What, on the other hand, are the fundamental concepts of serial thought?
Point I: All messages call into question their code; every act of words constitutes a discussion of the language to which it gives life. In its extreme sense this means that every message postulates its own code, that every work of art is the linguistic foundation of itself. the discussion of its own poetic system. It releases itself from the bonds which previously claimed to define and circumscribe it: every work of art is thus the key for its own reading.
Point 2: Polyvalence: the whole notion of plurality of meaning overturns the Cartesian axes of the vertical and the horizontal, paradigm and syntagm. Series is a clustered constellation offering a field of infinite possibilities and multiple choice.
Point 3: What matters in serial thought is the identification of historical codes and the production of new modalities of communication by calling them into question. The effect of serial thinking is the evolution of codes and the discovery of new codes, not a progressive recoil toward the original foundational code. Series is not an investigation of history aimed at uncovering absolute axes of communication, but simply the permanent transformation of the past, the production of a new ancient history.
(It is obvious that when French Experimentalists came into contact with structuralism, they did not simply experience a static obstacle; by the mediatory stance of Lacan they were enabled to locate the extreme point in a written text where language develops its infinite combinatory resources to create both itself and its users. This also facilitated a linguistic revolution in which Sade is wedded to Saussure in a ceremony where Freud is both bridesmaid and best man.)
Nevertheless, one is bound to admit that the Italian avantgarde messed up its theoretical consciousness of the language problem. Perhaps this was a lucky mistake. Political themes were promoted far more directly and energetically by them. Their critique of language was designed not to be a summary of the existential situation but a critique of the political status quo. A critique of the ultimate structure of all vocabulary was abandoned in favor of the summary of ideology as a term smitten with wordfatigue and arteriosclerosis. This was accompanied by a constant terror that the avantgarde’s pet word, «revolutionary,» might come down with the same disease.
At the 1965 Palermo congress one of the keyphrases had been:
Same.» Sanguineti’s coup was pulled off: museum culture was on the way to gobbling up the avantgarde.
All this meant that our experimental avantgarde operating from sleeping cars and station restaurants eventually acquired the very attributes of the historical avantgarde which it claimed to repudiate: Activism, Antagonism, Terrorism, Demagogism, Cult of Youth, and Revolutionism. As we shall see, it still lacked the concept of risk through sacrifice. It failed to realize that it had to pass through the valley of death, and thus it gave birth to the journal
Quindici
Quindici was born in 1967, initially conceived as a lively magazine with lots of illustrations, halfway between a Playboy with a fulllength pinup of Gertrude Stein as «playmate of the month» plus the layout of the New York Review of Books and a Sunday Times weekend supplement specially for university heads of department.
The Gruppo 63 had no trouble finding financial backing for a magazine like this. We belonged to the Establishment, as I have said. But the birth of Quindici in fact constituted our first escape pang.
After lengthy discussions, we decided to pay for Quindici out of our own pockets and produce it in a bulky unattractive format, without any photography, nothing but columns of print, with extremely long articles, none of them less than five or ten thousand words. The result was something of a success, given the layout and the number of people in Italy interested in problems of literary criticism.
The journal started up with another peculiarity. Literature and books were certainly its primary interest, but it turned out that poets began to analyze the Middle East crisis, linguisticians discussed the Pope’s latest encyclical, and novelists explained whom they were going to vote for in the next elections. All this was still a personal authoritarian analysis conducted by a group of writers for their own fan club.
Then came the outbreak of student unrest, a few months before France’s May 1968. The students of Turin University had occupied their lecture buildings, set up a free university with its own courses, and were exgurgitating a mass of political material which the official news media completely ignored. Quindici quickly faced up to its responsibilities: our generation had criticized the previous one for consolidating and embattling itself on its own conservative positions (in questions of culture even more than politics) without attempting to understand progressive change.
The Gruppo 63 had to avoid stumbling into the same pitfalls. By no means all of us were convinced that the students were in the right, or that they had found the best solutions for their problems. But we were all agreed on one thing: that we had to give them a platform for their views. There was a sudden, unexpected escalation of events. Quindici became the place where for a long while the budding groupuscles could publish their polemic texts before they brought out newspapers of their own. The circulation of the journal increased to four times its original issue, until eventually Quindid was being read by very young militants who were not interested in literature at all, but only in politics.
At first this was a supremely amphibious operation. Side by side with programs for a permanent social revolution there continued to come out a series of programs for linguistic upheaval produced by «avantgardistes» who had by now been absorbed back into traditional postures. In a matter of weeks our own socalled «young» generation had become the generation «in between.» So Quindici represented an effort to come to grips with this new historical role for the Gruppo 63, and to fulfill it honorably.
In order to fulfill such a role, it was absolutely essential to emerge from the glorious isolation of people who were offering a platform to the young but failing to take an active part in what they had to say. A section of the editorial board took upon itself a kind of examination of our political conscience. We began to ask ourselves what it meant to be writing in the new perspective that had come into being since May 1968.
A series of articles followed. Perhaps their argument could be summarized as follows: the act of prise de la parole, by inviting all sorts of different people to scribble on the walls of the Sorbonne perhaps the most beautiful texts of the contemporary artisticliterary avantgarde, robbed real poets of their privileged function as selfelected representatives of language.
Our whole attempt to extricate the structures of language was suddenly unmasked for what it really was: an experimental study of class language. We were brought face to face with the real language of factory workers and angry students. The French avantgarde had posed Lacan’s question «Who is to speak?» whereas the problem of the contemporary literary avantgarde in Italy had suddenly become: «Who is one speaking to? How is one to do it? Why? Should one go on speaking (i.e., writing) at all?» Some of the group even began refusing to write at this point. People like Balestrini began to collect and publish documents concerning the workingclass movement in factories.
Quindici stumbled on for three more numbers and then committed harakiri. At least it achieved the last feature of any avantgarde: sacrifice of self, the Dionysian fantasy of a beautiful death in order that something new might be formed in its stead. In the sixteenth number of Quindici I tried myself to list some of the problems facing our avantgarde, if it wanted to transform itself into something new and vital. But the agony had begun without finding an avantgarde ready to submit to it. Many of our friends wanted to go on playing a game that was already over. Maybe they are right today in believing that literature still has something to say. They were wrong, in my opinion, in those days. Quindici lost its unity. It quit. Hence the end of Quindici, split by two irreconcilable hypothetical stances, marked the demise of the Gruppo 63.
In my view, the Gruppo 63 died because it lacked the theoretical energy to state and resolve this whole crisis. However, I believe that it agreed to die because it became aware that to go on living would have made it into an ossified relic. It gives me pride to be able to declare that our death was in fact a suicide.
Notes
- Here we must eliminate a possible misunderstanding straightaway: the practical intervention of a «performer» (the instrumentalist who plays a piece of music or the actor who recites a passage) is different from that of an interpreter in the sense of consumer (somebody who looks at a picture, silently reads a poem, or listens to a musical composition performed by somebody else). For the purposes of aesthetic analysis, however, both cases can be seen as different manifestations of the same interpretative attitude. Every «reading,» «contemplation,» or «enjoyment» of a work of an represents a tacit or private form of «performance.»
- Henri Pousseur, «La nuova sensibility musicale,» Incontri musicali 2
(May 1958): 25.
3.For the evolution of preRomantic
