Introduction

“Antactic Structures”? What is that? What does it mean and why might anyone find it interesting? Many years ago, linguist Noam Chomsky wrote a highly influential book titled Syntactic Structures, and yes, my title was chosen by analogy with his. And since an antactic structure is the opposite of a syntactic structure let us first be clear on the meaning of the word “syntax.”

From Merriam Webster:

1: the way in which linguistic elements (such as words) are put together to form constituents (such as phrases or clauses)

2: a connected or orderly system : harmonious arrangement of parts or elements

While the word is most often associated with linguistic grammar, I’ll be using it here in the more general sense implied by the second definition, in line with its etymology, based on the Greek roots σύν (syn), "together," and τάξις (taxis), "structure.” More generally, any means of organization that operates by unifying its various elements into a coherent whole, greater than the sum of its parts, can be understood as fundamentally syntactic. Thus perspective space has often been considered a type of pictorial syntax and the generally accepted “common practice” system of tonal relationships a type of musical syntax.

Toward a Unified Theory of the Arts

Originally published in the journal Semiotica, in 1993 – reissued with additional commentary in Music Theory Online, 1996

          With the great successes of structuralism, semiotics and poststructuralism during the past three decades, the theory of the sign-function and the ideological issues associated with it threaten to dominate the entire realm of aesthetic discourse.  This paper presents the essential ingredients of a unified theory of the arts which, while reflecting the very real insights of structuralism and its offspring, seeks to move beyond them to a realm where the aesthetic can find a meaningful place.  The theory is 'unified' in the sense that it is intended ultimately to encompass:  1. any and all art forms; 2. the full historical and ethnological range of artistic expression, non-Western as well as Western, modernist and postmodernist as well as 'traditional'; 3. semiotic as well as aesthetic principles.

Passage from Realism to Cubism: The Subversion of Pictorial Semiosis

                                                                            

Originally published in Art Criticism, 1998

  

A. From the “natural” to the “semiological”

            The story of the struggle between art as “perception,” what could be described as some sort of direct, unmediated “visual experience” and art as “language,” a conventional system of signs intended to convey “meaning” via a fundamentally conceptual process, goes back a very long way.  The conflict came to a head in the late nineteenth century with the development and subsequent dissolution of a major Realist movement affecting all the arts.  In my view, the history of the birth of Cubism from the intensification/ collapse of this movement is of decisive importance.  This history, and its theory, has, of course, already been written (apparently by Clement Greenberg[1]), countersigned (by his critics as well as his followers), folded into a reductive “definition” of what modernism “was” all about, closed and placed on a dusty shelf.  We must reopen this “closed book,” re-examine and rewrite it.

Mondrian and the Dialectic of Essence

Originally published in the journal Art Criticism, 1999 

          The current ascendancy of the postmodernist viewpoint has led to interpretations of modernism which, to the present writer, are misguided and misleading.  Nowhere has the critical process been more unfortunately oversimplified than in the case of Piet Mondrian, one of the key figures of what can be called "classic" modernism.  The artist/theoretician who strove so intensely to overcome the limitations of late Romantic subjectivism has been painted as himself a Romantic idealist, a purist seeker after "essence" who turned his back on reality to pursue an esthetic of "significant form" as model for a super-Platonic, essentially totalitarian, Utopia.  This assessment is of course fully in line with the currently fashionable notion of modernism as an elitist fantasy of mastery and control.

The Cinematic Denial of Difference

from Montage Realism and the Act of Vision

A. Time and The Apparatus 

The mechanics of the motion picture camera subjects the temporal continuum of "reality'' to an "analysis'' not entirely unlike that performed on the phonetic continuum by a syntagmatic breakdown into phonemes. The characteristic division of the film strip into a series of similar but discontinuous "frames'' is, moreover, analogous to the purely spatial division into bits of grain of a photograph as analyzed by Eco.

Brakhage and the Theory of Montage

Based on a publication in the Millennium Film Journal, fall, 1998

          The essay which follows reflects the time in which it was written, a time when “modernism” was going out of fashion, when Andy Warhol was beginning to be taken seriously, not just as artist, but “philosopher,” and the “cinema of sight,” associated with the American independent filmmaker Stan Brakhage, had already given way to a “cinema of intellection,” the so-called “structural film,” which was itself on the verge of obliteration by our ruthless, trend-obsessed “postmodern” culture.  I attempted to counter the destructive effects of simplistic modernist and postmodernist dogma alike by demonstrating that things were not as straightforward as they might seem, that if Brakhage’s was, indeed, a “cinema of sight,” this meant that “seeing” itself had to be reconsidered on a very fundamental level indeed, a level that must take us far beyond the limitations of both Greenbergian modernism and a “postmodernism” which seemed (and still seems) lost in its own hall of mirrors.

The Cinematic Act of Vision

                                                                                              from Montage Realism and the Act of Vision


Event and Time

Of all the material covered thus far, the most fundamental statements regarding the nature of antactic structure are undoubtedly those of Mondrian, gathered together in the section of the essay "Mondrian and the Dialectic of Essence" (see above) entitled "A Dialectic of Form and Space." Mondrian's thought, as rigorous as his artistic practice, reduces his theory to two basic elements: form and space. In order to apply his analysis to film, we must find an appropriate equivalent in time for the notion of form.

A Field Theory of Musical Semiosis -- Part One

(From a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Semiotic Society of America.)

Music, which, according to Umberto Eco, is “purely syntactic,” with no “apparent semantic depth,” presents very special problems, both for a semiotics of music per se and a general semiotics capable of including musical “signification” within its scope.  One does not have to fully agree with Eco to see the difficulty.  Few today would contend that any music can be “pure,” totally free of cultural content, context and connotation.  Nevertheless, the failure of anything we might want to call “music,” in and of itself, without the assistance of verbal language,  to clearly and unequivocally represent (i.e., “denote”) some generally agreed upon referent or concept, has time and again posed what seems an insurmountable barrier to any theory of musical semiosis.  The apparent lack of a clearly defined musical signified which could be paired with a corresponding, clearly articulated, signifier, has created especially serious problems for those attempting to work from the model outlined by Saussure.  This difficulty, coupled with the tendency to associate his approach generally with what has been criticized as “the linguistic model,” has discouraged semioticians of music from pursuing Saussure’s line of thought.

A Field Theory of Musical Semiosis -- Part Two

(from Montage, Realism and the Act of Vision.)

The Tonal-Metric System and "Perspective Time"

We may begin by stating outright that the system of "classical" tonality with which we are all familiar, strongly centered on a particular "key," dependent on an intricate hierarchy of harmonic and metric relations within which all elements take their place and fuse, is an excellent example of positive svntax, having much in common with spatial perspective and the cinematic denial of difference. Just as film involves the coordination of two "fields," screenspace and time, music is based in two closely analogous "fields," pitch and rhythm. It should not be difficult to understand how "pitch-space," as traditionally controlled by a complex system of tonalities (keys), can be related to the effects of pictorial (and photographic) perspective. Indeed, musicians routinely apply spatial analogies to pitch, referring to notes that are "high" or "low," keys that are "near" or "distant," motives that occupy the "foreground" or "background."

Modernism/Postmodernism/Neomodernism

Originally published in the Downtown Review, Vol. 3 Nos. 1&2, Fall/ Winter/ Spring 1981/82

The Myth of Post‑Modernism

I will say at the outset that I am involved in what I call “neomodernism,” which may be defined as a return to the most fundamental tenets of "formal­ist" modernism. This may seem an odd occupation in an era when we are apparently escaping from the long hegemony of modernism. Why return to modernism on the very threshold of a new style period: post‑modernism? My answer is that there is something very suspicious about this "post­modernism."

Some Thoughts on Evolution and Consciousness

I've recently come across a very interesting book on Darwinian evolution, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, by James Le Fanu. He is out to "debunk" Darwin and the principle of natural selection, but where he differs from most such skeptics is in his awareness of some of the most recent research, especially in the areas of molecular science and cognition. A thorough consideration of LeFanu’s unusually sophisticated argument, including a vigorous defense of Darwinian evolution, can be found on my blog, Music 000001, beginning here.

Formless at the Pompidou

A Review-Essay, published in the online review Other Voices, 1992

“I give myself up to feverish dreams, but I do so in order to deduce new laws.  In delirium, I seek multiplicity, subtlety and the eye of reason, not rash prophecies.”

                                                                                    Antonin Artaud

            Formless:A User’s Guide is the catalog of an exhibition held at the Pompidou Center in Paris during the summer of 1996.  It is also much more, both a theoretical-historical monograph and a manifesto.  Curator-authors Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois wish to redefine the boundaries of modernism and put that redefinition to use in a shake-up of the art world that will “redeal modernism’s cards.”  

Ars Analogi Rationis

(Adapted from Victor Grauer, Montage, Realism and the Act of Vision)

The Analogue of Reason

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the original meaning of the word aesthetic is "of or pertainable to things perceptible by the senses, things material as opposed to things thinkable or immaterial; also 'perceptive, sharp in the senses.'" It was on the basis of this now practically obsolete definition that one Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1712-1762), a follower of Descartes, Leibnitz and Wolff, formulated the first philosophical theory in which the term aesthetic is associated with the arts.

A Theory of Pure Film

PREFACE 

Part I of this paper established a general conceptual framework for the much more detailed and specific theorizing which follows in Part II. Readers who are more interested in these specifics, or do not have access to Part I, may skip it and begin with Part II which contains a summary of I, and is complete in itself. Some readers may wonder why I have taken such pains over certain issues which might easily be passed over in a sentence or two. It is true that my plodding approach makes for difficult reading and my concern over certain problems may seem excessive. I can answer this objection in two ways: