In this text, the lesson of LeviStrauss, laced with Lacanian theory, leads the author to acknowledge the presence of a universal combinatory source underlying every historical culture. Similarly, Dumezil’s identification of a theological tripartition in the religious thought of most civilizations leads him to acknowledge «a certain order . . . independent from the variety of its manifestations,» and to discover the only level where «the code can be attained.»» On the other hand, says Sebag, if at the basis of every civilization there are «primary complexes,» why should these be seen as the structures that determine all human expression from the inside rather than as the particular manifestations of human groups that constitute a historian’s object of study?»
This line of thought would allow one to abandon the contradictions of an idealistic structuralism, while recovering the abundance of possibilities inherent in historical development: to identify structures would become the aim of an intellectual activity «that takes apart both causality and relativity to discover its own specific properties.» 15
All sociohistorical material could then be submitted to a double reading: on one side, the diachronic study of causes and effects, and, on the other, the synchronic selection of signifying systems that the researcher would no longer consider definitive but instead useful to explain the relationships between different cultural areas at a given moment. This, of course, would in no way invalidate the proposition according to which «all these systems can be considered as so many manifestations, at different levels, of a certain number of operations proper to the human mind» (here «mind» = «unconscious objective laws»).
In this case one could also—without having to relinquish a Marxist/historical perspective—study myths independently from the society that has produced them,» as «a language that obeys certain laws of which the subjects who utilize them are not conscious.»» How can one reconcile the emergence of these atemporal structures with the acceptance of historical causality? Simply by believing in historical rationality as «a source of meaning.» In other words, the rationality of the historical process would make it possible to trace the systems that manifest themselves in various historical contexts back to unconscious, universal laws, whose very development, like the systems they generate, depends on the same laws.
«Marxist analysis always presupposes the possibility of tracing the languages constructed by men back to an original locus, source of every human creation.» «Whereas historical science corresponds to the praxis of individuals and groups taken in all their fullness and determinacy, the systems that such a praxis generates at different levels can be considered as the products of the human mind constantly structuring an extremely diversified reality. This is what we must understand.»»
And this is what Sebag is driving at: «Every society seems to submit to a principle of organization that is never the only one possible, to a reality that can undergo a multiplicity of transformations.» All the various messages that are identified can all be viewed in a functional light, and their meanings reflect the social realities that correspond to the interests of that particular society and those particular men.»
The whole point is to find a level of articulation that would make it possible to understand what I have termed «serial thought» in terms of structural thought, and to consider totality as something that goes beyond the historical structures that can be identified in it. But the project is doomed to failure the moment historical rationality, which should make multiple events and readings possible, becomes the objective logic that predetermines facts and one’s way of articulating them:
Intellect in its use as well as in the laws that govern it is as real as what it reflects; and since it is real it takes itself as its own object from the beginning. As Marx writes, consciousness is not only the consciousness of a reality outside itself but also of its own being. This does not mean that the subject is immediately and intuitively present to itself, but rather implies a system of laws that are not imitated but rather arc acquired from and through the progressive use of an intelligence that is coming to grips with a universe of objects. These laws can in turn be transformed into instruments, since the organization of reality, as well as the discovery of the order that underlies it, depends entirely on them; on the other hand, this reality is none other than the very source out of which the intellect draws the meaning of its own logical organization.2′
What is this reality of the intellect that allows it to evolve substantially so as to form a reality in a state of constant renewal but whose forms, however mutable, always correspond to the original order? Sebag has already answered this question in one of the quoted passages: it is its «resemblance to an original locus.»
As it happens, it is precisely the notion of «original locus» that is in opposition to that of «historical process.» Or rather, though the theme of the «original locus» assumes a view of history as a continuous chain of events originating from the same place (and for the time being, the history of thought has failed to provide us with an alternative), the very materiality of the historical process vanishes the moment everything is made to depend on the discovery of their original locus and philosophy is again turned upside down. On the other hand, it should be remembered that Sebag’s «original locus» is not the same as the place of origin of Hegel’s dialectic chains, but rather something else.
And, just in case the expression he uses were not enough to discourage any philosophical reference, he also adds a note in which he reminds us that the problem of philosophy is not to wonder «What is that which is?» but rather «how to think that which is.» Sebag’s style is Heidegger’s; his philosophy, Lacan’s. His last philosophical work, «Myth: Code and Message,» 22 abandons all aspiration to keep open the possibility of dialectics and process, and to acknowledge the presence of permanent mental structures by virtue of which «the physical world reveals the organization that transcends it by abandoning itself to our perception.»»
The original locus, or place of origin, is where Being, masked, reveals Itself in structural events while avoiding all structure. Structure (stable and objective) and process (qua creation of continuously new structures) explode—as should already have happened in LeviStrauss—and what is left is no longer structurable.
XI. The Death of the Gruppo 63
I would like to express some personal opinions about an avantgarde movement to which I myself belonged, the «Gruppo 63,» a group of writers and critics that set itself up some years ago in Palermo. The fact is. the group is dead. It died in 1969. I cannot talk about a corpse; I can only commemorate it. If I try to discuss what happened. I can only describe events that have already gone down in history: they no longer alarm anybody.
They’re already packed inside the luggage of culture, with a nice tight string round the parcel.
All right, now that Samuel Beckett has had the Stockholm treatment, the word «avantgrade» can hardly keep its meaning. We can’t use it in the same way the heroes and giants used it at the beginning of the century, men like Apollinaire and Breton, Marinetti and Mayakovsky.
The decease of the Italian neoavantgarde was possibly the last and bravest act that a soidisant literary avantgarde group can perform in this day and age, certainly since May 1968.
All the time while our French friends at Tel Quel were trying to put together Maoism, the French communist party, and a «theorie subversive de l’ecriture,» their Italian counterpart has wallowed in a Machiavellian cynicism and a total disregard for literature (in a civilization which has always had a literature, but never a high priesthood of letters) which has allowed them to adjust Apollinaire’s eleventhhour plea: «Have pity on us, soldiers battling constantly at the frontiers of the limitless future, have pity on our failings, on our sins!» so that the prayer becomes: «Have pity on us; from now on society is opening all the gates of the future to us, providing we don’t disturb it too much in the present. Help us to see how we can sin a little again, how we may follow Stephen Daedalus’ plan and recover the use of cunning, silence, and exile, compounding a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong one lasting perhaps as long as eternity.»
So what can we say about the Italian avantgarde of the 196os? What angle can we examine it from? From a sociologically oriented view of Italian literature? The country which boasted the first avantgarde in the twentieth century, Futurism, and then transformed it into a propaganda machine for early Fascism, and was subsequently careful to nurse arriźregarde movements which were quite possibly antiFascist but certainly literaryreactionary—this same country, Italy, produced a set of artists lost in adoration of the word, the page, the ultimate solitude of the creator faced by his writing; at least Italy can take credit for cremating the ideology of writing as an Empyrean Absolute.
Look, shall we try taking a Reader’s Digest sociological stance? This gives us a bizarre avantgarde with highranking celebrants like Sanguineti, a university professor working on Dante like a medieval monk, together with the director of an important publishing firm, the manager of a department in Italian Radio, a journalist on an important daily newspaper, the head of publicity at a major
