THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CONTEMPORANEITY OF ALL STYLES

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CONTEMPORANEITY OF ALL STYLESAuthor(s): F. G. ASENJOSource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Fall 1975), pp. 381-389Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41177967 .

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THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CONTEMPORANEITY OF ALL STYLES

F. G. ASENJO

The End of the Avant-Garde and What it Means

There was a time when the avant-garde was clearly iden-

tifiable, when it could be easily recognized in any field, the fine arts, music, or literature. Gradually, and sometimes not so gradually, this situation changed. Schools claiming to represent the "true" avant-garde proliferated, yielding contradictory views and incompatible aesthetics. This progressive fragmenta- tion into a myriad of directions, often with one-man "schools," has inevitably resulted in the demise of the avant-garde itself. As evidence, consider the present situation in the arts with all the ephemeral "isms" and the constant shelving of yesterday's con- victions; or look at the musical world where disorientation reigns supreme,1 or at literature where a single book, Finnegaris Wake, killed even the possibility of an avant-garde for the foreseeable future.

What conclusions should one draw? Is the end of the avant- garde the end of the arts? So much gloom and pessimism per- vades art, music, and literary criticism these days that one is inclined to assume that the future of art is dependent on the health of the avant-garde. What a fallacy! Yet it is true that preoccupation with the adventures and misadventures of the avant-garde has become for the artist a real wall to creativity.

Mr. Asenjo, a previous contributor to Soundings, is Professor of Mathemat- ics at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published a number of articles on mathematical logic, aesthetics, and philosophy, and a book, Whole and Parts: Studies in Formal Ontology.

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Any escape from the morass in which we find ourselves is impossible without a radical rethinking of our historic perceptions. In this regard, it is historicism itself that should be questioned - that is, our conception of the arts in terms of a progressive development that takes place along a linear span of time. I am not implying that we should turn to the past, or that we should take a detour around the decomposing corpse of the avant- garde. These moves would simply perpetuate our historicistic prejudices. I have another thesis in mind, as hinted by my article's title.

This alternative is difficult to present. We are still children of our habits, and historicism is so pervasive, its workings so insidi- ous, that even when we vow not to fall into its clutches we find ourselves unwittingly reverting in our next judgment. Indeed, historicism is such a resilient conception that what we need here is nothing less than a new, equally resilient frame of mind from which time and progress are automatically banished as providers of value. Not an easy point of view to develop, but let me try.

Style as a Site of Creation Rather Than Only Its Product

To change one's way of thinking one must begin to see each style as a continuing starting point. It is an error to believe that a style possesses at its inception a predetermined development similar to the hereditary development of a biological organism. In the arts every beginning is a ramification point, a choice of forking alternatives. No style can be thought of as having ex- hausted its creative possibilities unless one erroneously believes that there is something inevitable in the way styles develop. Both this belief and artistic saturation cause blindness to the many possibilities which, although open to a given style, are neglected during a long sequence of conscious and unconscious choices. In art, however, once a beginning always a beginning. Renaissances are the discovery of this truth, the perception of eternal foun- tains in old principles. Aesthetics do not die; occasionally we simply become blind and deaf to some of art's constant solicita- tions. Hence it is a mistake to give any weight to the so-called avant-gardists, for they hold that creativity is based on oblitera- tion, on a nihilistic severance in accordance with the principle that the latest is the best. Art is not an evolutionary process except in its most superficial aspects. True artistic creation flows from the adoption of a point of view from which given materials



THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CONTEMPORANEITY OF ALL STYLES 383

display a special aesthetic potential. Such a viewpoint is not affected by time; rather, it affects time. In fact, time flows very differently within each respective point of view. Think what happened when Joyce adopted Vico's cyclic conception of history and literature. From this vantage point Joyce was able to survey an incredibly suggestive world of rich possibilities far beyond Vico's horizons. This same process occurred when Stravinsky found in Webern's compositions an eye-opening view that led him in his last composing years to an entirely new musical style. Similarly, from the viewpoint of a single painting by Velazquez, Las Meninas, Picasso went on to execute a highly inventive sequence of variations. In each of these examples the artist did not go back in time; instead, by assuming a particular viewpoint he went outside of time, he lifted his mind above time to a plateau from which he could look at his work and at time itself with a new objectivity. The vista from such a plateau oper- ates as a creative revelation, as aprincipium ex machina, a key from heaven which opens closed doors down here below.

The Need To Change Our Conception of Time

Although belief in the existence of progress in the arts is often criticized, and although there is continual talk of decadence and crisis, nothing so far has replaced the linear scheme of historicism that is so intrinsic to the idea of progress. The presumed linearity of time has such a grip on us, it seems so obvious and ultimate, that this alone constitutes an enormous stumbling block in any attempt to grasp the real aesthetic situation. The slightest acquaintance with relativity theory teaches us, however, that time is not a container of events but an element of events, that time is relative to each point of view. Far from believing like Newton in a primordial time that flows uniformly ad infinitum even in a universe empty of matter, one should think of time as entering the cosmos through and with matter: there would be no time in an empty universe. Time is a streak of concreteness that changes from location to location in accordance with the dynamic state of the point at which it is measured. A change in viewpoint implies a change in one's sense of time. In fact, it is not physically inconsistent to postulate locations and states which remain untouched by time, locations from which time can be looked at from the outside. All this is perfectly conceivable once we have learned that the only absolute in this world of ours is the



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relativity of everything, including particularly our basic categories of reality. We are in no way contradicting the laws of nature when we say - and mean it as more than a metaphor - that an ecstasy of beauty transcends time, that it belongs to a different dimension of human enjoyment which spreads beyond - not within - time.

With this ontological scheme in mind, it is not difficult to understand that what we witness in the world is not a syn- chronized evolution but a counterpoint of fairly independent processes in some of which time flows faster than in others, each having its own particular perspective of universal history, its particular ordering of events into past, future, and temporally incomparable. This is especially true of styles. Chinese art of the sixteenth century is temporally incomparable with the European Renaissance, whereas all African art can be either very remote and primitive or very close and alive, depending on whether it is considered from the viewpoint of classicism or of cubism. Even styles which are geographically close are capable of different temporal perspectives. Thus because Romanic art was im- mediately followed by gothic, the former is seen by some as no more than a stepping-stone to the latter; however, both Romanic and gothic may also be seen as sites of different creativities from which the artist can take off at any time with a sense of presentness and relevance. Realization of this fact should help us to circum- vent the neglect into which some valuable works have fallen simply because they are wrapped in dated styles. Fauré's last quartet is an example of such a rejected masterpiece, slighted because it was written in the early 1920's - Bartok's and Stravinsky's period of ascendancy - in a style which had been fashionable two decades before.

My expression, "the principle of the contemporaneity of all styles," is meant to convey the idea that styles never lose their validity, that the only concrete source of relevance is the one that originates in the artist's creative ecstasy without regard for historicistic prejudices. Before an act of creation all styles have the same value; they are all abodes of beauty in different forms, all potentialities, open paths, never closed chapters of art history. Once a style is developed, it becomes part of a permanent realm of possibilities, an "eternal" point of view for which time is merely a secondary projection. In a very concrete sense all periods coexist, more so today than ever before, despite the




abstract rationalizations with which both artist and critic alike justify their particular choices of the moment.

We have put styles in the realm of the "eternal;" thus it would appear that a concrete act of creation takes place at some intersec- tion of eternity and history. However, the term "eternity" is plagued by connotations we wish to avoid. Styles are not Platonic Ideas forever unchanging. They are as concrete as a pebble, only beyond time in the ordinary sense: their changes take place in ways that we cannot fathom with the usual linear categories of past, present, and future. In this realm of styles all processes are many-dimensional, and when a change occurs it is of a massive nature that affects past, present, and future simultaneously. T. S. Eliot glimpsed this point when he wrote: ". . . what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it."2 Nevertheless we shall continue to use the word "eternal" as an approximation of what is only a naturalistic and psychological conception. Some Practical Implications

From principles, theorems are derived - practical consequ- ences. Here our first consequence is that the artist must not try to situate himself mentally in any particular period of time. Con- trary to usual advice, he should expend part of his energy fighting any tendency to lock himself consciously into a specific historic span - be it avant-garde, neoclassic, or neoromantic. HusserPs famous motto, "To the things themselves!" should be taken to heart by the artist. To creativity itself! - that is, to a consideration of aesthetic materials without temporal con- straints, to look at any painting, listen to any music, read any book as if we were ourselves at that moment creating them. Any experience of art worth the name always involves to some degree such a re-creation; the artist simply takes this active experiencing to higher levels with a view to still further creation - levels which can reach an intense communion with "things themselves" and set his mind on fire. Next to being called old-fashioned, nothing offends the artist more than being called eclectic. But this is a dangerous word from the vocabulary of progressivism which should be ignored. Joyce, Picasso, and Stravinsky, for example, have all been accused of eclecticism at one time or another. However, if one considers the extensive transmutations to which



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they subjected the materials they brought forth from their res- ervoirs of aesthetic experiences - those vast assortments of meaningful odds and ends - it is impossible not to recognize that their final products were usually something very new indeed. Joyce's ingenious parodies, Picasso's analytic variations, Stravinsky's inventive syntheses are not mere revivals of a past which was always present anyway, but true artistic creations that came into being through awareness of the eternal significance of particular styles. Alerted to such significance, no effort is empty, no attempt unworthy, so long as the stylistic viewpoint from which it originates touches one's heart. Again, to the creative mind that resides in all times all the time, no art period is ever finished and closed.

A second practical consequence to be derived from our principle is that one should always beware of saturation with a given style. Saturation is not an assessment of worth but merely a psychological state that consists of the mind's transient incapac- ity to cope with a particular style, an inability to re-enact the motivations that led to a specific work. Saturation is a severance from sources, a sterilizing phenomenon - inevitable occasionally - that should warn the artist to suspend judgment and wait for a fresher attitude instead of indulging in rationalizing pro- nouncements based on temporary blindness. The creation of a work of art is necessarily a selective process and calls for an active discarding of irrelevant materials and forms. This attitude is different from rejection that stems from a saturated frame of mind. To keep A and reject В on the basis of B's unsuitability vis-à-vis a specific aim does not indicate the intrinsic unworthi- ness of В - be it an idea, a musical motif, or a form. Creativity is fundamentally evenhanded, and far from obscuring the relationships between a work in progress and others of different types, it puts such relationships to good use. Thus, all architec- ture is implicitly contrasted with the Greek example. Thus, too, all Western music is compared with the great polyphonic models of the Renaissance. It is only a romantic prejudice - a form of saturation - to see Palestrina's music as dry art without pathos. Lived from the inside, so to speak, there is nothing flat or primitive in Palestrina; rather, it has a stylistic perfection of its own which includes a deeply tragic flair, a sense of infinity, and an emotional intensity that is difficult to match. For the post- romantic mentality, Palestrina's works are a wellspring of eter-




nally new aesthetic elements waiting to be drawn into fresh combinations.

It is clear then that origins are not necessarily more rudimen- tary than final products. When a style or an art form flourishes as a refinement of previous works, the new creation does not supersede the former ones, nor does it diminish their value, their intrinsic message, or their originating power. The continu- ous or discontinuous transformation that leads from one style to another only reveals that each is a polarization of universal and individual currents that flow ceaselessly. To see these moving currents in a style is of the utmost importance to the artist - a third consequence derived from our principle. A style is a synthesis, a densification of processes that raises itself to a new dimension at which history pauses, but not activity. Just as one occasionally forgets oneself and transcends time on seeing a spec- tacular sunset, so can art be seen as a sudden ecstatic perception of a confluence of eternal aspects. Originally each style has this element of ecstatic oblivion, this disregard for time, this sense of the absolute. When two styles merge to produce a new one, the latter does not constitute a dialectic absorption of the previous two but a new opening, a new vantage point that eliminates nothing, merely adding a new freedom to cast old materials into new perspectives. To a person "fallen into everydayness" - to use the Heideggerian expression - it is as difficult to conceive this Olympus of styles as it would be for a triangle to imagine the sphere. In their own realm styles are not ordered in the way that everyday facts are ordered, each ranked according to definite aims or qualities; styles remain idiosyncratic existences which hold dialogues with one another without suppressing each other. In creation's realm synthesis and contrasts certainly take place; but there, in contact with one another, styles undergo transfor- mations without losing their irreducibility. Indeed, there is cross-fertilization; however, the new progeny only enlarges the realm in accordance with the principle of the ontological expan- sion of the universe, the principle that the new eliminates nothing and preserves everything. Art As Knowledge of Stylistic Realms

Artistic creation used to begin with a gathering of treasures. In music, for example, the composer would start by collecting ap- pealing motifs embodying a special mood and having the correct



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balance between accent and intensity of sound. The extreme austerities of post-serial music eliminated this type of composing, and with it the concrete participation of the work in progress with other works. Today the composer follows an abstract design rather than an aesthetic experience, and as a consequence there is now less style, less personality in music than in most other periods of Western history. An abstract design is no substitute for the conviction that accompanies a moving experience. Apart from conviction, a moving musical experience generates tendencies and reflexes of a highly differentiated nature, rhythmic and metric tendencies as well as harmonic ones. Thus listening to the human voice, practicing a piece at the piano, or tapping one's foot at the sound of drums set the musician's mind in specific directions which follow subconsciously a hidden map of feelings. But one of these triggers merely provides a concrete starting point; much of the composer's work thereafter consists of separating the ready-made responses from the hidden map of feelings - that is, in inhibiting the responses and bringing the feelings out into the open so that the former can be reassessed in light of the latter. Sometimes this discovery and reassessment is attained gradually, almost without noticing, and sometimes it comes suddenly in the form of a revelation. Dostoevsky, looking at the Neva River one day, saw in a flash his special destiny as a writer. At that moment he perceived as a supreme truth that "there is nothing more fantastic than reality."3 This vision lighted the path he was to follow for the rest of his life. The role played by such a timeless vision is principally what makes art a form of knowledge, one through which realms that are not knowable in any other way become accessible to man. This is why a visionless art is a tragic loss to humanity, a form of mental crippling.

To be able to think about gathering treasures requires a value system that can convert a fragment, an idea, a theme into a treasurable object. Such a value system comes through an enhanced perception of reality, the opposite of the indifferent disorientation which characterizes saturated frames of mind. What the Neva did so dramatically for Dostoevsky, the "splendor in the grass," "the glory in the flower" did for Wordsworth. It is this vision of the spirit of things beyond ordinary sense perception that the artist wishes to capture, whether he knows it or not. Art begins with this enhanced perception of reality, and its




ultimate aim is to elicit such perception in others. There is something unwholesomely solipsistic in working from an abstract blueprint, a truly anti-artistic procedure. Planned ex- perimentation taken to the current extremes ignores the fact that music composes itself at its own pace as much as the composer does, in the very same way that a painting paints itself. The latter was acknowledged by no less an experimental painter than Picasso, who said in confirmation of this ego-less, unwillful artistic creation: "Painting makes me do what it wants." And then: "You can search for a thousand years and find nothing," "no search leads to a find." And again: "Nudes . . . have to paint themselves." "There comes a moment . . . when the breasts fall into place themselves without your even needing to draw them." Indeed, it is things that find us, things in which there is "something sacred, touched by God."4 Objects and situations have these "sacred" streaks which the artist must encounter in order to lose himself in them. These irrational aspects of creation are the artist's source of conviction. Whereas doubt originates in a divorce from reality, certainty develops from the realization that the artist's mind is a continuation of reality - in fact, its instru- ment. Or to put it in Jung's words as quoted by Herbert Read, the artist is "himself conscious of the fact that he stands as it were underneath his work, or at all events beside it, as though he were another person who has fallen within the magic circle of an alien will."5 Art is reality's freedom as much as man's.

If it is true then, as Blake says, that "a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees," it should not be difficult to understand that art plays an essential role in the ontological demon- stration of hidden realities of the world; that art is - to quote Picasso again - "the moment of truth." The role that art plays in this respect cannot be substituted by any other activity of man. Just as nobody can explain green to me until I have seen green, so the truths that art reveals cannot be revealed by any other means than those of art.

NOTES

1. F. G. Asenjo, "The Crisis in Western Music and the Human Roots of Art," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXIX (1971), 529-535.

2. T. S. Eliot. Selected Essays (New York: 1950), d. 5. 3. K. Mochulsky, Dostoevski (Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 27-28. 4. Cf. D. Ashton's Picasso on Art (New York: 1972) and H. Parmelin's Picasso

Says (New York: 1969). 5. Herbert Read, The Forms of Things Unknoxvn (New York: 1967), p. 73.



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THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CONTEMPORANEITY OF ALL STYLES