36.
to. This attitude involves the disposition of parts in relation to a whole that does not yet exist but that already gives a direction to the process. This sort of «wholeness,» which leads to its own discovery within a circumscribed field, recalls the Gestalt model. The event that is going to be narrated prefigures itself by determining the very act that is supposed to lend it a form. Except that—as transactional psychology would point out—this wholeness can be attained only through a series of choices and limitations that will inevitably betray the personality of the «author» at the precise moment in which he submits to the very wholeness he intuits. This wholeness, once attained, will appear as the realization of a subjectively intuited objectivity.
12.See F. Ferguson, The Idea of a Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949; Anchor Books, 1953); and H. Gouthier, L’oeuvre thecitrale (Paris: Flammarion, 958), ch. 3, «Action et intrigue.»
communism becomes an affirmation: «Communism represents the positive in the form of the negation of the negation and thus a phase in human emancipation and rehabilitation, both real and necessary at this juncture of human development. Communism is the necessary form and dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not as such the goal of human development, the form of human society» (Marx, «Private Property and Communism,» in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, p. 96). These pages could be read in light of the formulation proposed above: a revolutionary action could eliminate economic alienation by modifying certain social structures, and this could well be the first step toward the elimination of other, persisting, forms of alienation to the object.
6.If I am correctly interpreting what Gianni Scalia says in «Dalla natura all’industria» (Menabd 4, p. 96), above and beyond all the contradictions existing between a capitalist society and a collectivist society, what exists today is an industrial society, which suffers from many of the same problems as the others, at least at the level of alienation. I realize that some writers (for instance, Raymond Aron) refer to an «industrial society» precisely to deemphasize the opposition between capitalism and collectivism. On the other hand, the notion of an industrial society remains valid and should be kept in mind, even when one respects the classical distinction between the two kinds of economy. This is why all the examples I examine in the following pages have been taken from an industrial society and could be found in any industrial society.
7.G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), pp. 665, 666, 667, 676.
8.John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton Balch, 1934), PP.
4445.
- For a stimulating defense of the tonal system, see Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1959). For a historical interpretation of the meaning of tonality (in the
sense I have proposed), see Henri Pousseur’s illuminating essay «La nuova sensibility musicale,» in Incontri musicali 2; and NiccolO Castiglioni’s II linguaggio musicale (Milano: Ricordi, 1959). - Actually, the problem is much more complex than it might appear from the generalization I have resorted to here for the sake of theoretical convenience, in order to isolate a particular discourse. What I have defined above—with the example of Schonberg, an artist who finds himself at the very beginning of a new musical evolution, at a crucial juncture, and whose validity and good faith are absolutely unimpeachable—is a «model» avantgarde act, the Uravantgarde (in which Ur indicates not just a chronological order but also a logical one). In other words, my argument would be quite simple and indisputable if, in the course of cul tural evolution, there had been only one instance of the avantgarde. But, in fact, contemporary culture is a «culture of avantgardes.» How can we explain such a situation? We can no longer make a clear distinction between a rejected tradition and an avantgarde that proposes a new order, because every avantgarde is the negation of a previous avantgarde, which, however, given its relative contemporaneity, cannot yet be considered as a tradition in relation to the avantgarde that is negating it. Hence, the suspicion that a valid act of Uravantgarde may often be the stimulus for an avantgarde manner, and that, today, «to be avantgarde» may well be the only way of belonging to a tradition. This situation is often seen as the neocapitalist conversion of artistic rebellion. In other words, the artist is a rebel because the market wants him to be one. Therefore, his rebellion has no real value, since it is only a convention. But on close inspection, it is not difficult to realize that what we arc again confronting here, in this «denunciation,» is the natural dialectic between invention and manner which has always existed in the history of art. Every time an artist invents a new form that involves a profound change in the vision of the world, he is immediately imitated by a legion of pseudoartists who borrow the form of his art without, however, understanding its implications. It is precisely because of the inevitability of such a phenomenon, and of its frequency in a civilization such as ours (where things arc used up so rapidly and change is so sudden that no novelty is ever new for long) that it is particularly important that every avantgarde action be immediately negated by a newer invention and thus prevented from becoming manner. The combination of these two dialectics produces a constant alternation between apparent innovations, mere mannerist variations on a theme, and real innovations, the negations of these variations. Thus, forms that have been negated by a number of successive avantgardes often retain a power that the newer ones do not have.
On the other hand, we should also note that if avantgarde methods are often the swiftest and most direct way of confronting and dismantling a declining artistic situation, they are not the only way. Another exists within the very order that is being negated: parody, the ironic imitation of such an order (Stravinsky’s alternative to Schonberg). In other words, a worn out, alienating form of expression can be negated in one of two ways: one can dismantle the modes of communication on which it is based, or one can exorcise them via parody. Parody and irony can thus be seen as viable, subtler alternatives to the more common, revolutionary ardor of the avantgarde. There is also a very dangerous, but plausible, third possibility: one can adopt the communicative forms of a particular system in order to question and challenge that very system—critically use mass media to raise the consciousness of that part of the audience
