good taste. Objectivized by a painter, on a canvas, both the CocaCola trademark and a comic strip fragment acquire a meaning they did not previously have.27
But even here, Kitsch does not waste any time taking its revenge on the avantgarde, by borrowing its procedures and its stylemes for its ads, where once again the only thing that matters is the production of an effect and the display of a higher level of taste. And this is only one episode in a phenomenon that is typical of every modern industrial society, of the rapid succession of standards whereby even in the field of taste every novelty is always the source of a future bad habit.
This is how the dialectic between avantgarde and mass production (which involves Kitsch as well as most products destined for practical uses) reveals both its worrisome rhythm and its possibilities for recovery. But it also allows for the possibility of new procedural interventions, of which the last one that should ever be tried, and the falsest, is the restoration of an apparent adherence to the timeless value of Beauty, which is generally only a cover for the mercenary face of Kitsch.
X. Series and Structure
Structure and «Series»
In his introduction to The Raw and the Cooked, Claude LeviStrauss examines the differences between two cultural attitudes which he terms «structural thought» and «serial thought.» By «structural thought» he means the philosophical stance that underlies the structuralist method of investigation in the human sciences; by «serial thought» he means the philosophy that underlies postWebem musical aesthetics—in particular, Pierre Boulez’s poetics.
This opposition deserves some attention for two main reasons. First of all, when LeviStrauss speaks of serial thought, the object of his polemics is not just the socalled Neue Musik but the whole attitude of the avantgarde and of contemporary experimentalism in art as well as in literature. In fact, his critique of serialism is close to the critique of abstract and nonrepresentational painting already sketched in his Entretiens yet another instance of LeviStrauss’s mistrust for all those art forms presuming to challenge the traditional systems of expectation and formation which Western culture has considered archetypical and «natural» since the Middle Ages. Second, by «structural thought» and «serial thought» LeviStrauss means not simply two different methodological stances but two different visions of the world. A detailed analysis of this text is therefore crucial to a proper understanding of the direction structuralism takes when it presents itself as a philosophy.
What are the distinctive features of serial thought? As Boulez defines them, in the essay to which LeviStrauss refers:
Serial thought has become a polyvalent thought process . . . As such, it is in complete contrast to classical thought, according to which form is a preexisting entity and at the same time a general morphology. Here (within serial thought) there are no preconstituted scales—that is, no general structures within which a particular thought could inscribe itself.
A composer’s thought, operating in accordance with a particular methodology, creates the objects it needs and the form necessary for their organization each time it has occasion to express itself. Classical tonal thought is based on a world defined by gravitation and attraction; serial thought, on a world that is perpetually expanding.’
This hypothesis of an oriented production of open possibilities, of an incitement to experience choice, of a constant questioning of any established grammar, is the basis of any theory of the «open work,» in music as well as in every other artistic genre. The theory of the open work is none other than a poetics of serial thought.
Serial thought aims at the production of a structure that is at once open and polyvalent, in music as well as in painting, in the novel as well as in poetry and theater. But the very notion of «open work,» the moment it is translated (reasonably, if daringly, as «open structure») entails a problem: Can the instruments provided by structuralism for the analysis of open structures coexist with the notions of polyvalence and seriality? In other words, can one conceive of a series in structural terms? Is there homogeneity between series and structure?
It is significant that, in his text, LeviStrauss speaks of «pens& structurale» and not of «pens& structurelle,» even though French would have allowed him to use either term. Jean Pouillon, in one of his essays, deals with this semantic nuance and, by so doing, helps us understand how an open work may have nothing to do with the structuralist problematic, and yet refer to it on another level.
In his essay, Pouillon relates the adjective structure( to the real configuration of an object as revealed by analysis, and the adjective structural to the laws that uniformly govern the various occurrences of structured objects. «A relation is structurelle when it plays a determining role within a given organization, and structurale when it can manifest itself in several different but equally determining ways within numerous systems.»‘ This should make the difference between structural and structure/ quite clear: serial thought produces openstructured (structurelles) realities (even when these realities ap pear unstructured), whereas structuralist thought deals with structural (structurales) laws. As we shall see, they are two fairly distinct areas of research, even though in the end the results of one must be translated into the other’s terms.
But the superficial similarity of the two terms has somewhat confused matters, so that the structuring activities of the avantgarde have often been related to the investigation of structures proper to structuralism. Several rash critics (that is, most cultivated readers and all uninformed ones) have even gone so far as to consider structuralism as the critical or methodological aspect of the artistic activity of the avantgarde. This was often just naive sophistry: since structuralism is an avantgarde method, then it must be the method of the avantgarde. At other times, however, it was the result of a hasty identification that led some to apply structuralist categories to avantgarde operations, with highly questionable results.
The aim of this chapter is not to separate the area of structuralist interests from that of the avantgarde’s artistic effort, but rather to distinguish their respective responsibilities by showing how they involve two different levels of experience. Only after such a clarification will it be possible to envision a language common to both practices.
On the other hand, there were reasons for such a misunderstanding, which may be why, in his introduction to The Raw and the Cooked, LeviStrauss insists on reminding us that serial thought is
