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Rules

Le verbe est intimement potentiel [...]: c'est en cela qu'il est Dieu. Mais le temps des adorations est passé, celui de la science et de ses ambitieuses surenchères est venu. La divine potentialité du Verbe, malgré quelques fulgurations notables, était restée, quoique toujours prête à sourdre, latente et implicite. Il s'agit [...] de passer à l'explicite et de mettre en oeuvre ces pouvoirs.
"Le Collêge de 'Pataphysique et l'Oulipo", in Oulipo, la littérature potentielle (1973), 42.
Il y assouvissait, jusqu'à plus soif, un instinct aussi constant qu'infantin (ou qu'infantil): son goût, son amour, sa passion pour l'accumulation, pour la saturation, pour l'imitation, pour la citation, pour la traduction, pour l'automatisation.
Georges Perec, "Un roman lipogrammatique", in Oulipo, 94.
Translations below.

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Preamble

One abiding folly in art and criticism is the supposition that rule-following and creative freedom are at odds. Call this the subromantic supposition. The development of art over the last century and a half has typically been written in terms of an ever-increasing liberation from conventional forms and contents. In music, the dissonance has been emancipated, the reign of tonal harmony has been overthrown. In painting, the canvas has sloughed off the burden of representation, and is free to be nothing other than itself. In poetry, dadaism, lettrism and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement urged that language should divest itself from signification. Innovation -- Diaghilev's "Étonne-moi" -- became an imperative, and the history of modern art has become, conventionally, a history of convention violated. Today the history-in-advance of multimedia perpetuates the imperative to make it new.

The natural counterpart to the subromantic supposition is the subclassical. The subclassical insists on the necessity of a particular rule or set of rules, because they are dictated by nature, or cloaked in the dignified habit of tradition, or demanded in the name of morality and the protection of the young. Works that flout the rules are unintelligible, monstrous, decadent. The unities of classical tragedy, meter and rhyme in poetry, plot and character in fiction, tonality in music, perspective in drawing, have been held to be not merely instruments but part of the essence of each art. Without them, there is nothing. The subclassical has long been the partner of the subromantic in a recurrent dialectic. Excess evokes demands for decorum and rigor; rigor, declining into sclerosis, invites transgression.

Each position evinces a kind of blindness. The subromantic fails to see that the recognition of diversity among artistic acts depends in part on a system of conventional distinctions. Without an established metric pattern, the use of a trochee () instead of an iamb () cannot be registered as a departure from a rule. In music, the pattern of accented and unaccented beats defined by meter makes possible syncopation, the dropping or adding of beats, polyrhythm. The subromantic thesis par excellence was pronounced by Roland Barthes in his inaugural Leçon at the Collège de France: language -- and so all convention -- is inescapably fascist. But the Fragments d'un discours amoureux, written a few years later, begin with a preface in which Barthes defines the "figures" that compose the work. Though they are said to originate as "bris de discours", in Barthes' work they are presented in a strikingly uniform, even pedantic, format: a title, an "argumentum", a series of numbered paragraphs. Within that format, the discourse of love, which "never exists but through fits of language, which come to the lover by way of the merest, aleatoric circumstance", is brought to heel, submitted to the arbitrary but familiar order of the alphabet. Barthes was in fact no enemy to rules, but to the forgetting that allows them to decay into "mythology", second nature, out of our hands, necessary and eternal.

But most by Numbers judge a Poet's Song,
And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong;
In the bright Muse tho' thousand Charms conspire,
Her Voice is all these tuneful Fools admire,
Who haunt Parnassus but to please their Ear,
Not mend their Minds; as some to Church repair,
Not for the Doctrine, but the Musick there.
These Equal Syllables alone require,
Tho' oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
While Expletives their feeble aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
While they ring round the same unvary'd Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
--Pope, Essay on criticism 337-349.
Ce qui est lu en tête de chaque figure n'est pas sa définition, c'est son argument. Argumentum: «exposition, récit, sommaire, petit drame, histoire inventée»; j'ajoute: instrument de distanciation, pancarte, à la Brecht. S'il y a une figure «Angoisse», c'est parce que le sujet s'écrie parfois (sans se soucier du sens clinique du mot): «Je suis angoissé».
--Barthes, Fragments 8.
It is not amiss, however, to remind the reader of this: that in all free arts something of a compulsory character is still required, or, as it is called, a mechanism, without which the soul, which in art must be free, and which alone gives life to the work, would be bodyless and evanescent [...]
--Kant, Critique of judgement §43 (trans. Meredith 164).
Free jazz, the sixties happening, have their conventions. To call them "conventions" is not to say that they are the device of any one person, or that they can be done away with ad hoc, or that they have no reason. Hitchhikers use their thumbs in part because thumbing, unlike winking or crossing your fingers, is visible from a ways off -- but so too is the wave of the hand that means good-bye: visibility may be necessary to hitchhiking gestures, but it does not favor the choice of one visible gesture over another. That art is artificial, that its rules, forms, and canons have histories, that those histories are enmeshed with political and social history, hardly needs repeating in a time when subromanticism, though on the wane, still predominates. Instead it may be more to the point to argue that those systems -- perspective drawing, tonal harmony, prosody -- which it has been the business of the twentieth century to overturn, had a certain fit with human perceptual and cognitive capacities, capacities not indefinitely malleable.

But neither are those capacities so fixed either as to determine any particular set of conventions. The subclassical fails to see that art and its machinery are made by us -- or it refuses to see, attempting instead to bestow on art the permanence, the inevitability of what is not made by us -- namely, nature. Only if the rules of art are "Nature still", however "Methodiz'd", will they be "unchang'd and Universal" like nature herself. Nature is the soul of art, the imperishable form that, though unseen, "each Motion guides, and ev'ry Nerve sustains". All we add is the corruptible, always imperfect body, or -- to use another of Pope's analogies -- to the naked thought a suitable dress. Yet nature, strangely enough, cannot instruct the aspiring poet or critic except through art, the art of the ancients, who, like Homer, "for all Ages writ and all Mankind" (123n). The rules of art, it turns out, were drawn from the "great Examples" ancient critics had before them. The difficulty thereby posed -- that universal and unchanging nature, if it can be grasped only in human products, might be incapable of providing a permanent, strife-allaying standard -- is immediately, and drastically, resolved. Like Virgil, if we examine Homer's works we will find that nature and Homer are the "same" (134). To copy the ancients is to copy nature; to obey the ancient rules is to obey nature.

But the solution is unsatisfying. Was Homer's "labour'd Work" confined by rules derived out of a proto-Homer now lost? If so, a regress opens up. Since Nature never shows herself but in the body of a work, a body which being humanly devised must always fall short of perfection, there will be no unassailable example, not even Homer. But if there was no proto-Homer, then Homer was unique in having an unmediated relation to nature, who spoke to him not through another poet but in her own voice, as God did to Moses.

First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frame
By her just Standard, which is still the same:
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang'd, and Universal light,
Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart
At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.
[...]
Those RULES of old discover'd, not devis'd,
Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz'd;
Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain'd
By the same Laws which first herself ordain'd.
--Pope, Essay on criticism 68-73, 88-91.
On ne sait bien où conduit un chemin qu'en le parcourant ou, tout au moins en y jetant un coup d'oeil pour voir s'il se termine, à peu de distance, en cul-de-sac, ou s'il n'a pas de fin visible. Même les impasses ont leur intérêt; il est de nous éclairer aussi bien sur les limites que sur les pouvoirs qui sont associés à telles contraintes ou à tels mécanismes.

[One doesn't really know where a path will lead except by following it, or at least casting a glance to see whether it terminates quickly in a cul de sac or has no visible end. Even impasses have a certain interest -- to enlighten us about the limits as well as the powers associated with this or that constraint or mechanism.]

--Fournel, Clefs 76.
[...] every art presupposes rules which are laid down as the foundation which first enables a product, if it is to be called one of art, to be represented as possible. The concept of fine art, however, does not permit of the judgement upon the beauty of its product being derived from any rule that has a concept for its determining ground, and that depends, consequently, on a concept of the way in which the product is possible. Consequently fine art cannot of its own self excogitate the rule according to which it is to effectuate its product. but since, for all that, a product can never be called art unless there is a preceding rule, it follows that nature in the individual (and by virtue of the harmony of his faculties) must give the rule to art, i.e. fine art is only possible as a product of genius.
--Kant, Critique of judgement §46 (Meredith 168).
In Pope's Essay, permanence and universality come to art through an art which is nature and which therefore has them already. What begins as an impossibility -- the identity of nature and art -- becomes a necessity. In Kant's Critique of judgement the instability of their roles is likewise striking. Art must of course be governed by rules. Because "the effectuation of an end necessitates determinate rules which we cannot venture to dispense with",

there is [...] no fine art in which something mechanical, capable of being at once comprehended and followed in obedience to rules, and consequently something academic does not constitute its essential condition (Critique §47; Meredith 171).
Yet genius, in whose works alone art finds its models, is a "talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given", a nature within us, which, unlike scientific reason, cannot articulate the "formulas" that govern its operations but can only perform them in producing models for later art. Nature in or through genius "gives the rule to art" (§46; 168). Kant avoids the puzzle of proto-Homer by supposing that not just one ancient poet, but every genius, however much he or she may learn from examples, is still an immediate medium for the operations of nature. God speaks not just to Moses but to all of us. A new genius is, by the works of others, aroused to "a sense of his own originality", so that he may put "freedom from the constraint of rules into force in his art, in such a way that for art itself a new rule is won" (§49; 181). But the "freedom" of the genius is not that of a free moral agent acting in accordance with maxims evident to reason. It is the "freedom" by which nature acts through us apart from reason, before or beyond it, and so -- from reason's standpoint -- arbitrarily.

Though Kant may seem to celebrate artistic genius, the genius in the end becomes a mouthpiece for nature, an oracle that knows not what it speaks. This is a constant danger for the subclassical. It begins by celebrating art, and defends tradition by folding it up into nature; it ends by reducing the artist either to a mere conduit (if she follows nature), or to an imitator (if she joins the school founded by some genius), or to a charlatan (if she willfully disregards both nature and tradition).

The subromantic, for its part, sometimes likens the genius to the position of vates, a channel through which some higher power speaks to us. Genius is allied to madness or to the sacred often by way of justifying or excusing its unruliness. But this defense of novelty, like the subclassical's defense of tradition, still has the effect of denying full human agency to the artist. In either case, the artist creates only at the expense of being subordinate to an extrahuman, or at least extrarational, agency.

But what if freedom from the constraint of rules needed no suprahuman seal of approval? What if the invention -- not discovery or vatic transmission, but invention, conscious as any construction in mathematics -- of rules, the deliberate reworking of conventions, were as essential to art as rules and conventions?

And what if portentous questions were essential to the effet-théorie, the absymal Kniff itself?


See To the next Part: Oulipian Constraints


Notes

  1. Translations:

    (i) The Word is potential in its most inward being [...]: for that reason it is God. But the time of adorations is past, and that of science and its ambitious rival bid has arrived. Despite certain notable fulgurations, the divine potentiality of the Word had remained, though always ready to spring forth, latent and implicit. Now it must emerge into explicitness, and its powers be put into action.

    (ii) An instinct, as constant as it was childlike (or childish), found satisfaction: his gusto, his ardor, his passion for accumulation, saturation, imitation, citation, translation, automatization.

  2. One example among many: "GRIST is open to all language and visual art forms that develop on the Net. We are rapidly becoming multimedia artists -- the old borderlines between forms are gone. The Net is an extension of the alternative forms of communication and interaction that were initiated by the break from traditional academic and culturally controlled forums of the period prior to the mid 60s."

  3. Derrida has already traced these steps, of course. See "Parergon", III, "Le sans de la coupure pure", in La Vérité en peinture [Eng. trans. Truth in painting] (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).

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Dennis Des Chene