Theory and Art in Cases of Calvino and Godard

In sixties emerged a debate on the status of semiology and autonomity of the work of art. The question, if I simplify it, goes like this: is semiology as a science of signs (of meaning, signification, sense, narration, tropes and so on) necessary to disclose a production of meaning in the work of art, or is it the very work that in its immanence shows (or stages) the genesis of meaning without any need of theoretical commentary or analysis? Let me rephrase it - is theory of art's meaning anterior or interior to the work of art? Is text (literature, movies, a play) self-enclosed and provides its own theoretical terms by which we analyze it, or does theory have an external status and its own conceptual apparatus? A lot of praised intellectuals joined the dispute, among main protagonists being Queneau, Calvino, Eco and also Pasolini and Derrida.

Italo Calvino was one of the theoreticians who proposed a view that the text doesn't need any external intervention, since it can stage its own reading. And that is exactly what his well-known novel, If on a Winter Night a Traveler, does. It is a book about itself, a book whose protagonist tries to read a novel called If on a Winter Night a Traveler, but in his search for lost chapters always finds some other novel, passage or story. It ends with him lying in bed with his girlfriend while reading what seems to be the last chapter of the text he's been looking for. While I myself was finishing this truly superb novel, I found myself being in the exact same situation : my girl was lying next to me half asleep and I was perusing the last chapters. In that truly sublime moment I realized that Calvino's reproaches to theory and artificial academical reading (readings, proposed by femminists, deconstructivists et cetera) are in complete accordance with what I was experiencing. Once the final words of the novel slipped before my eyes, for a very brief moment, maybe a second or two, I felt a complete coincidence (in its double meeaning: that of a happy and unexpected meeting of events and that of an overlapping) of me, my girlfriend and a novel on one side and the content of the last chapter on the other. I felt there was no place for theoretical stance, no room for a concept that would transcend Calvino's novel and guide my reading of it.

Godard once reproached Pasolini because of him merely joining an academical debate over semiology and movie (Pasolini wrote some realy excellent propositions on the poetical language of movie, which were sadly abolished by "official" semiology). Pasolini's answer was, as always, pregnant with lucidity: he said Godard's movies were NOTHING BUT pure theory. Works like Masculin/Feminin and A Bout de souffle are purely theoretical meditations on concept of genre. In his movies distinctions like that between theory and work of art, parody and genre, movie and a text on it, are completely abolished. That is why watching Godard changes the very experience of watching a movie. Because his films situate themselves in a location where parody and genre cannot become separate, his movies stages the very experience of watching a movie. After Godard, one could no longer go to some forgotten theatre, lost in narrow and crouded street, between cafes and nightclubs, and watch a movie with a girl he loved or with a group of old friends in the same way one used to. His movies literally stage that experience of watching some old American movie (a western, a noir or some other golden genre) in an "authentic" place of old and rusty theatre.

These days I am writing a paper on aesthetics (concerning a problem of the site of the artistic work) and I must admit that despite my infinite belief in theory, writing on art repels me. For me, art is a blind spot of theory. As Alain Badiou argues in his Short Manual of Inaesthetics, a philosopher should learn how to let the art speak in its own language about itself. It is a willingness in complete opposition to every philosophical instinct: a willingness to listen to art, to let it ground itself, to wait for the art to offer you a thought and a word of it. It is a gesture that truly turns platonism on its head: a gesture of waiting for a work of art to stage itself as an event that ripples a calm philosophical surface.