D O C U M E N T - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

DOCUMENTO

ART, SOCIETY/TEXT
A FEW REMARKS ON THE CURRENT RELATIONS

OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN THE FIELDS OF

LITERARY PRODUCTION AND LITERARY IDEOLOGIES

ANONYMOUS (AUTHORIZED BY
THE EDITORS OF PROBLEMI-RAZPRAVE

En este momento, when a certain escalation of the ideological struggle in
the ﬁ eld of high culture has yet again brought the (idealist) “question
of literature” to a point, where the dividing lines between idealism
and materialism are being drawn, y donde, in the last instance,
what arises is a class struggle in this speciﬁ c sphere of the social
superstructure

— whereby the very idealist form of this question is such
that it already forecloses the ﬁ eld of possible answers, that is to say,
it is a momentary incidence of the function of general dominance that
the bourgeois class ideology today perpetuates in the ﬁ eld of high
“culture”—which is at the same time a sufﬁ cient warning to every
materialist intervention, that in this area, materialism is moving
in the opponent’s terrain; a terrain, dónde, at least for now, every con-
frontation, this one included, inevitably begins with the opponent’s
attack —

“Umetnost, družba/tekst,” Problemi-Razprave XIII, nos. 3–5 (March–May 1975): 1–10.
Translator’s note: The present text is stylistically rather difﬁ cult, perhaps in order to upset
the “normalization” of language, which the authors attack in Section I. Here I have attempted
to preserve the original style, particularly the authors’ preference for long sentences with
multiple subordinate clauses. I have only broken up the sentences or varied punctuation
marks when I felt that not doing so would introduce a new ambiguity. I have also followed the
authors’ use of bold type and their occasionally inconsistent capitalization of theoretical terms.
Sin embargo, to ease the ﬂ ow of argument, I have standardized their interchangeable use of double
and single quotation marks as double quotation marks.

102

doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00161

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Razprave are introducing a new section of the journal, dedicated

to dialectical-materialist theory of (mostly Slovene) literary production,
and more generally dedicated to the problem of production in “lan-
guage” (langage) (es decir., in spoken language: this includes the problems
of criticism, traducción, questions about “correct” and “incorrect”
idioma, as well as the more explicit ideological questions of “style”
and rhetoric),1 and also dedicated to the struggle against the up-to-now
dominant ideological conceptions in the field of “literary theory.” What
is in fact hidden behind the regressive question of literature is the prob-
lem of language and—through it—the problem of a signifying practice
and its effects—the social symbolic. The questions opened up by “liter-
ature” are therefore not solvable at the level where these questions are
directly posed.2

In this essay we will, perhaps in somewhat disorganized fashion,

draw attention to a few elementary points, which despite their “elemen-
tariness,” that is to say precisely because of it, belong to distinct concep-
tual planes.

Hoy, what we call “literature”—or indeed the whole domain of
“artistic” practices—occurs in the conditions of class struggle (if we
are to use this sufficiently concise formulation from a discussion that
appeared in Komunist). There is no universal-humanistic “human
essence,” no “human heritage,” which is not in its very kernel marked
with the split introduced by this struggle. Emphasizing universal
humanism in whatever version is always only a specific effect of a

One can easily see how deeply the bourgeois ideology has penetrated everyday speech
by looking at this sentence at the beginning of some newspaper editorial, in which the
author discusses the class struggle: “It is in man’s nature to protect his life and property.”
Aquí, some such commonplace rhetorically serves as prosthesis, while at the same time
one can clearly see the specific, class-based nature of this “generality” (hombre, naturaleza, vida,
propiedad): an ideological determination will intervene precisely in the most neutral and
innocent claim.

2 When these days people talk about critique, about how it is needed and how there is not

enough of it, we should draw attention to two things: every materialistic intervention
into this field must first deal with an understanding of the critical discourse as a meta-
idioma, es decir. as a discourse that claims to possess the “truth” (“sense”) of the discourse,
which it takes for its object. In relation to this much-discussed problem we merely want
to emphasize that within the ideological struggle, this position of meta-language is today
the main stronghold of bourgeois idealism. Sin embargo, the materialist theory must specify
the problem of the meta-language in the very field of literature, es decir. the way in which liter-
ature never wants to exclude this “meta” level from itself.

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103

concealed affirmation of a specific pole in the class struggle. Este
is where the analysis must go all the way: in the most “neutral” themes,
in impressionistic still life, in an innocent love poem, one must—
as its “absent,” “negative” determination—recognize a historically
specific class position; it ought to be noted that seemingly “neutral”
and “universal” themes are especially appropriate for such an
análisis, because here one may nicely show the “alienating effect,"
which disperses the innocent neutrality into a web of historical
concreteness.3

The question of humanist ideology is complex, since it is a rela-
tively autonomous systematization of that very relation, cual es, en el
form of the legal term “the natural person,” the structural condition for
the capitalist mode of production. What is especially important for our
estructura, sin embargo, is that the humanist ideology finds in literary pro-
duction the specific structuring of its work process, which it may then
use as its particular fetishism. The “factors” or elements of the labor
process in literary production are linked in a way that is the opposite of
the way in which they are linked in the dominant industrial production
of material goods: and the fact that literary production is determined by
the craftsman’s unity of labor power and the means of labor (in opposi-
tion to the mechanistic unity of technology, es decir. of the means of labor
and the object of labor, which is typical for the capitalist industry)—
this fact is the material basis for the ideological mystification, accord-
ing to which the literary or any artistic “act” counts as a model of non –
alienated labor (cf. Jameson’s analysis of Hemingway, in his Marxism
and Form). The fact that the entire ideological privilege of literature is
based on the societally nondominant structure of its specific labor pro-
impuesto, retroactively acts upon the textual process, which then the ideol-
ogy defines as literature (es decir. the specific historical structuring of the
textual process) exclusively per oppositionem (and perhaps per negatio-
nem) in relation to the dominant capitalist process of production. Este
means that the cultural-idealist mystification of literature depends on
the mystification of the radically excluded understanding of literature

A symptom of this is a recent review of Forte’s play about Tomaž Münzer, published in
Delo: in the name of a polemic against a vulgar-economic simplification, against a disre-
gard for psychological forces at play, etc., this review in fact argues against the very
“distancing effect,” against a demystification of the particular fetish of “Western art”—
es decir. “eternal internal problem,” “eternal themes of passion, love”; such fetishizing always
only understands the specific-historical determination of “eternal themes” merely as a set
of “external circumstances.”

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as production similar to the dominant production: it is only on the
basis of this opposition, which already recognizes the capitalist category
of production as the basis for the comparison, that it is possible to cul-
turally fetishize a text as literature and art. This fetishization, cual es
the active suppression of the textual negativization and its subversive
action within the bourgeois organization of the social symbolic, tiene
two main effects: it gives the bourgeois ideology of humanism a “mate-
rial base”—and at the same time it allows for the literary structuring
of the text only sub specie of the ideology, eso es, a structuring already
adapted to the interests of the ruling class.

This suppression, which always presupposes a Productivist under-

standing of literature, but can never enunciate it (first of all because
Productivism as an ideology never wants to deal with production as a
material social relation; and secondly because the—scientific—ques-
tion of literary production already broaches the materialist question of
negativization in the very production process), may of course never be
properly overcome by the so-called contemporary “avant-garde” literary
ideologies, which replace the old naturalist-“spontanist” vocabulary
with the technicist-cybernetic one: this is an internal matter for the
bourgeois ideology, completely relatable to the notions of the ideologues
of the McLuhan type, and which directly corresponds to that which this
same ideology calls the transition from the industrial to the postindus-
trial society (whereby the regressive ideal of literature remains typically
untouched; we would recommend that literary history analyzes the
Catalogue on the basis of these principles: its nonantagonistic syncre-
tism clearly shows the limits of the ideology involved—and at the same
time suppresses that which in fact happened within it; and which of
course happily escapes the history in question).

We therefore must firmly occupy the position that art reflects
(mirrors) its social content. Sin embargo, it is crucially important that
when following this formula we do not fall in with an empiricist and/or
idealist mechanicism, which is often attached to it—that is, our process
should remain worthy of the materialist dialectic. This means:

It is not the case that art is a sign “on the one side,” and that such
a sign reflects some social content, which would be on “the other side.”
On the contrary, art as a “sign” is internal to the social practice, or in
otras palabras, this very relation of being external, which is typical for
art in its relation to social practice (exteriority, which only allows art to
appear as “sign,” “appearance," etc.), is an internal exteriority, de modo que

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105

only through this exteriority is the “social content,” which is then
“reflected” in art, constituted.

The relationship of exteriority, in which we find art in relation
to the field of the Social, therefore does not suggest that we remain on
the level of mechanistic reflection, whereby for example literature “imi-
tates” “real” reality, which is outside literature and which literature in
vain attempts to capture; it does not suggest this because this exterior-
ity is an “internal exteriority”:

What the Social excludes, and through the exclusion of which the

Social is constituted, is not—as many would have us believe—some
sort of “pre-human chaos,” some undeterminable abyss of “nature”;
rather it is an already determined practice, a signifying practice, "el
actual basis” of that which Freud calls “the unconscious.”

From the point of view of the materialist theory we should under-
stand that the “emptying,” or the “disinvesting”—through which spo-
ken language manifests itself as an empty/neutral form, as a form
external to the content—is the very act through which this “content,"
es decir. the field of the Social, or the field of the social “reality,” is first
constituted.

The signifying practice “reflects” its “social content,” but so that it

is already at work in the very “social content,” as its “negative, absent
deter mination,” since the very field of “the social” is constituted
through the expulsion of its own level of the signifying practice. En
otras palabras: be cause there is a void in the midst of the Social, porque
the very “positivity” of the Social contains some “non- . . . ,” it has to be
defined “negatively.”

The exclusion of the signifying practice is the “existential condi-

tion” for the social—and precisely because of this, “art” reflects some-
thing different from and other to it, because art is itself the space for
representing the other within the same, because it is—as “one among”
the practices in the field of the social—the very practice, which in this
field represents its excluded other, the differentiating-rearranging, el
constituting (es decir. the oppositional, the same/other) negativization; es
understandable that this representational instance will contradict that
discourse, which establishes the unity of this field as a noncontradic-
tory generality, whereby this generality itself posits some already estab-
lished “illusory” completeness of the social against its constant and
pre-existing constitutive negativity—the negativity at work in this very
campo, but only in a tension between a dominant instance and other

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instancias, a negativity at work within a distance (even though this is
an “internal,” and therefore all the more radical, distancia) entre
the dominant and the determinant, that is to say, within overdetermi-
nation—that is to say, within the contradiction of the social itself.
The discourse, which supports generality, is nothing self-standing,
but is instead—except in the pretentious fullness of the ideological dis-
course—a marker inseparable from every discourse, a marker of the
fact that every discourse belongs to some totality, it is its politicality,
general shadow, in which every particular discourse obtains its specific
“weight” — — and so: 1. Politicality is present in “art” primarily as an
ideology, but is always also the “object” of specific treatment within an
“artistic process”; 2. “Art,” even though it cannot be reduced to a pure
ideological discourse, therefore depends on ideology, lives from it and
“within” it; 3. In opposition to its “illusory” belonging to the totality,
the specificity of literature, and its articulation through other practices-
instancias, is revealed within this totality as a textual subversion.

The signifying practice is what the field of the Social needs to
exclude, if it is to be constituted, and is allowed only within marginal,
governable fields, already marked with an ideological falsification: como
the field of the “sacred,” religion, “art,” “madness," etc., whereby every
actual determination of these marginal fields is always historically
determined: from the mythical opposition “sacred/profane” to the mod-
ern schism between the “logic of the heart” and “logic of the mind.”

It is not for nothing that already Freud compared religious rituals
with obsessive neurosis: permitted/counterfeit forms of the signifying
práctica, arte, religión, etc., are all literally the “return of the repressed”
social processes of production. They are the “return” of those processes
that need to be repressed, so that this field can be at all constituted.
In this way the signifying practice, for example a “work of art,"

“reflects” the social content, delivers the “truth” about the society
through the fact that it is not its bare “reflection,” but rather that it
“reflects” the social content in its own medium, which is the medium
of that which the society represses. The truth about society is not the
truth of the society itself, but rather the truth of that which the society
needs to “kill” if it is to exist.

En otras palabras: it is only in this “reflection” that society arrives at
its own truth. The “reflection” of the society in art is not a reflection of
truth, it is rather a reflection through which the reflected itself arrives
at its own truth.

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107

Por supuesto, none of this is to suggest that art is some kind of

unmediated/nonalienated “measure,” an exalted viewpoint, from which
we should judge society; on the contrary, artistic practice—as a form of
historical specification of the signifying practice, as an intra-social, por-
mitted re-presentative of the signifying practice, which has been sup-
pressed with the arrival of the Social—is the “medium” in which the
contradictions of the Social are most sharply “expressed,” including
that contradiction which constitutes the Social itself.

Here we have a specific dialectic of art: as Adorno already claimed,

it is both social and extra-social. If abstracted from the Social, arte
would fall into a “pre-phallic regression,” into fetishism, which would
be bare negation (Verneinung) of the Social; sin embargo, without the extra-
and presocial, art would no longer be art; it would change into a pure
sign, which would “sublate” the materiality of the signifying process
into empty ideological mist.

The basic assumption is an irreducible “dualism” of practices: el

social-productive practice and the signifying practice. This dualism had
several names throughout history, beginning with the split between
the “sacred” and the “profane.”

The relation of the artistic practice to the totality of social practices

is therefore not equal to the relationship of “part and the whole”; es
not the Hegelian relation of the whole, which is expressed/reflected in
each of its parts; one has to maintain a kind of exemption of the artistic
practice from the field of the “social” as a whole.

We could also put it this way: these marginal fields (the artistic
práctica, the religious practice, the erotic practice, etc.) each act within
their own historical-social determination as replacements for the
absent signifying practice, which had been repressed with the arrival
of the social. En otras palabras: the social-productive practice can never
encompass the whole, it remains in the field of the “finite,” its totality
is always “totality with a lack,” decentered, elliptical totality, dentro
which there is always a void, a void that always prevents it from filling
itself out into a “circle of circles,” a “set of sets,” etc. And this constant,
socially permitted form of the signifying practice (religión, arte, sexual-
ity—the organization of the field of the “infinite,” enjoyment, “the gen-
eral economy”) acts as a “plug,” which allows an imaginary “completion
del circulo,” which as such “holds together” the Totality and without
which that same totality would fall apart. It is in this way that we can
call art, religión, etc., an “imaginary supplement” to the “earthly mis-

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108

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ery,” a supplement to the structure of the social-productive process;
it is from this viewpoint that one should reinterpret Marx and Engels’s
oraciones, which address this problematic.

Precisely as a plug or a stopper does, literature acts as a reception
center for the kinds of ideological investments that are most concisely
described by the well-known demand that literature should be the mir-
ror of its time. As the kind of production in which the lost unity of the
craftsman artist is preserved—for just a little, little longer—literature
becomes that very hook, upon which the most intimate desires of every
bourgeois can be hung: in the civil society, literature performs that
same function as the state performs in the sphere of political represen-
tation—and thereby it enables the individual to recognize himself in
an imaginary way as a potato in the sack of the nation. In this way,
literature becomes the chosen means of class domination in the field
of the social symbolic.

It is quite clear that once the bourgeoisie loses its nation state it

will turn to literature to support its class struggle, and more generally
to “culture,” i.e. to “its own” organization of the social symbolic. El
aesthetic-elitist ideology, which complains about the overintellectual-
ized abstraction of philosophy, prefers to put literature in the place of
the most exalted (es decir. dominant) discourse (for this ideology, literature
performs the function of philosophy, es decir. the function of representing
the political in the field of theory); the ideology escalates its struggle
just when it loses its “social basis” (the regressive nationalist bourgeoi-
sie in power): because the “social basis” of some “fact” of the super-
structure is not a substratum, but a relation, an economic relation,
which is shown (represented) as the relation between the classes and
as the class struggle.

From what has been said here one might also want to illuminate
the issue of the so-called “crisis of language,” which in Slovenia we all
too often address in the naïve belief (which is actually merely an
automatism of a particular class ideology) that language is something
objetivo, general, and neutral—and that therefore we might “solve”
the “problems” of language with a direct, “conscious” action (this posi-
tion is not too far from the no less naïve and perhaps even more rigidly
ideological conviction of the avant-garde poet that with every little
poem he “invents” a language). The linguistic degeneration brought
about by the upwardly mobile petite bourgeoisie is in direct structural
relation with the linguistic purism of the “traditional” bourgeoisie. El

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109

ideologues of each side can relax or constrain the linguistic “norm”;
sin embargo, the Marxist analysis is only interested in what structures this
relation. Let us merely recall at this point that the crisis of the linguis-
tic norm—in this instance, we need to establish a kind of immediacy—
is merely the crisis of a class, which is existentially linked to this norm
as a linguistically-signifying normativity; and if this class was once
“established” with the establishment of the norm, the norm will now
collapse together with the demise of the class; and with the norm, y
this we should really emphasize, the sign itself, its ideologeme will
fall—and the Saussurean langue. Por lo tanto, the “crisis of language”
cannot be solved—quite the opposite: it is our present task to escalate
the crisis until the end, until the end of langue as a normalizing, nor-
mative language that follows the ideologeme of the sign. Until then,
sin embargo, we find the present situation important especially because it
shows ever more clearly the specific class nature of that which has been
up until now presented as the general, all-binding, and therefore the
neutral-totalizing “linguistic norm.” The Slovene bourgeois ideology,
even though it still dominates the sphere of the social symbolic, is no
longer capable of ensuring a fundamental unity of this sphere in its
“infrastructural” organization, in the organization of spoken language
as a normal, neutral means of communication between
individuals-persons.

It should be clear that we are not here concerned—in our under-

standing of the reflection of the duality of the signifying and the
social-productive practices—with any kind of “revision” of Marxism-
Leninism, nor with a revision of dialectical and historical materialism;
después de todo, not only do we accept all, even the most “radical,” positions/
pronouncements on the class-based nature of art, about art as a reflec-
tion of the social content, in addition we even demand that these posi-
tions be radicalized; we care to show—together with the dialectic
starting point—those conditions and assumptions that enable artistic
reflection in the first place, and through which it is possible to consti-
tute the distance between the reflected “content” and the “medium” of
reflection—the conditions that are necessarily overlooked in the direct,
fetishistic inclination to study merely the reflected “content.”4

Some will complain at this point that what is ultimately at stake here is an age-old, irra-
tional understanding of art as an effect of asocial/unconscious forces. In reply, we must
immediately emphasize that we are here only interested in a particular interpretation of

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Today it is possible to talk about “art”—without losing ourselves in
ideological mystifications—only if one starts out from a basic historical
breaking point that determines the entirety of our relationship to art,
the breaking point which can be noted in all of the artistic “disciplines”
at the end of the 19th century: in literature, that is the end of “realism”
in the most basic sense of an artwork’s direct-naïve “quasi-realism,” the
directo, naïve belief in language as a neutral medium for expressing the
“interior” or the reflection of an “objective reality”; in painting, the end
of imitating the “objective reality”; in music, the end of the classical
tonal structure; etc.. This breaking point may be quite clearly delineated
with names: in poetry the late Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Mallarmé (no
yet Baudelaire); in prose fiction we find the border (one of the borders)
within Joyce’s oeuvre itself, from Ulysses onward (not yet Dubliners nor
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); in painting Cézanne (not yet the
Impressionists); in music Schönberg (not yet Debussy). This breaking
point is a “commonly known” fact, and yet here the question of how
to theorize this “fact” remains open, as does the question of its scope.
Here we will not attempt to develop the thesis, already well-developed
within “structuralism” and “poststructuralism,” about the parallel be –
tween this breaking point and the breaking points of Marx/Nietzsche/
Freud, but one should note that even as of this day, this dividing line
has not been completely thought through, and that its scope is still
reprimido. Hoy, these breaks may seem like mere beginnings, largo
since “overcome” and “radicalized” (what does a Schönberg amount
to—of course, when it comes to being “radical”—in comparison to
contemporary electronic music; what does a Mallarmé amount to in

psychoanalytic theory, within which we see the only properly preserved dimension of the
psychoanalytic discovery, half-obscured even to Freud himself: eso es, in the direction of
Lacan, which understands the Unconscious as a specific signifying practice, y cual
sharply contrasts with the Jungian obscurantist revisionism. Here one may of course
open the question of how Freud has been understood in Slovenia. The polemic between
V. Zupan and T. Svetina is useful as an indicator of the level of this understanding: en
the one side, we have cultured-and-complacent, pseudo-“objective” “refutations,” consis-
tently blind to the central point of Freud’s discovery; on the other side, an entirely
obscurantist, “Jungian” version of “deep archetypal forces," etc., ideologically bound to
Lebensphilosophie.
Al mismo tiempo, some “radical” psychiatrists—with their symptomatically persistent
denial of links to “anti-psychiatry”—try to sell us the “crisis” of psychoanalysis as their
latest discovery, and demand a redirection toward a “socially” directed analytical revision
of “neo-psychoanalysis” (Rapport, Horney, Fromm, sullivan), the concealed ideological
conformism of which has already been revealed by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization.

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comparison to postwar Dadaism?5), but all these “radicalizations” and
“continuations” are after all mere practical revisionisms, mere specious
“developments,” which mostly only obfuscate the fundamental point
of the cut: eso es, a break with the fundamental characteristic of
“Western art,” that is to say with art itself in its concrete-historical
determination, a break with the suppression of its own productive pro-
impuesto; a break, which at the level of the signifying practice is made by
this fundamental artistic cut at the end of the 19th century, which at
the level of the analysis of the social-productive process is made by
Marx, which at the level of the analysis of the “production” of ethical-
ideological categories is made by Nietzsche, and which at the level of
“production” of the unconscious is made by Freud.

“Such is the fright that seizes man when he discovers the true face

of his power that he turns away from it in the very act—which is his
act—of laying it bare” (Lacan). Everywhere—in “theory” as much as in
“practice”—we witness the effects of a retroactive awareness, el efecto
of having overlooked the scope of one’s own act, of having overlooked
this historical cut, and this very oversight is what allows the afore-
mentioned revisionisms. It is only the field of “structuralism” and
“poststructuralism,” more precisely (if we are to let go of these ideo-
logical nicknames) the field of materialist theory of the signifying
práctica, that is the field of this later awareness, a repetition/return of
the historical cut; that is indeed the purpose of the whole conceptual
apparatus, which concerns the de-centering of production in relation to
re-presentation, “the process of enunciation” in relation to the “process
of the enunciated,” the signifier in relation to the signified, geno-text
in relation to the pheno-text; in relation to meaning as the later effect
of “autonomous” signifying operations, in relation to textual practice
as non-sense, which first produces sense, etc.. etc..

These days, after the break, it is simply no longer possible to write
(to write in the strict sense of the word, which this word acquires in the

In the “visual arts” we can also notice a deviation, that is a “radicalization,” that is a revi-
sion of the break: Cézanne is “radicalized” by Cubism; then Dada between the wars and
partly after the war, this anticipation of the cultural revolution (which is necessarily dou-
ble since it includes within itself not only the elements of the break but also elements of
bourgeois liberalism, anarchism, etc.; in short, we must understand Dada as a coalition of
“free thinkers,” within which we see both the realization of the break—e.g. in the works
of Schwitters, Ernst, Picabia, Tzara—and the revision of the break—e.g. in the works of
Arp, Chirico, and most of Dada after the war) is “radicalized” first by its “continuation”
after the war, and then is finally deviated from by Surrealism and the Bauhaus.

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theory of the signifying practice), without knowing the basic laws of
the materialist dialectic—this is the end of the myth of the “naïve,"
“pure” poetic “creativity,” “unsullied” by reflection. Consider any name
which means anything within the avant-garde: Mallarmé, Schönberg,
Libra, Brecht . . .—a “reflection” upon the practice is an irreducible
component of each of their practices (internal to the practice, not exter-
nal to it), a reflection, cual apunta, even if still in a “wild,” mystified
forma, to break up the fetish of the “work of art,” within which the pro-
cess of its production is obfuscated.6

The dilettantism of Slovene literature, which especially comes to
the fore in various modernisms and “avant-gardes,” should therefore be
understood—today more so than any time before—to have an entirely
class-based meaning.

To consider a real “archetype” of the misunderstanding of what
the breaking point means, we may turn to the book The Structure of
Modern Poetry by H. Friedrich, also translated into Slovene—where
the author says: “I admit that in the new edition I would much rather
avoid the word ‘structure,’ because since the time when the first edition
of this book came out, this fashionable word has spread through all
kinds of academic disciplines” (foreword to the 9th edition). The “fash-
ion” mentioned here probably refers to “structuralism”—but let us con-
sider what this word means for the author himself: “‘Structure’ here
means the common form of a group of several poems, which could not
have influenced each other, but the particularities of which neverthe-
less do match and can be explained by reference to one another, y
which certainly occur often enough and in the same order so that
they may not be treated as mere coincidences.” Here, entonces, estructura
is taken to be a mere abstract generality of an “ideal type,” indifferent
to real historical concreteness, and indifferent to its “particular” forms,
something that, por supuesto, is in its very formal-methodological aspect

In response to those naïve scientistic ideologues who believe that here we are merely talk-
ing about a “scientification” of art itself, let us merely note that the necessary other side of
this process is the “artification” of science itself; the process which—as the “crisis of
critique”—has already been described by Roland Barthes, in sufficiently popularizing
terms. Sin embargo, this double relationship implies no symmetry: if science today takes
over certain “functions” of art; si, for example in Slovenia, the so-called history of lan-
guage occurs, to the extent that it does, mostly in the field of theory, and only here and
allá, in a completely secondary way, also in the literary practice (and even then mostly
in translation, which has really become something of a tradition by now)—then the so-
called scientification of poetry is merely an ideological counterattack, which ought to
prevent, stop, and dismiss this entirely subversive rhythm of the historical matter.

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far away from the “structuralist” notion of a structure as a differential
set—indeed, it would be better for the author to avoid this word, desde
now we should worry that the author will be taken for a structuralist, en
least here in Slovenia, if the current “understandings” of structuralism
here are anything to go by!

It would be almost unnecessary to add that such an abstract-
general use of the notion of “structure” always necessarily ends up in
an ahistorical approach to the question, in a methodological under-
standing of “structure” as opposed to “history,” which the author him-
self often emphasizes. Therefore we also should not be surprised, cuando
in the name of this emphasis on “structure” some of the fundamental
writers of the break are excluded: “The notion of a structure renders
quite redundant any attempt to gather a historically complete set of
materiales, especially when the materials in question merely offer us
variations of the basic structure. This is for example the case with
Lautréamont, who appears to be quite popular today, even though he
is merely a weaker version of Rimbaud. . . ."

It is quite a comical sight, observing how Friedrich classifies
“modern poetry” by means of merely repeating those markers which
are recognized as typical of it by that very “ideological consciousness”
that “modern poetry” tried to evade: Hermeticism, caos, flight toward
the unreal, magic/suggestive power of words that is independent of
their everyday/literal meaning, etc.; how Friedrich still “measures”
avant-garde poetry by the measure of the “classical”—it is for that rea-
son that most of his fundamental classifications are negative. En esto
abstract-empirical enumeration of “features,” one easily loses sight of
Friedrich’s occasionally quite incisive views on the difference between
the classical and modern poetic use of metaphors, on the fundamental
dissonance of modern poetry, etc..

Here we can see quite clearly how methodological idealism (aquí

by using the notion of a “structure”) and empiricism support one
otro: because Friedrich lacks every theoretical notion of the break-
ing point of the “avant-garde,” he lists its “features”: and this may
include both the real characteristics of the break and those characteris-
tics that already belong to its ideological mystification, y especialmente
to a certain spiritualist obscurantism.