Leonard B. Meyer
         Innovation, Choice, and the History of Music
         Before going further, it will be helpful to consider briefly the
            notion that novelty per se is a fundamental human need. Experiments
            with human beings, as well as with animals, indicate that the
            maintenance of normal, successful behavior depends upon an adequate
            level of incoming stimulation or, as some have put it, of
            novelty.2 But lumping all novelty together is misleading. At least
            three kinds of novelty need to be distinguished. (1) Some novel
            patterns arise out of, or represent, changes in the fundamental
            rules governing the organization of musical processes and
            structures. By significantly weakening our comprehension of the
            musical relationships presented undermining not only our
            understanding of what is past but our ability to envisage what is
            to come such systemic change seriously threatens our sense of
            psychic security and competent control. Far from being welcome, the
            insecurity and uncertainty thus engendered is at least as
            antipathetic, disturbing, and unpleasant as stimulus privation. (2)
            Novel patterns may also result from the invention of a new strategy
            that accords with prevalent stylistic rules. Though they may
            initially seem to threaten existing competencies, the function and
            significance of novel strategies within the larger set of stylistic
            constraints can usually be grasped without too much delay or
            difficulty. For a while the tensions produced by strategic
            innovation may seem disturbing. But in the end, when our grasp of
            the principles ordering events is confirmed and our sense of
            competency is reestablished and control is reinforced, tension is
            resolved into an elation that is both stimulating and enjoyable.
            (3) Most novel patterns original themes, rhythms, harmonic
            progressions, and so forth involve the innovative
            instantiation or realization of an existing strategy or schema (see
            examples 1-3 below).3 Novelties of this kind not only enhance our
            sense of control a feeling that we know how things really
            "work" but provide both the pleasure of
            recognition and the joy of skillfully exercising some competency.
            We enjoy novelty the stimulation of surprise, the tension of
            uncertainty as long as it can be accommodated within a known
            and understandable set of constraints. When the rules governing the
            game are abrogated or in doubt when comprehension and control
            are threatened the result is usually anger, anguish, and
            desperation.
            These responses to novelty are consequences of fundamental and
            poignant verities of the human condition: the centrality of choice
            in human behavior. Because only a minute fraction of human behavior
            seems to be genetically specified, choice is inescapable.
            While in lower organisms, behavior is strictly determined by the
            genetic program, in complex metazoa the genetic program becomes
            less constraining, more "open" as Ernst Mayr puts it,
            in the sense that it does not lay down behavioral instructions in
            great detail but rather permits some choice and allows for a
            certain freedom of response. Instead of imposing rigid
            prescriptions, it provides the organism with potentialities and
            capacities. This openness of the genetic program increases with
            evolution and culminates in mankind.4
            The price of freedom is the imperative of choice. Human beings must
            choose were to sow and when to reap, when to work and where to
            live, when to play and what to build. Intelligent, successful
            choices are possible only if alternative courses of action can be
            imagined and their consequences envisaged with reasonable accuracy.
             
            2. For further discussion, see my Music, the Arts, and Ideas
            (Chicago, 1967), p. 50.
            3. Rules are transpersonal but intracultural constraints for
            instance, the pitch/time entities established in some style, as
            well as grammatical and syntactic regularities. Strategies are
            general means (constraints) for actualizing some of the
            possibilities that are potential in the rules of the style. The
            rules of a style are relatively few, while the number of possible
            strategies may, depending upon the nature of the rules, be very
            large indeed. The ways of instantiating a particular strategy are,
            if not infinite, at least beyond reckoning.
            4. François Jacob, The Possible and the Actual (New York, 1982), p.
            61. See also Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin (New York, 1977),
            p. 257.
Amelie Oksenberg Rorty
         Experiments in Philosophic Genre: Descartes' Meditations
         It would be pretty to think that Descartes' Meditations is
            itself a structured transformation of the meditational mode,
            starting with the dominance of an intellectual, ascensional mode,
            moving through the penitential form, and ending with the analytic-
            architectonic mode. Unfortunately the text does not sustain such an
            easy resolution to our problems. Instead, we see that different
            modes seem dominant at different stages; their subterranean
            connections and relations remain unclear.
            We could try to construct a nesting of mask, face, and skeleton in
            Descartes' use of these distinct traditions. He might have
            unselfconsciously inherited a Stoic skeletal structure, fleshed it
            with the weight of his analytic-architectonic meditation, and
            masked it with a penitential meditation for the sake of safety in
            orthodoxy. But the penitential mode provides essential structural
            support it cannot be unmasked. And, as we have seen, the
            analytic-architectonic flesh does not always conform to the Stoic
            skeletal structure.
            The problem is that the various readings subtly undermine one
            another. It is as if the Meditations were composed like a Francis
            Bacon painting. There are plenty of good solid clues for how to
            read the composition of the work in fact there are too many.
            The work we see when using some of those clues is quite different
            from the work we see when following others.
            Did Descartes do this deliberately? An extremely chartable reading
            would turn him into a new sort of Socrates, constructing puzzles to
            force us to examine the truth of his arguments dialectically. But
            whatever Descartes may be, he is not Socrates, any more than he is
            Hume. He is defensive as well as devious, proud as well as prickly;
            and he is not funny.
Menachem Brinker
         Farce and the Poetics of the Vraisemblable
         French theorists have recently proposed a theory which describes
            all literature in terms of the probable, the vraisemblable.6 This
            poetics of the probable commences with a purely relativistic claim.
            What is probable not only changes in accordance with the
            audience's concept of reality but also changes in accordance
            with the needs of the story and with the narrative possibilities
            open to various genres. It includes all of the norms and models
            making a given text understandable to the reader, however
            outlandish and eccentric it may be. Various levels of the
            vraisemblable are distinguished from each other, and the
            vraisemblable based upon models of the world or the world view
            prevalent in a given culture is scrupulously separated from types
            of the vraisemblable that are based upon literary, generic models.
            However, as Tzvetan Todorov gladly admits, "the two notions
            tend to melt into each other."7 He and other theorists see
            the literary genre itself as one of the models
            "probabilizing" a given text, at times in direct
            contradiction with "natural" models of the world. Still
            others see the world, or the prevalent world view, as the universal
            text which probabilizes other texts.
            […]
            Rather than how this new concept of the vraisemblable, of
            probability, fares in relation to farce in films, theater, and
            literature, I prefer to ask how farce fares in relation to it. I
            think that it doesn't do well. Farce shows that it is a
            mistake to unify the possibilities for understanding a text and the
            possibilities for understanding its fictional world within a single
            integrated concept. It is a further mistake to term such a concept
            "probability." When dealing with the fantastic or the
            marvelous, for instance, probabilizing the text and probabilizing
            the work's fictional world may legitimately be unified under
            a single principle or concept. If we agree to change or suspend a
            fundamental belief about the world, we will be able to perceive as
            logical and probable not only the texts but also the fictional
            worlds of such works. Coleridge's "willing suspension
            of disbelief" excellently fits works that are written in
            these genres. Such works require that we temporarily forget
            ("for the moment," as Coleridge would have it) a
            certain general belief about the world. After we've agreed,
            as a result of this suspension, to include certain elements in the
            world (like fairies or witches), we may then rebuild the fictional
            world while using the rest of our beliefs along with this new
            assumption.
             
            Farce's incredibility creates a different situation. Before
            we have even begun to recover from an attack upon one probability
            principle, another is undermined. In farce the rules of probability
            are not neutralized in one specific realm of reality; their
            inversion operates constantly on all of reality's realms. The
            image of a seemingly real world, reminding us of our own world and
            of our own set of probabilities, is all we need to be constantly
            astonished by farce's persistently novel deviations from
            predictable probability. Here, in direct opposition to the
            marvelous, the new deviations must keep on coming from unexpected
            directions, because farce won't allow its incredibilities to
            consolidate and become new rules of probability. The fictional
            world of overt farce lacks a specific factor, the one that would
            have probabilized all of the other factors of this world. Such an
            Archimedean center might seem to be located in the genre's
            definition this genre, however, does not probabilize the
            incredible. Farce's definition does not make farce's
            world more intelligible in any sense of that word. At the very
            most, farce allows us to forgo such intelligibility without
            transgressing the established boundaries of art.
            6. For an excellent presentation of their views, see Jonathan
            Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the
            Study of Literature (London, 1975), pp. 131-60.
            7. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard
            (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), p. 83. See also his introduction to
            Communications 11 (1968): 2.
Neil Hertz
         A Reading of Longinus
         It became customary in the eighteenth century to praise Longinus in
            ways that mimicked one of his own favorite turns of
            thought to identify enthusiastically two elements that would
            more commonly be thought of as quite distinct. To say, with Boileau
            and Pope, that Longinus "is himself the great Sublime he
            draws," or to profess to doubt, as Gibbon did, "which
            is the most sublime, Homer's Battle of the Gods or
            Longinus' apostrophe…upon it," is knowingly to override
            certain conventional lines of demarcation between writers and
            their subject matter, between text and interpretation very
            much in the manner of Longinus overriding the distinction between
            Homer and his heroes, between sublime language and its author
            ("sublimity is the echo of a noble mind"), or between
            sublime poet and his audience ("we come to believe we have
            created what we have only heard").1 Longinus' admirers,
            struck by the force of the treatise, are usually willing to release
            him from the strictures of theoretical discourse and allow him the
            license of a poet; they are likely to appreciate his transgressions
            of conventional limits without ever calling them into question. It
            has been left to more skeptical readers, wary of Longinus'
            "transports," to draw attention to his odd movements of
            thought: W. K. Wimsatt, for example, is unsympathetic but acute
            when he accuses Longinus of "sliding" from one
            theoretical distinction to another, a slide "which seems to
            harbor a certain duplicity and invalidity."2 Wimsatt is
            right: something one might want to call a "slide" is
            observable again and again in the treatise, and not merely from one
            theoretical distinction to another. One finds in the treatise a
            rhetorician's argument conducted with great intelligence and
            energy, but one also discovers that it is remarkably easy to lose
            one's way, to forget which rhetorical topic is under
            consideration at a particular point, to find oneself attending to a
            quotation, a fragment of analysis, a metaphor some
            interestingly resonant bit of language that draws one into quite
            another system of relationships. I want to attempt to follow that
            movement here, to hold it in mind and to question its implications.
            I will look closely at a number of passages in which Longinus
            interweaves language of his own with that of the authors he
            admires for it is here, out of the play of text with
            quotation and of quotations with one another, that the most
            interesting meanings as well as the peculiar power of the treatise
            are generated.
            1. &lsquo;Longinus' On Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russell
            (Oxford, 1965), 9. 2, 7. 2; all further references to this work
            will appear in text, though I have changed a word or two of
            Russell's translation in the interests of a more literal
            rendering of the Greek. I am indebted to another recent
            translation, G. M. A. Grube's Longinus On Great Writing (New
            York, 1957), and more particularly to the ample and intelligent
            introduction and notes accompanying Russell's edition of the
            Greek text, &lsquo;Longinus' On the Sublime (Oxford, 1964).
            2. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A
            Short History (New York, 1957), p.101.
Gerald Graff
         The Pseudo-Politics of Interpretation
         Critics, then, who label theories such as objectivism or
            deconstructionism as "authoritarian" or
            "subversive" are committing a fallacy of
            overspecificity. To call Hirsch's theory authoritarian is to
            assume that such a theory lends itself to one and only one kind of
            political use and that that use can be determined a priori. To
            refute such an assumption, one need only stand back from the
            present in order to recall that today's authoritarian
            ideology is often yesterday's progressive one, and vice
            versa. Indeed, there's considerable historical irony in the
            fact that objectivism has now acquired the status of a right-wing
            idea, while Nietzsche and Heidegger have emerged as heroes of
            literary leftism. As recently as a few decades ago, these
            alignments were different. George Orwell, for instance, thought
            that the tendency to deny the possibility of objective truth
            reflected a totalitarian mentality. "Totalitarianism,"
            he wrote, "in the long run probably demands a disbelief in
            the existence of objective truth." He added that "the
            friends of totalitarianism in this country tend to argue that since
            absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a
            little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are
            biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modern physics
            has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so
            that to believe in the evidence of the senses is simply vulgar
            philistinism."10
            It's not that it hadn't occurred to Orwell that the
            notion of objective truth could easily be used to justify the
            actions of tyrants and oppressors. But Orwell's experience of
            Fascist and Communist falsification of history showed how the
            denial of the possibility of objectivity could also justify
            oppressive actions, perhaps in a more disarming way. For various
            historical reasons, Orwell's insight is easily lost today.
            His is one of those Enlightenment concepts of truth which have been
            compromised in usage. As the Enlightenment has come to be
            associated not with progress, democracy, and equality but with the
            ideological exploitation of those concepts in the interests of
            social control, a great moral and political transvaluation of the
            epistemological vocabulary has occurred. Enlightenment thinking is
            frequently associated with the bourgeois complacency or the
            menacing technology of Western democracies or is identified with
            the totalitarian regimentation of the Soviet Union. Thus the
            concepts of objective truth, nature, essence, identity, and
            teleology have come to be viewed as conservative or reactionary
            ideas, as if these ideas had never operated, and never could
            operate, in quite other ways.11
             
            10. George orwell, "The Prevention of Literature," The
            Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed.
            Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (London, 1968), 4: 63-64.
            11. As Frederic Jameson has noted, "it is certainly the case
            that a belief in the natural is ideological and that much of
            bourgeois art has worked to perpetuate such a belief…. Yet in
            different historical circumstances the idea of nature was once a
            subversive concept with a genuinely revolutionary function, and
            only the analysis of the concrete historical and cultural
            conjuncture can tell us whether, in the post-natural world of late
            capitalism, the categories of nature may not have acquired such a
            critical charge again" ("Conclusion," Aesthetics
            and Politics [London, 1977], p. 207).
