Let’s examine, then, how series and structure differ from each other, how they oppose each other, whether their opposition is total or only partial, and whether they should see in each other a demonstration of their respective limitations and an indication of other possible directions.
What are the most important concepts introduced by structuralist methods, following the models proposed by linguistics and, more generally, by communication theory?
(1) The codemessage relation. Communication occurs to the extent to which a given message is decoded according to a preestablished code shared by both the addresser and the addressee.
(2) The presence of an axis of selection and an axis of combination. Ultimately, these two axes are the basis of the double articulation of language, since every act of communication takes place when units of secondary articulation, determined by the selective repertory of the code and endowed with an oppositional value resulting from their position within the system, emerge out of the choice and combination of units belonging to the primary level of articulation.
(3) The hypothesis that every code is based on a more elementary code, and that, by retracing an act of communication code by code through each successive transformation, it might be possible to reach back to a primary code (formally and logically speaking, an Urcode), constituting, by itself, the real Structure of all communication, all language, all cultural manifestation, all acts of signification, from articulate speech to the most complex syntagmatic chains such as myths, from verbal language to the «language» of cuisine or fashion.
Conversely, what are the most fundamental concepts of serial thought?
(1) Every message calls the code into question. Every artistic message is a discourse on the language that generates it. At the extreme, each message posits its own code; each work is its own linguistic basis, a discourse on its own poetics, a declaration of freedom from all those ties that presumed to determine it in advance, the key to its interpretation.
(2) The very notion of polyvalence challenges the bidimensional (vertical and horizontal) Cartesian axes of selection and combination. A series, qua constellation, is a field of possibilities that generates multiple choices. It is possible to conceive of large syntagmatic chains (such as Stockhausen’s musical «group»; the «material» ensemble of action painting; the linguistic unit extracted from a different context and inserted, as a new unit of articulation, within a discourse where what matters are the meanings that emerge out of the conjunction and not the primary meanings of the syntagmatic unit in its natural context; and so on)—chains that offer themselves as ulterior instances of articulation in relation to their initial articulations.
(3)Finally, even though it is possible for communication to be rooted in an Urcode that underlies all cultural exchange, what really matters to serial thought is the identification of historical codes in order to question them, thereby generating new forms of communication. The main goal of serial thought is to allow codes to evolve historically and to discover new ones, rather than to trace them back to the original generative Code (the Structure). Thus, serial thought aims at the production of history and not at the rediscovery, beneath history, of the atemporal abscissae of all possible communication. In other words, the aim of structural thought is to discover, whereas that of serial thought is to produce.
Given these differences, it should be easier to understand LeviStrauss’s objections to serial thought—objections that are perfectly justified from his point of view. Another look at the pages in question should show whether these differences are indeed irreducible or whether in fact it would be possible to find grounds for a mediation that LeviStrauss seems to exclude.’
Levi-Strauss’s Criticism of Contemporary Art
LeviStrauss begins his argument with a comparison between painting and articulate speech:
If painting deserves to be called a language, it is one in that, like any language, it consists of a special code whose terms have been produced by combinations of less numerous units and are themselves dependent on a more general code. Nevertheless, there is a difference between it and articulate speech, with the result that the message of painting is grasped in the first place through aesthetic perception and secondly through intellectual perception, whereas with speech the opposite is the case.
As far as articulate speech is concerned, the coming into operation of the secondary code wipes out the originality of the first. Hence the admittedly «arbitrary character» of linguistic signs .. Consequently, in articulate speech the primary nonsignifying code is a means and condition of significance in the secondary code: in this way, significance itself is restricted to one level. The dualism is reestablished in poetry, which incorporates in the second code the potential, signifying value of the first.
Poetry exploits simultaneously the intellectual significance of words and syntactical constructions and aesthetic properties, which are the potential terms of another system which reinforces, modifies, or contradicts this significance. It is the same thing in painting, where contrasts of form and color arc perceived as distinctive features simultaneously dependent on two systems: first, a system of intellectual significances, the heritage of common experience and the result of the subdivision and organization of sense experience into objects; second, a system of plastic values which only becomes significant through modulating the other and becoming incorporated with it. Two articulated mechanisms mesh to form a third, which combines the properties of both.
It can thus be understood why abstract painting and more generally all schools of painters claiming to be nonfigurative lose the power to signify: they abandon the primary level of articulation and assert their intention of surviving on the secondary one alone.
LeviStrauss further elaborates his argument (already sketched in his Entre:lens, as well as in another structuralist text about serial music, Nicolas Ruwet’s essay on Henri Pousseur),’ by lingering on a few subtle distinctions. Even Chinese calligraphic painting seems to rest on forms that are merely sensible units belonging to the second level of articulation (plastic occurrences, just as phonemes are auditory occurrences devoid of all meaning). But in Chinese calligraphic painting, these units, which seem to be secondary articulations, rest on a preexisting level of articulation, a system of signs endowed with precise meanings that are not completely obliterated by plastic articulation.
The example of calligraphic painting is useful because it allows the argument to shift back from nonrepresentational painting to music; indeed, music, by virtue of its purely sonorous existence, hearkens back to a primary level of articulation created by culture—that is, the system of musical sounds.
This comparison forces LeviStrauss to take a stance on another fundamental issue that will become the key to the rest of the argument:
This is an essential point, because contemporary musical thought, either formally or tacitly, rejects the hypothesis of the existence of some natural foundation that would objectively justify the stipulated system of relations among the notes of the scale.
According to Schonberg’s significant formula, these notes are to be defined solely by «the total system of relations of the sounds with one another.» However, the lessons of structural linguistics should make it possible to overcome the false opposition between Rameau’s objectivism and the conventionalism of modern theorists.
As a result of the selection made in the sound continuum by each type of scale, hierarchical relations arc established among the notes. These relations are not dictated by nature, since the physical properties of any musical scale considerably exceed in number and complexity those selected by each system for the establishment of its distinctive features.
It is nevertheless true that, like any phonological system, all modal or tonal (or even polytonal or atonal) systems depend on physical and physiological properties, selecting some from among the infinite number no doubt available, and exploiting the contrasts and combinations of which they are capable in order to evolve a code that serves to distinguish different meanings. Music, then, just as much as painting, supposes a natural organization of sense experience; but it does not necessarily accept this organization passively.
At this point, LeviStrauss begins to define the difference between concrete music and serial music. The very existence of concrete music involves a paradox: if such music retained the representative value of the noises it uses, it would have at its disposal a primary articulation, but since it instead alters those noises in order to turn them into pseudosounds, it automatically loses that primary level which would have provided a basis for a secondary articulation.
Serial music, in contrast, elaborates sounds according to a sophisticated grammar and syntax that situate it within the traditional bounds of classical music. Nevertheless, it also lapses into a number of contradictions shared by abstract painting and concrete music.
«The serial approach, by taking to its logical conclusion that whittling down of the individual particularities of tones which begins with the adoption of the tempered scale, seems to tolerate only a very slight degree of organization of the tones.» Or, to use Boulez’s words, serial thought creates the objects it needs and the form necessary for their organization each time it has occasion to express itself.
To put it somewhat differently, it abandons the relations that constitute the sounds of the tonal scale, relations that, as Levi-Strauss suggests. correspond to the words, the tnotthries, the level of primary articulation typical of every language aiming at communication. As a result, serial music seems to him to slide toward the heresy of the century (precisely of the century, since, as we have already seen, the debate over serial thought calls into play the totality of contemporary art) in its attempt to construct a system of signs on a
