Giuliani: «The measure of poetry for us consisted in the degradation of meanings and in the constantly shifting physiognomy of the verbal world into which we were plunged.
«These were the years of restoration in which Lampedusa’s The Leopard seemed to have reinjected Italian culture with a taste for grandiose reflection on history in the Romanesque manner. The world was justified by way of language.
«Let’s be quite clear about one thing: language as a means for the representation of reality is by now a machine gone out of control, an instrument that needs to see a psychiatrist. So it will have to transfer itself inside the very heart of reality by using its concrete form to imitate the actual processes that go on inside a situation which language cannot judge from the outside but submits to judgment by the way it chooses to articulate itself.
In other words, if language is prepared to stay on the outside of reality, it must understand that its way of describing it is neither objective nor unchallenged. So language must be prepared to place between reality and itself a series of filters and lenses, the schizophrenic arc of humor. Who are its masterperformers in this sense? Pound, Joyce, Beckett, Musil, Proust. Picasso. So you can see what kind of avantgarde we are dealing with: one whose main task was to recover their literary fathers and at the same time kick out against their own brothers when they were too closely linked with their grandfathers, as if they were the trustees of some kind of legacy.»
Fausto Curi: «Neocapitalist society has accepted the avantgarde poet. The avantgarde poet has accepted neocapitalist society. The image of the harassed pate maudit is becoming more and more unusual. Nowadays avantgarde artists have accepted order and society both to the extent that they have radicalized the demystification of Bohemian mauditisme and taken it to its extreme logical conclusions, and also insofar as historical materialism has made them aware that the effectiveness of disorder is in strict proportion to its ordered distribution.»
Anyone will notice the hint of arrogance in this contradiction, the lack of any integrity in this form of masochistic complaisance. It is easy to detect the clear influence of the negative dialectic preached by Adomo and the Frankfurt school, an influence which began to insinuate itself into Italian culture after the war—that is, well before Marcuse became the prophet and hero of the conflict between the generations. Hence the Marxism of the Italian avantgarde took on more and more of a negative dialectic in its ideological position.
We meet the same attitude, tinged with a Dantesquecummedieval apocalyptic Messianism, in the pronouncements of Edoardo Sanguineti, who has grown up on an intellectual diet of classical reading and a Marxism which draws half from Adorno and half from proChinese filibustering. With Sanguineti, dialectic leads to a taste for compromise which is followed through to the ultimate acceptance of the historical impossibility of rebellion; it gives him a tinge of the gnostic, and at one stage I insinuated this without ever getting a clear refutation of my suspicion. In fact, he gave me a shifty smile when he heard me suggesting it aloud.
For the gnostic Carpocrates, the only way to deliver himself from the tyranny of the angels, lords of the cosmos, was to give in to the worst ignominies they could force on him, in order to find some way of releasing himself from the debts contracted with each one of them. It’s only by committing all possible actions that the soul can gain release from action and recover its original purity. By this interpretation, Jesus became the man who came to know all possible forms of evil but was able to triumph over it.
Now, Sanguineti’s poetic theory, deriving as it does from a Marxist type of historical judgment, recognizes the existence of a state of alienation which it is the main undertaking of poetry to represent objectively. But poetry can record a historical alienation only by way of its reflection on language, language as a historical depository.
The historical exhaustion of language, its ability to play out every variation, though in a deceptive style, its potential evocation of myths which no longer offer us any release—these are Sanguineti’s themes, and he brings a prodigious verbal virtuosite to play on the double keyboard of an individual nervous breakdown and the collective nervous breakdown of Western history.
One must cross the whole rotten swamp of language to reach a subsequent release: Palus putredinis, Laborinthus, these are the recurring formulas in Sanguineti’s work. Quotations from medieval poets like Benvenuto da Imola and Evrard the German. In this swamp of culture a whole range of alchemical and Jungian symbols seethe like larvas, made up of quotations from Pound, Eliot, and Marx. Sanguineti’s language has all the features of High Middle Age pastiche; it achieves a grotesque, tragicomic leveling of any myth that has ever nourished our hope for redemption. The historical avantgarde, with its taste for contamination, multilingualism, scissorsandpaste work, clever collage, and all the rest, in fact attempts to reach its point of no return here. So what is his program?
«Turn the avantgarde into an art for museums, plunge ourselves into the labyrinth of formalism and irrationality, into the Palus putredinis of anarchism and alienation, with the hope of really escaping from it, perhaps with dirty hands but certainly with the mud left safely behind us.»
If Sanguineti saw the situation as a plunge into the Mare magnum of the culture of the past, others in the group took an opposite view: they envisaged their insertion into contemporary reality in its most violent and triumphant manifestation. A close attention to the world of technology has been a constant feature of this neoavantgarde, just as it had been of the historical avantgarde. However, if the historical avantgarde had seen the use of technical and machine imagery in terms of a symbol of hope, from the Italian Futurists to Russian Futurism, the Gruppo 63 found its meeting with the world of technology (never unequivocal in this kind of lovehate dialectic) positively ironic. There was irony. for example, in the way Nanni Balestrini put together poems by using the flotsam of everyday speech, the detritus of pulp literature.and combining it with scraps and cuttings from the press.
Antonio Porta is a Catholic in a crisis, haunted by the presence of evil, whereas Balestrini is ecstatically obsessed by the presence of printed and spoken nonsense, and Sanguineti is haunted and obsessed, besides being sure that he is able to escape this obsession, by the presence of universal culture as an ideological mask. Porta’s technique is a scissoringup which could be compared to the New Wave of cinema, perhaps to Godard, a process applied to events which are in themselves neutral, part of a traditional poetics, perhaps, but which reemerge from the scissorwork charged with a simultaneously moral and physical menace.
If we take another look at Porta’s and Balestrini’s publicly stated poetics at the beginning of the sixties, we can detect an attitude that is closely akin to that of Sanguineti (simply transposed into a different key. one might say). This attitude posits a universe which poetry does not set out to judge.
Rather, the aim of poetry is to capture and fix it in all its disponibilite, its myriad connotations and equivocations, its potential Otherness, its implicit capacity to vouchsafe to the poet something not yet known to him. This is precisely why he can invite the reader to follow him into an openended adventure where neither of them enjoys a privileged point of view, neither of them has special messages to transmit, but instead there is a maze of multiplechoice footpaths to enter and cross.
The aesthetic model of the «open work,» which I proposed to these poets after they had got me interested in it, was also prompted by similar developments in the field of contemporary music, par titularly the work of Luciano Berio, who eventually produced «musical activities» with libretti by Sanguineti, such as Passaggio, Laborinthus, and so on. I thought I could relate this model to a parallel epistemological situation evinced by contemporary physics, which is governed by the principles of indeterminacy and complementarity.
This all went to emphasize the difference between our Italian avantgarde and the cogenerational French avantgarde, which preferred to take structuralism as its operational model. In Italy it would have been impossible to speak of structuralist activity as part of the avantgarde’s artistic program, the way Roland Barthes did in France.
Elsewhere I’ve tried to underline the differences between structuralist thinking and what LeviStrauss called «serial thought» in his «Ouverture» to The Ram and the Cooked. The musical ideas of a Boulez or a Berio are set in serial thought, and so is Sanguineti’s notion of informal poetry and his adoption of the lesson of the New Music. In its own way, seriality is dialectic thought, intellection of the diachronic rather than the synchronic.
A brief discussion should make some of the differences between structuralist thinking and serial thought clear. What are the most important concepts introduced by structural methods following the lesson of linguistic research and the theory of communication in general?
Point 1: the relationship between code and message. All communication is valid to the extent that its message is decodable by reference back to a preestablished code.
Point 2: the reality of a selective and a combinative axis, which is the ultimate justification of the concept of language’s double articulation.
Point 3: the hypothesis that every code, every language, is based on the existence of more elementary codes and that all forms of communication
