Caro Signor Olivieri,
per l'ultima lezione prima delle vacanze di Pasqua, sarei venuto da lei martedì di primo pomeriggio. Prima di lasciarmi andare, mi avrebbe dato da portare a casa i suoi auguri e un vassoio di tortellini. Non glieli ho mai visti fare. Diceva che doveva essere solo in casa, ma io me lo immagino come facesse la spesa di tutto il giorno prima, per cominciare al mattino di buon’ora. Rosolava la lombata di maiale ben sgrassata, la lasciava un po’ raffreddare, la tagliava a pezzetti, vi aggiungeva la mortadella bolognese e il crudo di Parma a cubetti. Al lento girare della manovella, il tritacarne estrudeva una polpa rosata che continuava a lavorare con i rebbi della forchetta, aggiungendovi due uova per legare, parmigiano grattato, un pizzico di sale e pepe, e un’idea di noce moscata.
Nel vulcano di farina 00 e dal magma di non so quante uova, forma l’impasto, bello e liscio come un uovo. Dopopranzo, mentre l’impasto ancora riposa, stende due tovaglie doppie sul tavolo del salotto e vi installa l'Imperia, come quella che usava mia nonna per farci i crostoli di Carnevale. Taglia una fetta di impasto, la schiaccia sulla tovaglia infarinata, la passa tra i rulli della macchina, la piega, stringe i rulli, la ripassa, la ripiega, un altro scatto del pomello ... Quando la sfoglia è sottile sottile, l’adagia sulla tovaglia senza strapparla né sgualcirla, la percorre in lungo e in largo con la rotella, precisa e veloce come un treno diretto, e in quel graticolato depone del ripieno appallottolato delicatamente tra il pollice e l'indice. Poi stacca un quadratino di sfoglia, lo ripiega in diagonale intorno alla pallina, sigilla i cateti, risvolta il vertice, gira la base attorno all’unghia del mignolo e lo chiude ad anello. Fatto, dispone sul canovaccio il tortellino pronto! Ma senza frapporvi un pensiero, già stacca un altro quadratino e taglia un’altra fetta di pasta e continua così fino all’ora di cena. Deliziosi che erano i suoi tortellini nel brodo di cappone, stento a capire perché mettesse tanto lavoro in così poco.
I
Per difetto di voglia e talento, avevo smesso di studiare il clarinetto da prima dell'estate, quando una sera di novembre mia madre mi da la cattiva appena rientrata a casa: "ho incontrato la Signora Olivieri dal dottore … un ictus improvviso… la notte si era perfino alzato ed era tornato a letto … al mattino credeva stesse ancora dormendo … ha chiamato l'ambulanza ma ormai era in coma e non c’era più niente da fare.” In seguito appresi da un amico medico che l’incidenza di ictus sarebbe più alta tra gli strumentisti dei fiati.
Lei mi aveva sempre sconsigliato di fare la sua professione per le lunghe e tarde ore di lavoro, sempre in viaggio lontano da casa con paga bassa e incerta. Tuttavia, aggiungeva che sapere la musica mi avrebbe dato qualche vantaggio e per dimostrarlo, mi raccontò, in una delle sue infinite divagazioni, di quando i tedeschi la misero in un campo di lavoro coatto. “Volevano mettere su un’orchestrina e ci chiesero chi sapeva suonare uno strumento, così mi feci avanti. Anche lì ci trattavano meglio degli altri e dopo che sarò morto, se in cielo ci fosse un’orchestra …” Ma della guerra lei non parlava, come fa chi l'ha conosciuta, e ora non mi restano che questi pochi e vaghi frammenti.
Alcuni giorni dopo il funerale, la sua vedova mi invitò a farle visita. Andai a casa sua di primo pomeriggio, come d'abitudine. Passammo un'oretta seduti in cucina senza dirci molto e prima di salutarci, andò a prendere un sacchetto di plastica che mi aveva preparato: scatole di ance usate, vecchi metodi per clarinetto e la cartellina gialla che conoscevo. Un pomeriggio già estivo ero arrivato a casa sua in ritardo per la lezione e così trafelato da non avere il coraggio di entrare. Appoggiai la bici alla ringhiera e mentre mi asciugavo, rimasi ad ascoltare le battute lente e pesanti di macchina da scrivere che fuoriuscivano dalla finestra socchiusa del suo salotto. Si interruppero appena suonai il campanello e mentre preparavo il clarinetto e gli studi per la lezione, lei si affrettò a mettere via una Studio 45 e sgomberare i fogli dal tavolo. Li ripose con cura nella cartellina gialla che accettai quel giorno dalla sua vedova e quell'atto stesso divenne la promessa di pubblicarne il contenuto.
Ci aveva lavorato per anni senza mai buttar via niente, come a quei passi difficili che ancora teneva in esercizio o a un bocchino che fischia. "Se lasci il clarinetto, il clarinetto lascia te", mi ammoniva quando non avevo studiato la lezione. Al contrario di me, non abbandonò mai il clarinetto fino all’ultimo, né smise mai di scrivere per quanto arduo le venisse e il testo sia rimasto riottoso fino alla fine. Prima di pensare alla pubblicazione dei suoi scritti, sapevo che avrei dovuto rivedere il testo, correggere, riorganizzare, eliminare, ridurre, combinare, magari riscriverlo. Rinviai a lungo il compito tedioso, per l’adolescenza, la maturità incombente o la colpa di aver mollato. Quando finalmente mi decisi ad iniziare, mi sembrò inutile proseguire oltre la prima lettura, incapace di dare senso al testo o trovare il punto delle sue 'chiacchierate'. Rimasi talmente deluso che ammucchiai i fogli scompaginati e li misi nella cartellina senza badare all'ordine nel quale li aveva lasciati. Ce li ho tenuti trent’anni giusti in quella cartellina, chiusa in un armadio, indisturbata dal fallimento, dalla promessa mancata e a torto.
II
E se avessi invece perseverato nella revisione fino a produrne una traduzione? Mi immagino le sue pagine dissolversi lievi e per gradi: l’odore e la tattilità della carta un po’ ruvida e ingiallita, le dimensioni eccentriche dei fogli, le spaziature irregolari, le righe sbilenche, il nero e rosso dell’inchiostro impallidirsi all’andare del nastro, le correzioni pigiate tra le righe, a biro blu e bianchetto le sue, rispettosamente a matita le mie, i rozzi diagrammi incollati o appuntati alla pagina. Forse sono sensibile a questi dettagli perché appartengo ad una generazione ancora anfibia tra carta e schermo, nostalgica della materia della pagina e del gesto della scrittura, come di feticci e riti animisti. Oppure perché vi è davvero una sensazione speciale che, se non viene distillata via come di solito accade, scorre al di sotto del testo e arriva ad inflettere il pensiero?
I suoi scritti quasi autobiografici sarebbero potuti diventare un documento, sepolto negli intestini di un archivio, o più verosimilmente un ingombro, che si aspetta ancora un poco prima di gettare. Invece l’amicizia che ci unisce ora più di prima, ha serbato la sua cartellina rendendola memoriale, e per quella promessa lontana, l'ha resa pubblica, l'ha resa monumento. Tuttavia, come un memoriale non è memoria bensì fabulazione, così il monumento non è determinato da grandezza, significato storico o valore letterario. Si tratta piuttosto di una condizione necessaria ad una ricerca artistica, che cattura gli aspetti affettivi e percettivi della ricerca altrimenti dissipati, ne esprime il macchinico inconscio e ritiene per il futuro quanto vi sia di virtuale nella pratica e non attualizzato nell’opera.
Non so tracciare una distinzione precisa, ma le qualità materiali dei suoi scritti non hanno per me nulla di sentimentale o feticista ma esprimono nella scrittura la stessa modalità di ricerca sul clarinetto che l’aveva condotta alla scrittura. Sottratto finalmente ogni imbarazzo linguistico e letterario, le sue pagine si sostantivano e le sue parole raggiungono il grado zero della scrittura, capace di narrare senza raccontare, di esprimere pratica e vita senza tradirle. In retrospettiva, considero oggi il mio fallimento di trent'anni fa come il dono ultimo della nostra amicizia. L’incontro con i suoi scritti sembrò interrompere schemi di interpretazione e valutazione ormai sedimentati, e mi confrontò, quasi per la prima volta, con il problema dell'intraducibilità, che della monumentalità è il segno. Questo rimarrà il germe cristallino della mia pratica di fotografia e ricerca artistica.
III
Ammettendo che la "monumentalità" caratterizzi i suoi scritti e forse la ricerca artistica in generale, non dovrebbero anche contribuire alla conoscenza, appunto in quanto ricerca? L’Introduzione al Trattato sembra muoversi in questa direzione, per esempio dove afferma che il sapere necessario alla messa a punto del bocchino per clarinetto sarebbe apprendibile. Infatti, respinge la tesi del suo insegnante che lo chiamava 'un mistero’, vuoi perché lo ritenesse un sapere esoterico oltre lo scopo della ricerca empirica, vuoi un segreto professionale, che non spetterebbe al conservatorio divulgare. Per lei invece si trattava innanzitutto di sapere pratico, incominciato da ragazzino, quando ancora suonava nella banda di Vignola, e di sapere tecnico, appreso sui metodi per clarinetto ed elaborato attraverso le sue 'prove' ed 'esperimenti'.
Riferendo che in Francia la messa a punto del bocchino per clarinetto sarebbe stata una vera specializzazione, inventa il francesismo 'pianoista' per chiamare 'l'artista del piano del bocchino'. Secondo un uso ormai desueto, ‘artista' starebbe solo ad indicare l’eccezionalità della perizia, perché altrove quasi contrappone il sapere pratico-tecnico a quello artistico. Andrebbe infatti a discapito del proprio perfezionamento artistico, se un clarinettista lo perseguisse fine a se stesso e a riprova, racconta di aver incontrato un eccellente pianoista che però sarebbe stato solo un clarinettista mediocre. Si tratterebbe insomma di un sapere che emerge dalla pratica artistica e professionale (un’altra distinzione che sembra fare), ma alla quale rimane subordinato e strumentale, riflettendo una tacita e diffusa gerarchia di valori. D'altra parte, il lavoro di sperimentazione e la stabilizzazione tecnica del sapere nel Trattato, sarebbero per lei il naturale completamento della pratica. Rilevando la lacuna nei programmi dei conservatori musicali e nella letteratura a disposizione, mette in evidenza l'utilità di conoscere la messa a punto del bocchino. Con il Trattato intende mettere a disposizione dei giovani clarinettisti il sapere acquisito negli oltre quarant’anni di professione, dove esperienza e sapere, ricerca e vita si sono confusi.
Scherzando senza vergogna sui suoi ottant’anni, ogni tanto parlava in terza persona di 'questo vecchio'. Invece, voglio servirmene qui, per riferirmi ad alcuni aspetti del suo sapere di pianoista. In primo luogo, si tratta di un sapere vecchio perché obsoleto già quando iniziava a scrivere il Trattato. Sarà stato il Settantotto, quando mia madre mi portò a comprare il mio primo (e unico) clarinetto. Come a tutti gli insegnati raccomanda di fare, ci accompagnò da Ricordi, che allora aveva un importante negozio di musica a Padova, dove c’è adesso la nuova boutique Prada. Un commesso al secondo piano le portò lo strumento che aveva già provato e e si era fatto mettere da parte, tirò fuori un bocchino dalla tasca della giacca e ci fece sentire delle scale e qualche brano. Mia madre staccò un assegno e ce ne tornammo a casa con un bel clarinetto in Si bemolle della Yamaha. In seguito, volle provare di nuovo il clarinetto con il bocchino di plastica in dotazione e dopo svariati esami, si disse sorpreso della qualità del materiale, della buona fattura e del suono ‘dolce e pronto’. Come avrebbe trovato le ance sintetiche che prefigurava nel Trattato, o il clarinetto in composito della ‘sua’ Buffet Crampon, o magari quello Yamaha in plastica? Con una qualità e scelta di strumenti più ampia proprio nella fascia intermedia, si rende anche meno necessario intervenire sul bocchino. Al tempo stesso, il sapere del pianoista sembra più diffuso che mai, grazie a video didattico-pubblicitari disponibili in rete e comunità virtuali di professionisti e appassionati, mentre servizi commerciali internazionali offrono riparazione e messa a punto di bocchini e tutto un raffinato e specializzato strumentario è direttamente acquistabile in linea.
Il sapere del pianoista è marginale sia per la limitata applicabilità, sia perché prodotto al di fuori dei circuiti della conoscenza e della pratica professionale. Già ignorato quando studiava al conservatorio, quel sapere è diventato sempre più alieno ai programmi di insegnamento al succedersi di ogni riforma e il Trattato presenta a sufficienza il disinteresse e la diffidenza incontrate in professione. Invece, proprio quando il suo sapere raggiunge il massimo approfondimento per l’anzianità professionale e la pensione potrebbe offrirle l’opportunità e la prospettiva necessarie alla sua ricerca, il suo lavoro viene escluso dall’ambiente in cui quel sapere può sussistere e la sua ricerca trovare applicazione.
Si tratta in fondo di un sapere tradizionale, lento e continuo ad accrescersi e trasmettersi anziché rapido e spezzettato, personale e situato anziché simbolico e astratto, sapienziale e locale anziché specifico e globale. Entrambi abbiamo creduto nella conversione di pratica in testo, ammaliati dalla stessa immagine di pensiero. Ormai che articoli e interviste sulle riviste specializzate hanno spogliato il pianoista di ogni alchimia, non rimane più mistero in quella pratica o segreto in quel sapere. Tuttavia tra la conoscenza di quei testi e la pratica del pianoista si frappongono le stesse interminabili ore di tentativi e svariati fallimenti, con la differenza che il compito prima avvolto nel mistero, ora appare molto complicato. Fosse stato chiaro e articolato, corredato non solo da disegni ma da video minuziosi, il Trattato avrebbe lasciato intatto il timore di mettere mano ad un clarinetto vero e poi sarebbe svanito come una traccia lieve: dove la conoscenza rappresenta la pratica e vi sostituisce, il sapere tradizionale ne guida l’apprendimento.
Forse abbiamo bisogno di un’altra immagine di pensiero da sostituire a quella che ci ha servito così male, di liberarci della catena di implicazioni pratica-sapere-conoscenza e del sensale fra pratica (materiali, azioni, relazioni, percezioni, affetti ...) e conoscenza (testo). Il Trattato doveva solo comunicare quello che già sapeva e il suo fallimento starebbe solo nella difficoltà di ‘dire il tutto’, nelle limitazioni del mezzo e delle capacità personali, perché ‘scrivere non è il mio mestiere’. Ma il buon senso dell’ipotesi copre a mala pena il trucco del sapere tacito: per la conoscenza il limite da cui purgarsi, e per il mistero buffo in cui nascondersi. Piuttosto ammetteremo che il sapere tacito non si distingue dalla pratica, che si implicano a vicenda o anzi, sono la stessa cosa. Si potrebbe pensare al loro rapporto come a quello tra la figura in una fotografia e il suo sfondo: a volte la figura sembra non avere sfondo (conoscenza), altre volte vi si confonde (sapere), ma è comunque l’immagine nel suo complesso a determinare entrambi, non la figura. Ecco la nuova immagine di pensiero. D’altra parte se ogni pratica implica sapere e non tutto il sapere può ridursi a conoscenza, è vero altresì che non tutte le pratiche hanno per scopo la differenziazione del sapere e solo quest’ultime si dovrebbero chiamare pratiche epistemiche.
IV
Ormai penserà che la vado tirando per le lunghe solo perché non saprei dire come il Trattato contribuisca alla conoscenza. Per questo avrei spostato il problema sempre più lontano, dalla conoscenza al sapere, sostenendo che i suoi scritti non sarebbero riducibili a testo (intraducibilità) ma esprimerebbero la sua pratica di pianoista in una modalità affettiva (monumentalità), poi dal sapere alla pratica epistemica, sulla base della relazione dinamica tra sapere e pratica che ho chiamato stagliatura. Adesso però non ho più scampo e devo giustificare la sua pratica di pianoista come pratica epistemica e mostrarne il valore per altre pratiche artistiche ed epistemiche.
Più che interpretare il Trattato, si devono rintracciarvi gli atti ed eventi della sua pratica epistemica. La stessa scelta di intraprendere il Trattato dopo la cessazione dell’attivià professionale che rischia di svalutarlo a progetto di pensionato, indica al tempo stesso il mutamento di prospettiva verso la sua pratica di pianoista e la precisa intenzione di approfondirla e supplementarla: riflette sulle ragioni di questa pratica, organizza ed integra conoscenze acquisite con esperienze fatte e soprattutto, intraprende e sviluppa seriamente una nuova pratica di scrittura. Fin dall’inizio dichiara il punto fisso della sua pratica epistemica, preoccupandosi del contesto educativo e professionale in cui si la potrebbe inserire e dei suoi diretti sbocchi applicativi nella professione. Purtroppo, è uno scenario tutto ipotetico per una pratica rimasta privata e un’opera mai finita, tra la speranza riconoscimento e consapevolezza di falliento
Due principi complementari informano la sua metodologia. La ‘ricerca del difetto’ (fischio, intonazione, volume) è un principio euristico nella diagnostica del bocchino che procede dall'identificazione dei sintomi attraverso l'esecuzione di apposite composizioni musicali, alla formulazione dell'ipotesi diagnostica, basata sull'eliminazione di fattori estranei e sull’analogia di casi precedenti. Una volta isolato il difetto, interviene clinicamente graduali, controllandone frequentemente il progresso con le piastre d’acciaio e i brani di controllo. I pianoisti di oggi si affidano ormai a strumenti di misura e tabelle di riferimento, mentre a lei bastavano due piastre di acciaio levigato sia come piano di lavoro che come livella. La mancanza di rilievi e protocolli della messa a punto, impedisce ora di analizzare i suoi interventi quanto a lei impedì di documentarli e comunicarli nel Trattato, minandone la validità come manuale. Ricorda la situazione della medicina prima che diventasse scienza.
La 'ricerca del meglio' è un principio normativo degli interventi sulla qualità complessiva del suono del bocchino e più specificamente caratterizza la sua pratica epistemica come artistica. Il meglio è determinato a orecchio sulla base di un modello di suono idealtipico che seguendo il Klosé, qualifica come ‘dolce, chiaro, pastoso e molle’. La vaghezza della sua descrizione è direttamente proporzionale alla complessità cognitiva del procedimento dalla mimesi dell’immagine uditiva, all’analisi timbrica del bocchino alla progettazione degli interventi da eseguire. È un peccato che il Trattato non contribuisca a questi temi attualissimi della ricerca musicale, dal momento che non specifica ulteriori parametri di analisi e diagnosi, né descrive in alcun dettaglio come proceda nel lavoro.
In generale, la documentazione della sua pratica consiste interamente nel racconto di alcuni episodi esemplificativi e nella descrizione dei suoi semplici strumenti di lavoro le piastre d’acciaio e l’asticella in legno per levigare la camera del bocchino con carta abrasiva. Sono certo che avrebbe fatto un uso più esteso di disegni se la sua abilità di disegnatore e il successivo coinvolgimento di suo nipote fossero stati pari al compito. Anche così tuttavia, il rapporto tra testo e disegno, l'attenzione alla materialità e manualità del pianoista, l'intento dichiaratamente pedagogico e divulgativo del Trattato, lo inseriscono nella tradizione della manualistica popolare a cavallo tra la prima industrializzazione italiana di fine Ottocento e la seconda degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta. Questa letteratura minore di cui si è sempre interessato, testimonia il vasto interesse popolare per un sapere tecnico-scientifico facilmente accessibile e applicabile, e la sua subordinazione culturale. È in questa chiave storica che interpreto il generale disinteresse che ha riscontrato in Italia per la sua pratica e soprattutto il valore politico del Trattato.
A differenza degli studi per clarinetto che servono ad esercitare difficoltà esecutive o interpretative generali, gli Studi di ricerca che completano il Trattato sono funzionali alla specifica messa a punto del bocchino, evidenziando i difetti, ma soprattutto fornendo un riferimento per il tono, volume e timbro del suono nei vari registri del clarinetto. In particolare, poiché il timbro dipende non solo dall'interazione complessa tra clarinettista, bocchino e clarinetto ma anche dall’interpretazione musicale, gli Studi forniscono stabili condizioni sperimentali e per converso, istanziano il modello di ‘suono classico’, al quale la messa a punto del bocchino deve tendere, e rafforzano l’interiorizzazione della norma. Il rapporto integrale tra il Trattato e gli Studi, e la circolarità tra esecuzione musicale e messa a punto del bocchino sono costitutivi della sua pratica epistemica artistica.
A questa dimensione creativa, aggiungerei però anche quella costruttiva verso altre pratiche epistemiche e artistiche. Benché inattuato, è chiaro che l’asse orizzontale esprime la direzione della sua pratica e ne giustifica i contenuti. In primo luogo, i suoi scritti privilegiano accessibilità e diffusione del sapere sopra novità e concentrazione. Quando afferma di 'non scoprire nulla di nuovo' e che ‘tutti possono studiare e riflettere’, allinea idealmente la sua pratica epistemica personale con la didattica, di cui sono stato parziale testimone. In secondo luogo, stabilisce un rapporto asimmetrico tra la pratica epistemica e la conoscenza che ne può derivare. Lo scopo non è tanto quello di limitare la trasferibilità di quella conoscenza, un’illusione che non aveva per lei alcuna lusinga, quanto sostenere la necessità di ri-produrre quel sapere entro la pratica epistemica e artistica di ciascuno: prova! In questo modo non affida la realizzazione di questo imperativo pratico a procedure tecniche specifiche, bensì alla coltivazione individuale di virtù epistemiche, quali la curiosità, l’apertura mentale, la perseveranza nel ricercare soluzioni, l’accuratezza di esecuzione, la disciplina nei controlli, la pazienza verso gli insuccessi. Sono queste virtù, più delle metodologie e conoscenze costituite, che formano comunità epistemiche stabili e culture epistemiche diffuse. È questo, a mio avviso, il vero lascito dei suoi scritti alla ricerca artistica.
V
Ma chissà cosa direbbe, vedendo il suo Trattato pubblicato a questo modo? E di queste righe che le scrivo? Magari non ci avrebbe badato e anzi le avrebbe fatto piacere. Tuttavia, non posso nasconderle un certo imbarazzo per averla coinvolta questo discorso, perché non credo che la ricerca artistica l’avrebbe interessata. La nostra infinita diseguaglianza sembra rendere ancora più grave questo abuso dei suoi scritti e l'arroganza dell’ultima parola, ma ci terrei che il piccolo mio ruolo di curatore, editore, interprete e avvocato dei suoi scritti non venisse valutato nell'ambito dell’informatica umanistica, bensì proprio della ricerca artistica.
C’è innanzitutto un motivo micro-politico nella nostra non-collaborazione in questo progetto, resa possibile dalla nostra amicizia, ma mediata dalla mia memoria e divisa in tempi e pratiche diverse. Proprio l'estraneità della mia pratica di ricercatore alla sua di pianoista, apre la possibilità di effettuare un'operazione di ricerca artistica, che cattura la sua pratica storica per strapparvi un’inattualità critica. Questo mi porta al motivo politico di presentare questa edizione come ricerca artistica, cioè riconoscere e valorizzare un atto di violenza simbolica, anziché dissimularlo. Nel momento in cui la ricerca artistica registra un certo grado di istituzionalizzazione, diventa più urgente distinguere tra pratiche epistemiche artistiche da una parte, e la ricerca artistica intesa come dispositivo dall’altra. Lo scopo non è quello di inscenare una critica istituzionale, ma di sfruttare la reciprocità della cattura per espandere il confine della ricerca artistica: l’arte nella ricerca!
E adesso? Forse se non può esistere un commiato da ricordi e sentimenti, potranno bastare i miei più sinceri auguri di
Buona Pasqua,
Paol0
E così lo volgare è più prossimo quanto è più unito, che uno e solo è prima ne la mente che alcuno altro, e che non solamente per sé è unito, ma per accidente, in quanto è congiunto con le più prossime persone, sì come con li parenti e con li propri cittadini e con la propria gente. E questo è lo volgare proprio; lo quale è non prossimo, ma massimamente prossimo a ciascuno. Per che, se la prossimitade è seme d’amistà, come detto è di sopra, manifesto è ch’ella è de le cagioni stata de l’amore ch’io porto a la mia loquela, che è a me prossima più che l’altre. (Dante, Convivio 1.12.5-6)
The mouthpiece refacer (pianoista)
The pianoista's knowledge in the Trattato:
- Practical-technical / artistic knowledge
- Emergence
- Experimentation
- Stabilisation
Recapitulation of the argument:
- from knowledge to knowing
- from knowing to epistemic practice
- Signor Olivieri's refacing practice as:
- artistic-epistemic practice
- artistic research
Dear Signor Olivieri
for my last clarinet lesson before the Easter holidays, I must have arrived in the early Tuesday afternoon, as usual. Before letting me go, you would have given me your Easter greetings and a tray of freshly made tortellini. I never saw you making them. You said you needed to be at home alone, but I imagine you did all the shopping the day before, ready to start in the early morning. You browned the pork loin after removing the fat, left it stand to cool for a while, cut it into pieces, added the diced Bologna mortadella and raw Parma ham. At the slow turn of the crank, the mincer extruded a pink pulp that using the prongs of the fork, you incorporated with two eggs to bind, grated Parmesan, salt and pepper, and a pinch of nutmeg.
In a volcano of 00 flour you formed the dough from the magma of many eggs, itself beautiful and smooth as an egg. After lunch, while the dough still rests, you spread two double tablecloths on the dining table and install your Imperia, [2] like the one my grandmother used for making us the Carnival crostoli. [3] You cut a slice of dough, flatten it on the tablecloth covered with flour, pass it between the rollers of the pasta maker, fold it, tighten the rollers, pass it again, fold it again, tighten the rollers a little more. When the dough is thin enough, you lay the sheet on the tablecloth without tearing or creasing it. You run it far and wide with the cutting wheel, precise and fast as the direct train to Bologna, and in that grid of pastry sheet you lay tiny balls of filling. [4] Then, you carefully detach a square, fold it diagonally around the filling, seal the sides, turn the tip, curl the base around the pinkie fingernail and seal the ring: done. [5] You arranged on the tea towel the tortellino and without giving it a thought, you detach another square and cut another slice of dough, carrying on until dinner time. Delicious as your tortellini were in capon broth, I could never understand why you put so much work in such a little thing. [6]
II
Had I persevered in revising the text and produced a translation, [1] your writings would have dissolved one bit at the time: the smell and tactility of the paper, rough and yellow like dough sheets, their different dimensions, the irregular spacings and wonky lines of the typescript, the black and red ink growing paler as the ribbon went on, the words added between the lines, your corrections, in blue ball pen and whiteout, mixed with those by others, respectfully in pencil, the crude drawings you commissioned to your grandson when he was still a boy, cut out and glued or pinned to the page. Perhaps, I am interested in these details because I belong to a generation still amphibious between paper and screen, nostalgic of the matter of the page and the gesture of writing, as of fetishes and animist rituals. Or maybe, there is a special feeling that, if it is not distilled and removed from the text as usually happens, flows beneath it, erodes thought and is deflected by it. [2]
Your semi-autobiographical writings could have become a document, buried in the intestines of an archive, or more likely junk, that one waits a little longer before throwing away. Instead, the yellow folder was preserved and became memorial, for the friendship that unites us now more than ever before, [3] and for keeping my belated promise, it was made public and became monument. As much as a memorial is not memory but commemoration, so a monument, not determined by its grandeur, historical significance or literary value, is fabulation, a necessary component of artistic research, that captures the excess, otherwise dissipated, of affective and perceptive aspects in a research, and keep for the future what otherwise would remain virtual in its practice and not actualised in its results. [4]
Although it is not possible to draw a precise distinction, the material qualities of your writings have nothing sentimental or fetishist, but they too express your relationship with the clarinet as a musician. [5] Bracketed every linguistic and literary consideration, their pages are substantivated and their words touch writing to the zero degree, narrating without telling, showing without betraying your practice and life. [6] In retrospect, I consider my failure of thirty years ago as the ultimate gift of our friendship. [7] Meeting your writing irritated my patterns of interpretation and evaluation, stratified during my classical education and confronted me for the first time with untranslatability, that is a sign of monumentality and that underlies my current artistic and research practice. [8]
III
Assuming, however, that monumentality distinguishes your artistic research in general, shouldn't your writings also contribute to knowledge in as much as you present them as research? Your introduction to the Trattato seems indeed to move in this direction, for example where you say that the knowledge necessary to adjust the clarinet mouthpiece is learnable and reject your teacher’s thesis, according to whom it is “a mystery”, either because it is esoteric and beyond the purposes of empirical research, or because it is a professional secret, not be for a music conservatory to divulge. [1] In contrast, you considered it an integrated and dynamic knowledge on three levels: practical, started when he was a kid playing in the band of Vignola, technical, elaborated through clarinet methods and personal experiments, and artistic, connecting the techniques of mouthpiece adjustment to the individual practice of a musician and taking it to the highest level of refinement.
Adjusting mouthpieces was in France an art and you call pianoista the artist, inventing a new Italian word from the French. According to an obsolete use of the term, the word ‘art’ only indicates an exceptional skill, and elsewhere you seem almost to contrast practical-technical to artistic knowledge. For example, you argue that it would be a mistake for a clarinettist to pursue it at the expense of artistic accomplishment and to support this claim, you said to have met an excellent pianoista who was just a mediocre clarinettist. It is therefore a kind of knowledge that emerges from artistic and professional practice (another distinction you seem to make), to which it must remain subordinate and instrumental, reflecting an unspoken and widespread hierarchy of values. At the same time, the work of experimentation and technical stabilization of knowledge are, in your opinion, the natural completion of the pianoista practice. For example, observing a gap in the curriculum and methods for clarinet, you highlight the usefulness of knowing how to adjust a mouthpiece and claim to make available to young clarinettists the knowledge you acquired during your forty years of profession, in which knowledge and experience, research and life have merged. While you often used the word ‘old’ joking about yourself and your well-worn age, I will use it here to emphasise the pianoista's epistemic marginality.
First, it is a knowledge already old when you began to write the Trattato. It must have been 1979, when my mother took me as a child to buy my first and only clarinet. As you recommend all teachers should do, you were already waiting for us in front of Ricordi, once the most important music store in Padua and now turned into another Prada boutique. [2] A clerk on the second floor brought the instrument you had tested and asked to put aside, you took out of your jacket pocket a mouthpiece and played some scales and passages. My mother pulled a check, and we went home satisfied with a nice Yamaha clarinet in B flat. Later, you wanted to try the clarinet again, this time with the plastic mouthpiece supplied. After several tests, you were surprised by its hardness compared to the hard rubber ones you knew, its good workmanship and voice quality, ‘mellow and responsive’ [dolce e pronto]. Who knows how you would feel about the synthetic reeds you had hoped for in the Trattato on the market since the Nineties, [3] or the clarinet in composite material by your favourite Buffet Crampon, or the Yamaha clarinet made entirely of plastic that I could have bought today. [4] With the quality and choice of clarinets and mouthpieces available, it is less necessary to intervene on a mouthpiece simply to make it work. [5] At the same time, the knowledge of the pianoista, seems more widespread and accessible than ever, thanks to didactic-advertising videos available online, virtual communities of professionals and enthusiasts, high-level commercial services offering refacing, customisation, repair and restoration, and specialized tool kits ready to purchase online. [6]
Second, the pianoista’s knowledge is marginal not only because of its characteristics and limited applications, but also its formation outside the conservatory. You complained that mouthpiece adjustment was not even mentioned to clarinet students when you were attending Bologna conservatory. At every reform of the conservatories, that knowledge became more and more alien to the curriculum, [7] and general disinterest and distrust continued during your professional career. Finally, you hoped that retirement would offer the conditions for organising your knowledge as a pianoista, while it definitively separated that knowledge from your artistic practice and the professional applications that supported it. At a time in which artistic practice less needs to project itself into the future, it also seems to achieve, albeit potentially, its maximum accumulation of knowledge and capacity for reflection. Not only artistic research, as historical formation, does not belong to your generation of artists, but more importantly, seniority of practice is considered irrelevant to artistic research, even more than research in general ignores, and thus destroys, minor knowledge.
Finally, the pianoista’s knowledge is in many ways a traditional skill, slow to sediment and transmit rather than immediately communicable, characterized by continuity of development rather than fractures and novelty, personal and localised rather than symbolic and abstract, sapiential and connected to local values rather than specialised and global. I expected, and perhaps you did too, that the Trattato would have simply verbalised your knowledge. However, although few pianoista handbooks meanwhile appeared on the market and other media offer precise descriptions, objective measures and clear instructions accompanied by detailed drawings, photographs and even videos, one still needs to take into account long hours of attempts and numerous failures, an aspect you never fail to point out. [8] Besides the Trattato ability to communicate, the clarinettist and the pianoista knowledge seem to share a fundamental difference from objective knowledge, so much so that I wonder whether the only way for the Trattato to achieve its goal would have been direct teaching, for which your text would have been just a faint track or an uncertain guide.
Three lines seem to run through the Trattato without intersecting: writing, knowledge and practice. I said before that the materiality of your writing expresses your practice as a pianoista, as I hope one will realise examining your typescript. On the other hand, because your practice precedes it, your text remains inaccessible to your own practice and does not contribute to the formation of new practices, because it does not communicate sufficient knowledge. Nevertheless, I believe that the failure of the Trattato, of which you seemed aware, lays neither in the difficulty of ‘saying the whole’, nor in the limitations of your drawing and writing skills, nor should it be searched where it is easier to find, in the text, that is. Rather, failure should be acknowledged in the Trattato twofold premise: on one side, the chain of implication from practice, to knowing, to knowledge, to new practice, and on the other side, the role of text that mediates between the practice on which it is founded (materials, actions, relationships, perceptions, affections, etc.) and the objective knowledge which it constitutes. [9]
The good sense of the premise conceals a double deception: knowledge, that invents knowing as its own limit so as to purify itself, and practice, that stages that mistero buffo so as to hide within it. [10] Perhaps, knowledge is immersed in knowing, which is indistinguishable from practice or even, they are one and the same thing. For example, one might think of their relationship as that between figure and background in a photograph. In knowledge, the figure seems to have no background, as in certain studio portraits on white background, while in knowing, the figure almost merges with it, as in a landscape, although the photograph is only viewed as a whole. In a similar way, while all practices imply knowing and knowing is only partially reducible to knowledge, only practices that bring knowing to the foreground are epistemic. [11]
IV
So, are the Trattato and the Studi sufficient to expose your practice of refacing as research? By now you might think that I am avoiding the question. First, I moved from knowledge to knowing, arguing that the writing of Trattato is different from its text and untranslatable, and that writing and text both express your pianoista practice in an affective mode (monumentality) while failing to communicate it. Then, from knowing I moved to epistemic practice, based on the dynamic relationship between knowing and the practice in which it is embedded, as between figure and landscape. Finally, I can answer the question in the affirmative, justifying why your practice is epistemic and artistic, and why it ought to be considered artistic research.
I previously critiqued the Trattato for being marginal to your profession. At the same time, undertaking the project meant for you a decided change of perspective on your refacing practice, from a technique useful to the clarinettist to an epistemic practice. [1] This can be seen, for example, where you reflect on the reasons that supported your lifelong practice, and how you organize knowing and integrate it with insights and experiences. At the same time, it is implicit in your commitment to a serious writing activity through which you seek to codify your knowing, going so far as to ask feedback on your text and activate yourself towards publishing it as a metodo for teaching.
The objective and purpose of the pianoista are made explicit, to identify and correct the defects in the clarinet mouthpiece, and to adjust the mouthpiece to the way of playing of the clarinettist so as it conforms to the sound model of the classical clarinet. You are also concerned with context and originality of your research, where you remark that mouthpiece adjustment is not taught at the conservatory and disregarded in the profession, and that no literature was available at the time, except for a cursory reference in the introduction to Blatt’s method for clarinet. [2] Finally, you propose some applications of your research, such as the evaluation and choice of a mouthpiece, and the artistic refinement of sound.
Two complementary heuristic principles seem to inform your methodology: the “search for the defect” and the “search for improvement”. The “search for the defect” is a diagnosis of the mouthpiece that proceeds from the precise identification of symptoms through the execution of specific music passages, to a diagnostic hypothesis, based on the elimination of extraneous factors and the comparison with previous cases. Once isolated, the defect is surgically removed with gradual interventions the progress of which is kept monitored in relation to shape with the steel plates, and in relation to sound with the dedicated compositions of the Studi. To the modern tool kit of a pianoista, belong several measuring instruments, while you only used two polished steel plates as worktop or as level. The lack of a measurement system and measuring instruments is probably one of the main weaknesses of the Trattato as a handbook. [3]
The “search for improvement” specifically qualifies your epistemic practice as artistic. The second heuristic principle guides the interventions on the mouthpiece in relation to the overall sound quality that must approximate the ideal model of clarinet voice, ‘clear, mellow and soft’. [4] The vagueness of the principle is directly proportional to the complexity of the operations practically assessed by ear and eye: the timbre analysis of the mouthpiece, the design of the interventions to be performed, the imitation of a special auditory image. [5] It is a pity that the Trattato does not contribute further to these current topics in musical research, as the parameters of analysis and diagnosis are few and impressionistic, and neither the investigative paradigm nor the work protocol are specific enough to be of any use. Moreover, the documentation of the practice is limited to a few exemplary anecdotes and descriptions of basic equipment with the help of some drawings.
I can feel your frustration between the lines, and I am sure you would have made extensive use of figures if your draughtsmanship or your nephew’s had been equal to the task. Still, the use of diagrams, the attention to materials and craft, the educational and popular style, place the Trattato within the genre of popular manuals between Italy’s first and second industrialisation. This minor literature testifies not only to the widespread interest for technical-scientific knowledge that is accessible and immediately applicable, but also to the subordination of this kind of knowledge within the elitist and humanist Italian culture of that time. This historical contextualisation of the Trattato may not only help us to understand why your practice was scoffed amongst your colleagues, but also to discover its political dimension and anti-hegemonic value within contemporary artistic research. [6]
V
I would really like to know your thoughts about this way of introducing your practice and writings. Can you appreciate it? Do you even care? In any case, I can't hide from you a certain embarrassment. I don’t think that artistic research would have interested you in the least, even f you had heard about it. [1] Further, my abusing your writings and having the last word about them seem now all the more serious because of the infinite inequality of our friendship. [2] Yet, I would like to believe that my role as disseminator of your writings is somehow relevant to artistic research because of the two of us together.
One reason for this, I might call it micro-political, is the peculiar character of our non-collaboration in this project. [3] On the one hand, it is mediated through my memory of you and through your memory of your own practice, on the other, it is divided in two unshared practices. Precisely the strangeness of my practice as a researcher now to yours as a pianoista then, opens to the possibility of carrying out here an operation of artistic research, that might capture your individual practice and wrest from its content and context a critical untimeliness. [4]
This brings me to an artistic-political motivation for exposing your writings as artistic research, namely to recognise and give value to an act of symbolic violence, rather than trying to disguise it. [5] At a juncture in which artistic research is institutionalised, it seems urgent to distinguish between epistemic-artistic practices and artistic research as apparatus. My aim is not to put on an act of institutional critique, but to exploit the reciprocity of capture to expand the boundary of artistic research, bringing more epistemic-artistic practices into academic research. [6]
Is there a way to conclude such a letter and at the same time, to take farewell from memory and feeling? It simply ends. [7]
Happy Easter,
Paolo
I
For lack of desire and talent, I had stopped studying the clarinet since before the summer. One evening in November, my mother gave me the news as soon as she returned home: “I met Signora Olivieri at the doctor’s... a sudden stroke... she even heard him get up at the night and get back into bed... in the morning, he seemed fast asleep... she called the ambulance, but there nothing that could be done.” Later, I learned from a medical friend that the incidence of stroke is higher among musicians of wind instruments. [1]
You always advised me not to take your profession, because of the long and late hours of work travelling far from home on low and uncertain pay. You also added that knowing music would offer me some advantage for my future and in one of your infinite digressions, you told me of when the Germans put you in a labour camp. “They wanted to set up an orchestra and asked who could play an instrument, so I stepped forward. Even there they treated us better than the others and after I am dead, if there were to be an orchestra...” As many of those who have known the war, you never talked about it, and now only those fragments and my questions remain. [2]
A few days after the funeral, Signora Olivieri invited me to visit her. I arrived, as before, in the early afternoon, and we spent an hour or so sitting in the kitchen without saying much. Before parting, she fetched a plastic bag she had prepared for me, full of boxes of new and used reeds, old methods for clarinet and the yellow folder I recognised. One summery afternoon, I arrived at your house late for the lesson. I didn't feel like getting in yet, sweaty as I was for the hasty ride, so I laid the bike against the railing to cool down. Slow and heavy key strokes were coming out of the half-closed window of the dining room, and they stopped as soon as I rang the bell. While I was preparing the clarinet and the scores for the lesson, you hastened to put away your typewriter, a Studio 45 purposely bought, [3] you picked up the sheets spread on the table and put them in a folder, the same yellow folder I received (“He would have wanted you to have it”) becoming the promise to publish its contents.
You worked on those pages for years, without ever throwing anything away, as the bravura passages you still kept in exercise, or a mouthpiece that whistles. “If you leave the clarinet, the clarinet leaves you”, you admonished me when I had not studied my lesson. In fact, you never left the clarinet, nor did you ever stop writing, no matter how difficult it was, how that text remained unruly and, until the end, infinite.
Before considering the publication of your writings, I knew I would need to revise the text, correct, reorganize, delete, reduce, combine, maybe even rewrite. I procrastinated a while the tedious task, for adolescence, the looming maturità or the guilt of having abandoned you together with the clarinet. When I finally decided to start, it seemed pointless to continue beyond the first reading. I did not know how to trace the sense or give a meaning to your written ‘chats’. I felt so disappointed and frustrated that I put the sheets back in the folder without even caring of their order. I kept the yellow folder in a closet for over thirty years, undisturbed by the frustration of my failure and the regret for breaking my promise, and I was wrong. [4]
Similarly, that vernacular is closest to a person which is the one most fully united to him, and the vernacular which is most fully united to a person is the one which without rival first acquires a place in his mind, and which is united to him not only intrinsically but incidentally, in that it is part of the people closest to him, such as his relatives, his own fellow citizens and his own race. I am, of course, speaking of each person's own vernacular, which is not simply close to him, but close in a most intimate way. Granted, then, what was said above, that closeness is a seed of friendship, it is clear that closeness must be counted one of the causes of the love I bear for my own vernacular, which is nearer to me than any other. (Dante, The Banquet 1.12.5-6) [1]
[1] The intent of producing knowledge is the first symptom of research (Borgdorff 2011: 53). However, the act of writing the Trattato is not only an ethical commitment, if not quite an 'exigency' (Blanchot 1993: 393), it is an 'event' in an epistemic sense. Here is how John Protevi describes learning and understanding in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms:
Diachronic emergence, or creativity in the production of new patterns and thresholds of behaviour, is what Deleuze will call an ‘event’, which is not to be confused with a mere switch between already established patterns or with the trigger or ‘external event’ that pushes the system past a threshold and produces the switch. The Deleuzean event repatterns a system. (Protevi 2006: 24)
[2] The Czech clarinettist Franz Thaddeus Blatt (1793-1856) published two methods for clarinet in 1828 and 1839 that underwent several translations and editions in German, Franch and Italian (Blatt s.d.). In Italy, Blatt was also known for his capricci and exercises arranged by Alamiro Giampieri (Amore 2012: 27). We were unable to late, however, the diagrams of the mouthpiece to which Signor Olivieri refers in the Trattato.
For the importance of placing epistemic practice in context see Borgdorff 2011: 56-7.
[3] Eric Brand introduced a method to measure and compare facings of mouthpieces (Pino 1980: 12-15) which is considered standard among professional refacers (Kurzweil 2013b).
The connection of artistic research methodology with those of empirical research see Borgdorff 2011: 57.
[4] The precise quotation could not be found, although the same sense can be inferred from this passage:
‘The finest tone is that which combines sweetness with brightness, and as the Clarinet possesses this precious advantage we must preserve it by applying ourselves closely, from the commencement, to the production of sounds both full and soft, giving them at the same time both force and roundness’ (Klosé 1873: 3).
Similar descriptors of the ‘bel suono’ are frequent in the clarinet literature of the time and Bianco Bianchini, Signor Olivieri’s teacher in Bologna, was especially keen on this aspect. Giuseppe Prestini describes Bianchini as follows: "Artista e clarinettista delicatissimo, che ha per dote principale una deliziosa voce cui corrisponde un particolare modo di eseguire, cosa che lo distingue fra molti" (Amore 2012: 74). Signor Olivieri’s insistence on the sound qualities of the clarinet in the Trattato and in his teaching, clearly derives from his teacher, as one can find in Bianchini’s most famous student, Luigi Amodio. (Amore 2012: 41) "Antoine de Bavier, for instance, said that Luigi Amodio 'did not pay much attention when his students played the wrong note, but he would expel them if he heard a sound not beautiful enough.' (49-50)
[5] The realisation of a specific sound model is the artistic element linking the Trattato with the Studi. This intention is apparent, for instance, in the frequent use of expression signs and indications of execution, many of which we omitted from the transcription for the sake of readability.
Signor Olivieri's use of a sonic model corresponds to Ansel Adams' 'pre-visualisation' of the photograph. In this short excerpt from video talks of which he talks about in this video: https://youtu.be/n-ZCEXWdIMg
[6] The hundreds of Hoepli manuals published on technical and scientific topics for over a century are the best example of this literature in Italy (De Mauro 1992: 16-8).
Antonio Gramsci defines hegemony as 'predominance by consent' to which culture was the key. His solution was to provide workers with accessible technical, industrial and also humanistic education. (Gramsci 2000: 53-75)
Gramsci introduces the historico-critical category of national-popular culture to highlight the lack of an organic relationship between Italian intellectuals and the broad national working class ‘A national-popular literature, narrative and other kinds, has always been lacking in Italy and still is.’ (Gramsci 2000: 368). See also Forgacs 1999: 209-19.
[1] Giorgio Agamben quotes similar passages from Dante's Convivio (2014) in "The Dream of Language" where he discusses Dante's bilingualism that "corresponds to the opposition not so much between two languages as between two different experiences of language, which Dante calls the mother tongue and the grammatical language." (1996: 53). Multilingualism remains a blind spot in artistic research, not only marginalising regional languages (Italian), dialects (incursions of Emilian dialect in the Trattato) or idiolects (some of Signor Olivieri's mistakes), but generally all styles laying outside English for Academic Purposes, including literary and poetic languages. In all its impracticality, the Trattato protests the right to speak in one's own vernacular.
[2] Imperia started to manufacture dough sheeters in Moncalieri (Torino) in 1932, with an eye to the growing US market of Italian emigration (Tgcom24 2014). The iconic Sfogliatrice Imperia mod. Titania (Imperia 2009: 4, fig.2) used by Signor Olivieri has been in production since the 70s. The diagram shows the knob (I), release lever (H) and the rollers (L) mentioned in the text. A parallel is suggested with the hand drawn diagrams illustrating the Trattato. See fig. [a].
[3] The first written recipe for these traditional Carnival fritters can be found in the Libro de arte coquinaria (1450-67) where they are called as 'frictelle piene di vento':
Wind-Filled Fritters. Take some sifted flour and some water, salt and sugar; thin the flour, thus making a dough that is neither overly hard, and roll it out as for lasagne on a table; using a wooden mold or glass, cut the dough and fry in good oil. Be careful that your dough has no holes; in this way, the fritters will puff up and will appear to be filled but will be empty. (di Como 2005: 95)
The modern 'crostoli' or 'galani' are sweet and flavoured (Agostini and Zorzi 1993). My grandmother used lemon zest and grappa, and dusted them with icing sugar as seen in the photograph below. Festive pasta recipes involving similar tools and skills were a common family tradition in my grandmother and Signor Olivieri's generation. See fig. [b].
[4] The Roman grid still characterise the landscape where Signor Olivieri was born. For instance, the photo shows traces of Roman centuriation near Castelfranco Emilia, Modena (Neri and Sanguineti 2010: front cover). See fig. [c].
[5] Signor Olivieri's reconstructed recipe follows the one officially registered in Bologna by La Dotta Confraternita del Tortellino (Lanzani Grimaldi 1974). The newsreel excerpt (Archivio Storico Luce 1955) shows how tortellini were made by skilled women workers, the so-called 'sfogline'. Castelfranco Emilia, 'birthplace of the tortellino' is only a few kilometres from Savignano sul Panaro (Modena) where Signor Olivieri was born and lived with his parents until he got married and moved to Bologna. See video [d].
In 'N as for Neurology' Deleuze says that thinking and kneading are processes of transformation that bring distant points into proximity and puts distance between contiguous points. Thus thinking in the brain creates both the concepts of philosophy and sensations (percepts and affects) of art (Stivale 2008: 24). The 'baker's transformation' shown in figure (Wiggins and Ottino 2004: 948 fig. 1) diagrammatises Signor Olivieri's material thinking across cooking, writing and refacing and. See fig. [e].
[6] 'We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us as well, in our estrangement. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or essays), but the movement in which speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation.' (Blanchot 1997: 291) The short essay L'Amitié (1971) that Maurice Blanchot dedicated to George Bataille will be our refrain.
[1] This informal communication is confirmed by Evers, Altenmuller and Ringlestein 2000.
[2] The only reference in the Trattato is the following passage worth translating in whole:
During the war, the Germans put me to work in a factory. This happened in September 1944 because of the work mobilization. I had no contract, I was free … but I had to go to a porcelain factory as the others. Only the cinema was left, we were all working …!
The factory where I was working had a high-precision department. As my German was fluent enough, it was easy for me to befriend the artist [sc. skilled worker] at the grinder.
The German ground small pistons made of a special metal that he said, were used in aircraft oil pumps. As he was a skilled lathe turner, he was the only one doing this job and only at night. He said he could not have worked during the day because of the vibrations from the other machines. He was working with a high precision grinder fitted with a dial indicator.
After finishing around 60 pieces every night, in the morning he was satisfied if he got 40 good pieces and 20 rejects, as sometimes he only got 40 rejects and 20 good pieces instead. It would be too long to account for the rejects and this needs not concern us here, but it is enough to show that even high precision machines are often inaccurate. (TBC84-5)
Unfortunately, there is no other reference to this period of Signor Olivieri’s life and only a rough reconstruction can be attempted.
In his unpublished Altri Scritti, Signor Olivieri writes that he remained in Germany from February 1942 until March 1945, except for short visits to his wife and son in Bologna (February and August 1942) and a few months tour to occupied Paris (from December 1942 to early 1943). He mentions having worked in Stuttgart (before August 1942), Dresden (September 1942) and in Bromberg (October 1942), the Polish city of Bydgoszcz which had been annexed to the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia in 1939. Following the announcement of the Italian armistice (8 September 1943), Bologna was occupied by the Germans and returning home would have been almost impossible.
Stuck in Germany by these events, Signor Olivieri must have been affected by the ‘Total Mobilization to War of Cultural Creators’ (Totale Kriegseinsatz der Kulturschaffenden), decreed by Joseph Goebbels, newly appointed 'Plenipotentiary for the total war mobilisation' (Reichsbevollmächtigter für den totalen Kriegseinsatz). When the mobilsation took effect (1 September 1944), all work activities in art and entretainment were suspended and the workers were dismissed, with the exception of artists and technicians working in radio or cinema, and the 1041 in the ‘List of the exceptionally gifted’ (Gottbegnadeten-Liste).
Although the German authorities would have considered Signor Olivieri a ‘foreign worker’ (Fremdarbeiter) and nominally free, it is appropriate to consider him a forced labourer from September 1944 to March 1945.
His writings and personal recollections suggest that to a certain degree, he met all the indicators of forced labour. First, he was left without any means of sustenance and needed to accept any job that the unemployment office (Arbeitsamt) would assign him and could not resign from it. Second, at the porcelain factory he was subjected to harsh work conditions and confined to live in barracks, usually built around the factories and patrolled by factory security (Zivilarbeitslager). It has not been possible to locate the porcelain factory based on the available information.
[3] Olivetti Studio 45 was a portable typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass Jr. in 1967. Produced between 1967 and 1974 in green and light grey, as Signor Olivieri's model (Torchio 2013). See figures:
[a] A 1972 Olivetti Studio 45 from the Anthony Mindling collection (2013a)
[b] A typeface specimen that matches Trattato typescript (Mindling 2013b).
[c] Henry Wolf's photo campaign for Olivetti, featuring pianist Duke Ellington 'typing' on a music sheet with a Studio 45 (Wolf 1969).
[d] Typing demonstration of the Studio 45 with sound (Royal Treasure 2014).
[4] This exposition is not nostalgic:
Everything we say tends to veil the one affirmation: that everything must fade and that we can remain loyal only so long as we watch over this fading movement, to which something in us that rejects all memory already belongs. (Blanchot 1997: 289)
[1] Rewriting is a form of intra-linguistic translation according to Roman Jacobson (2000: 114) and Umberto Eco (2001: 68). With translation begins expositionality.
[2] The point is to show what the Trattato is not.
Life research and life writing are established fields in the UK academia, as demonstrated for instance by the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex, Brighton (since 1997), the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King's College, London (since 2007), the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford (since 2013), and particularly relevant to this context, the Writing Lives. Collaborative Research Project on Working-Class Autobiobraphy at the John Moores University, Liverpool (since 2013). Life research was pioneered in Italy by Saverio Tutino since 1984. In 1991 he initiated the Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale at Pieve Santo Stefano, Arezzo also publishing the journal Primapersona, and in 1998 with Duccio Demetrio founded the Libera Università dell'Autobiografia at Anghiari, Arezzo.
In the sense of 'life writing' or 'life research', the Trattato is a document of Signor Olivier's life, where life itself becomes an object (of research) by being documented. Allan Kaprow poses the problem in his 'Manifesto' (1966) for a contemporary art practice, but one might also say for artistic research too:
Art and life are not simply commingled; the identity of each is uncertain. To pose these questions in the form of acts that are neither artlike nor lifelike while locating them in the framed context of the conventional showplace is to suggest that there really are no uncertainties at all: the name on the gallery or stage door assures us that whatever is contained within is art, and everything else is life. (Kaprow 1993a: 82)
and in the conclusion of 'Art Which Can't Be Art' (1986), Kaprow goes even further:
Anything less than paradox would be simplistic. Unless the identity (and thus the meaning) of what the artist does oscillates between ordinary, recognizable activity and the “resonance” of that activity in the larger human context, the activity itself reduces to conventional behaviour. Or if it is framed as art by a gallery, it reduces to conventional art. Thus, toothbrushing, as we normally do it, offers no roads back to the real world either. But ordinary life performed as art/not art can charge the everyday with metaphoric power. (Kaprow 2003b: 222)
As art and life 'oscillate', so does artistic research and search in life, problematising the boundary of which the Trattato is a document. The solution, gained at the price of confusion, lays in the rhizomatic nature of artistic research.
[3] The relation between the authors of this exposition is brought as example of a general condition for expositionality, away from the Kantian courtroom: 'My question was: How can a friend, without losing his or her singularity, be inscribed as a condition of thought?' (Deleuze 2006: 332). Friendship between subjects (the authors of this exposition, its readers) and 'subjects' (the epistemic and affective components) is difference:
So there is the dark precursor and (Deleuze gestures a Z in the air) then a lightning bolt, and that’s how the world was born. There is always a dark precursor that no one sees, and then the lightning bolt that illuminates, and there is the world. He says that’s also what thought should be and what philosophy must be, the grand Zed, but also the wisdom of the Zen. The sage is the dark precursor, and then the blow of the stick comes, since the Zen master passes among his disciples, striking them with his stick. So for Deleuze, the blow of the stick is the lightning that makes things visible . . . Here, he pauses and says, “And so we have finished.” (Stivale 2008: 20).
See figures:
[a] Pierre Boutang claps to sync audio. Looped video excerpt from Gilles Deleuze from A to Z. 2012. Directed by Pierre Boutang, with Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. DVD Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
[b] Deleuze presents Nietzsche's 'philosophy of affects' in this audio excerpt from Gilles Deleuze from A to Z (2012).
[4] 'Memorial' (tombeau) and 'monument' (monument) are two slightly different concepts by Deleuze. Tombeau (memorial, but in French also 'elegy') has a commemorative function in the book Deleuze wrote for his friend Michel Foucault shortly after his death: ‘The book I did wasn't about the history of philosophy, it's something I wanted to do with him, with the idea I have of him and my admiration for him. If there was any poetry in the book, one might see it as what poets call a tombeau’ (N 150)
[1] Signor Olivieri writes (TBC053) that in 1930 he entered the Liceo Musicale di Bologna (since 1942, Conservatorio Statale ‘Giambattista Martini’) to attend the School of Clarinet with Bianco Bianchini (1868-1940), who taught there from 1905 to 1939. Unfortunately, student records of the period 1931-1942 are very incomplete and Signor Olivieri’s name could not be found in the database of the Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica di Bologna. However, based on the fact that Signor Olivieri was a mature student with considerable experience, he might have been admitted to the second or third year of the course, thus graduating after 4 or 5 years in 1935 or 1936. It seems unlikely that Signor Olivieri graduated after 1936, as in the Altri Scritti (not included in this exposition) he writes that he signed a first clarinet contract in September 1937, one year after moving to Bologna with his wife. Moreover, he should not have been affected by the 1930 reform that raised the duration of the course to 5 years for the Licenza inferiore and 7 for the Licenza superiore (Maione 2006: 63).
[2] The references to places and local history become relevant once the situatedness of artistic knowledge is taken into consideration.
The Ricordi shop was located in a early XX century building at the corner between Piazza Garibaldi and via Santa Lucia since 1973. It had the largest selection of records in town ranging from Italian pop to contemporary music, as well as stocking sheet music and musical instruments in the upper stories. It remained the meeting point of middle class youth during the Eighties (paninari) until it declined in the early Nineties, coinciding with the acquisition of Ricordi Records by BMG Music (1994). It became a Ricordi Media Store, part of La Feltrinelli group (http://www.ricordicompany.com/it/page/31) between 2008 until its closure in 2010 (Paduano 2010), and has been a Prada store since 2012. See map: https://goo.gl/maps/mAKtmNy4qdz
[3] Enduro was the first synthetic reed, patented and produced by Arnhold Brilhard 1940. The dwindling supply from France during the war, created the market in the United States for this styrene (Tonalin) reed, of which Signor Olivieri may have heard about. Although synthetic fibres begun to be used in reed production from the Sixties, such as Aramid by Fibracell and Avilar by Bari. Only recently could a sound quality comparable to natural cane be achieved, for instance by Légère in 1998 or Foreman in 2010. Vandoren, leader in the production of clarinet mouthpieces and reeds, only uses natural cane obtained from the giant cane. Arundo Donax is an invasive species, originating from eastern Asia, but probably imported to the Mediterranean already in antiquity (Hardion et al. 2014), mainly to exploit its hollow stems, 3-5 cm thick and 6 m tall.
See figure:
[a] The photograph shows a rhizome of giant cane. (Perdue 1958: fig. 3). Quite to the point, Deleuze remarks that 'the rhizome includes the best and the worse' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7). The rhizomatic-arborescent structure of artistic research, and of this exposition in particular, is illustrated by 'the delicate inter-twinning of the roots of ten young Scots pine trees.' (De Assis 2018: 33). Elaborating on this diagram, the rhizome (epistemic practice) is an intermediate structure between the pine trees (propositional knowledge) and the earth in which they are rooted (practice). In the photograph of the giant cane, one can notice several roots that broke when the rhizome was extracted from the ground, as well as small roots still clinging to the soil in which they were growing.
[4] The clarinet bought around 1979 was a Yamaha YCL-34 in B flat. It remained a best-selling clarinet for intermediate students since it launched in 1978 (http://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical-instruments/winds/clarinets/bb-clarinets/ycl-34/). It was discontinued in 2001 and replaced by the more expensive YCL-450 (http://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical-instruments/winds/clarinets/bb-clarinets/ycl-450/?mode=model). The YCL-34 came with a standard CL4C resin mouthpiece (http://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical-instruments/winds/mouthpieces/woodwind/clarinets_series/#tab=feature).
Yamaha begun producing an ABS clarinet for beginner students in the 1990s. The bestselling YCL-255 currently retails on Amazon.com at around 602.00 USD while a used YCL-34 in good conditions can be bought used on Amazon.com for 545.00 USD (http://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical-instruments/winds/clarinets/bb-clarinets/ycl-255/))
Signor Olivieri’s professional clarinets were all Buffet Crampon. In 1994, the company started producing its Green LinE made of recycled grenadilla for advanced students (http://www.buffet-crampon.com/en/saga/our-history).
[5] Professional refacer Scott Kurzweil is correct to observe that (2013):
What a great many players don’t realize is that most of these common “troubles” (as Erick Brand called them) can be remedied in less than an hour at the bench. The most common problem I run into is a crooked facing, especially on older mouthpieces that have warped or twisted reed tables.
Nowadays however, due to the changes in production quality and price structure that we tried to dramatise with our personal experience, there are probably less clarinet students facing the need to reface their mouthpiece, than there were when Erick D. Brand (1897-1951) wrote his Selmer Band Instrument Repair Manual (1939) or Signor Olivieri begun working on his Trattato. Arguably, another effect of globalisation was to spread awareness, knowledge and expectations around refacing, which in turn, has led intermediate and advanced clarinettists to try refacing themselves or to seek refacing services. This trend is testified, for instance, by the series of articles ‘Mouthpiece Madness’ on The Clarinet (MacDowell and Guy 2012, 2012b, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2014) and the change of perception during the Eighties is registered by how the refacer is referred to in clarinet literature. For instance, Kenneth Stein calls the 'pianoista' a 'reliable man doing custom refacing' (1958: 5), while David Pino already uses the expression ‘artistic craftsman’ (Pino 1980: 15).
[6] One example for each case:
- Ridenour, William. 2015. The Clarinet Mouthpiece Revealed. YouTube video. Uploaded 14 January. https://youtu.be/aVM9Bahz2NA [accessed 12.6.2019]
- Sax and Clarinet Mouthpiece Work. Yahoo Restricted Group moderated by Keith Bradbury.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/MouthpieceWork/info [accessed 12.6.2019]
- Theo Wanne, Mouthpiece Refacing. Website. https://theowanne.com [accessed 12.6.2019]
- MusicMedic.com. E-commerce of woodwind repair supplies. https://musicmedic.com/ [accessed 12.6.2019]
[7] The reform of conservatories in the Bologna Process irreversibly excluded refacing practice and knowledge from the curriculum (Ministero dell'università e della ricerca 1999).
[8] Scott Kurzweil emphasises the importance of risk-taking in the learning process:
After I had worked with Jerry Hall for a while learning the basics of mouthpiece measuring, geometry and facing techniques, he told me “You know everything that I know. Now go screw up about a thousand mouthpieces and you’ll be ready”. Needless to say, I learned a great many of the below issues and remedies while destroying those thousand pieces.’ (Kurzweil 2013)
[9] Italian language enables to follow more closely Michel Foucault’s distinction between connaissance (conoscenza) and savoir (sapere). Departing from the English translation by Sheridan Smith that uses 'knowledge' for both, we use 'knowledge' for 'connaissance' and 'knowing' for 'savoir':
Connaissance refers here to a particular corpus of knowledge, a particular discipline - biology or economics, for example. Savoir, which is usually defined as knowledge in general, the totality of connaissances, is used by Foucault in an underlying, rather than an overall, way. He has himself offered the following comment on his usage of these terms:
'By connaissance I mean the relation of the subject to the object and the formal rules that govern it. Savoir refers to the conditions that are necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given to connaissance and for this or that enunciation to be formulated.' (Foucault 1972: 15, n. 2)
To the binary savoir/knowing - connaissence/knowledge, we superpose Michael Polanyi's binary tacit knowledge - propositional (explicit) knowledge. We will forfeit a discussion, relying on 'the three-phase model of tacit knowledge.' proposed by Harry Collins (2010: 157-71).
However, Foucault and (Collin's) Polany are only our starting point. For both, socialization is what in tacit knowledge cannot be made explicit. This cannot dispel the principle that explicit knowledge remains a quantity to be extracted and transferred, disposing of the tacit as inevitable production waste. The ideology of tacit knowledge is exposed as soon as it drops off the knowledge market.
This conclusion reflects Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff’s principles of ‘(1) self-determination – practice can self-determine its own exposition as research; and (2) indetermination – a practice can be anything, that is, there are no criteria to include or exclude something.’ (Schwab 2015: 1), which they trace back to Kant and the Romantic tradition (Schwab and Borgdorff 2014: 13).
[10] The "comic mystery' (Fo 2014) alluded here is the creation of a Boundary between knowledge ('reason') and knowing ('experience') in § 59 of Kant's Prolegomena:
At the beginning of this note I made use of the metaphor of a boundary in order to fix the limits of reason with respect to its own appropriate use. The sensible world contains only appearances, which are still not things in themselves, which latter things (noumena) the understanding must therefore assume for the very reason that it cognizes the objects of experience as mere appearances. Both are considered together in our reason, and the question arises: how does reason proceed in setting boundaries for the understanding with respect to both fields? Experience, which contains everything that belongs to the sensible world, does not set a boundary for itself: from every conditioned it always arrives merely at another conditioned. That which is to set its boundary must lie completely outside it, and this is the field of pure intelligible beings. (2004:111)
The boundary underlies Kant's epistemology and is the model upon which most inter/disciplinary knowledge is structured. This exposition attempts to show the fundamental continuity of knowing in which the administrative cartography of epistemological regions is substituted by a continuous epistemic landscape of which the arborescent-rhizomatic structure we described previously is part.
See figure:
[b] One of Fernand Deligny's maps of lignes d'erre ('wander lines') offers an example of this geoepistemology (2015: 232-3).
"Monoblet, November 1976. Background map and tracing, . . . 36.6 cm x 49.7 cm, [inverted]. The background map is a freehand sketch of the kitchen in “Y House” and its furnishings (table and stools at the top, stove and sink at the bottom). The entrance to the room is on the left.
The wander lines are drawn in India ink on tracings superimposed on the background map. They transcribe the movements of the three autistic children while bread is being made. The “eyes” mark the children’s places around the table. The “hands” are recognizable, as well as the strings of saliva (with which one of the children is playing), represented by little wavelets."
[11] ‘Epistemic practice’ generalises a notion introduced by Karen Knorr Cetina (1999, 2001). A practice becomes epistemic when knowledge emerging from a practice is reapplied to the practice and new things are thus created. The criteria of novelty and supervenience elaborate on the difference between weak and strong emergence (Chalmers 2006, 2008).
See figure:
[c] Rubin’s Vase (Blom 2010: 264, fig. 4). The shift from a figure-ground opposition to depth of an image is based on Deleuze Frances Bacon
[d] David Chalmers explains strong emergence (2008)
[1] The use of the expression ‘artistic research’ in Italy, can be traced back to the Centro Internazionale Ricerche Artistiche in Turin (CIRA, 1962-7) directly linked to the Bauhaus, through Asger Jones, and international situationism. Here and in other cases though, artistic research within the tradition of avant-garde experimentation should be distinguished from artistic research in the contemporary field of academic research. (Viel s.d.)
[2] In The Infinite Conversation Maurice Blanchot speaks of ''extreme distance' and 'pure interval' in friendship (1993: 197):
And yet when the event itself comes, it brings this change: not the deepening of the separation but its erasure; not the widening of the caesura but its levelling out and the dissipation of the void between us where formerly there developed the frankness of a relation without history. In such a way that at present, what was close to us not only has ceased to approach but has lost even the truth of extreme distance. . . . Here discretion lies not in the simple refusal to put forward confidences (how vulgar would that be, even to think of it), but it is the interval, the pure interval that, from me to this other who is a friend, measures all that is between us, the interruption of being that never authorizes me to use him, or my knowledge of him (were it to praise him), and that, far from preventing all communication, brings us together in the difference and sometimes the silence of speech.
[3] Deleuze and Guattari refer to the double capture of their writing as a micro-politics. (1987: 22)
[4] The text distinguishes three positions within the field of artistic research: the epistemic artistic practice characterised by affective mode of expression and differentiation of practice, as we have tried to trace in Signor Olivieri’s practice for writing the Trattato, an operation of capture of practice by research, as we attempted in this exposition, and finally artistic research as a dispositiv. Within this framework, an epistemic artistic practice (broadly construed) can be inserted in the dispositiv through an operation of artistic research to elicit transformation (Holert 2011). Bringing Signor Olivieri’s practice inside artistic research is an attempt to pervert artistic research (Zourabichvili 2012: 177-8; Boundas 2006: 22-4) and returning it to common practice (‘profanation’ in Agamben 2009: 24).
[5] In 'Symbolic Violence’, Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant define misrecognition as ‘the fact of recognising a violence which is wielded precisely inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such’ (2004: 272).
[6] The characteristics of an apparatus (dispositivo) are for Giorgio Agamben (2009: 2-3):
a. It is a heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and non-linguistic under the same heading: discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on. The apparatus itself is the network that is established between these elements.
b. The apparatus always has a concrete strategic function and is always located in a power relation.
c. As such, it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge.
Fraser 2009
[7] The end:
We should not, by means of artifice, pretend to carry on a dialogue. [...] We can [...] remember. But thought knows that one does not remember: without memory, without thought, it already struggles in the invisible where everything sinks back to indifference. This is thought's profound grief. It must accompany friendship into oblivion. (Blanchot 1997: 292)
Monument differs from the memorial in its direction, future rather than past, and dimension, virtual rather than actual. Fabulation is a memory of the future and sensation is its medium. 'It is true that every work of art is a monument, but here the monument is not something commemorating a past, it is a bloc of present sensations that owe their preservation only to themselves and that provide the event with the compound that celebrates it. The monument's action is not memory but fabulation. We write not with childhood memories but through blocs of childhood that are the becoming-child of the present. Music is full of them. It is not memory that is needed but a complex material that is found not in memory but in words and sounds: "Memory, I hate you." We attain to the percept and the affect only as to autonomous and sufficient beings that no longer owe anything to those who experience or have experienced them: Combray like it never was, is, or will be lived; Combray as cathedral or monument.' (Deleuze and Guattari 2015: 167-8) 'A monument does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: The monument does not actualize the virtual event but incorporates or embodies it.' (177) 'The whole of the refrain is the being of sensation. Monuments are refrains.' (184) 'Sensation itself vibrates because it contracts vibrations. It preserves itself because it preserves vibrations; it is Monument.' (211)
See figure:
[c] The title of this exposition page derives from the title of this artist book (Tom Phillips, 1973. A Humument. London: Tetrad Press. p. 1. http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument.) Without becoming a new signifier, 'humument' summarises the multiplicity of the Trattato as it fuses together the words 'human' and 'document' while sounding like 'monument'.
[5] In the previous section, typewriter and clarinet have been compared as musical instruments. Here, the comparison is about the relation between the instrument and the player-typist, at times prosthetic, other times symbiotic. See figure:
[d] William Borroughs types on the 'Clark Nova' insect typewriter prop used in 'Naked Lunch' (1991. Directed by David Cronenberg, with Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. Written by David Cronenberg based on the homonymous novel by William Borroughs (1959). Canada, UK, Japan, 115 min, colour, stereo.
[6] In 'Writing Degree Zero', Roland Barthes describes 'writing at the zero degree' as '“..writing at the zero degree is basically in the indicative mode, or if you like, amodal ... a journalist’s writing.” (1968: 76) 'The aim here is to go beyond Literature by entrusting one's fate to a sort of basic speech, equally far from living languages and from literary language proper.' (77) Pier Paolo Pasolini in 'Intervento sul discorso libero indiretto', writes that the 'substantivation of the page' in Italian contemporary writing has the same intent to abolish literary style and tradition (1992: 1365).
Barthes and Pasolini are sources for Deleuze's concept of 'minor' that will be discussed later. Here, these references support a new function Signor Olivieri's Trattato with its typewritten pages and its basic technical language, operates in a similar way against literary and academic language, all the more because it is not carried out from the inside or the ouside of either, but from within a periphery of both.
See figure:
[e] Marianne Holm Hansen, Typing not Writing, 2012. Typewritten text on paper, 17 x 22.5 cm. http://www.criticalm.org
[7] Time is the ultimate gift in Jacques Derrida's Given Time, Counterfeit Money (1992: 29):
What there is to give, uniquely, would be called time.
What there is to give, uniquely, would be called time.
What there is to give, uniquely, would be called time.
The time of this exposition (before, during, after writing) is the gift of our friendship, 'a gift that cannot make itself (a) present [un don qui ne peut pas se faire present].' (29)
[8] In 'The Task of the Translator', Walter Benjamin paradoxically concludes that the more a text approaches the degree zero of writing the less it can be translated:
The extent to which a translation manages to be in keeping with the nature of this mode is determined objectively by the translatability of the original. The lower the quality and distinction of its language, the larger the extent to which it is information, the less fertile a field is it for translation, until the utter preponderance of content, far from being the lever for a translation of distinctive mode, renders it impossible. (Benjamin 1996: 262)
As seen in the previous section, the degree zero of Signor Olivieri's Trattato in its material and textual dimensions, lies at the basis of the contingent and personal failure at translating it. Now, it is recognised as an immanent quality of the Trattato, Benjamin's 'untranslatability', and a general characteristic of artistic research that distinguishes it from other modes of research.
