Everything that relates to language as a system must, I am convinced, be approached from this viewpoint, which has scarcely received the attention of linguists: the limiting of arbitrariness. This is the best possible basis for approaching the study of language as a system. In fact, the whole system of language is based on the irrational principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, which would lead to the worst sort of complication if applied without restriction. But the mind contrives to introduce a principle of order and regularity into certain parts of the mass of signs, and this is the role of relative motivation. If the mechanism of language were entirely rational, it could be studied independently. Since the mechanism of language is but a partial correction of a system that is by nature chaotic, however, we adopt the viewpoint imposed by the very nature of language and study it as it limits arbitrariness.⁵

I cite this passage since it frames a parallel effort made here in analyzing how a certain tendency in American art has pushed toward reducing arbitrary and non-arbitrary, or “motivated,” which is for de Saussure an historical, evolutionary, or diachronic feature of language’s development and change. Language is not plastic art but both are forms of human behavior and the structures of one can be compared to the structures of the other. That there should be some incipient general patterning modality common to both should not be surprising. Nor it is surprising to find Ehrenzweig at other levels characterizing certain psychological perception as rhythmically alternating between “differentiation and dedifferentiation” or scattering (arbitrariness) and containment (motivation). What resolves the duality as a tendency in behavior at many levels is, for de Saussure as well as Ehrenzweig and others, the alternating passage between the two poles, a tendency toward the one and then the other. Ehrenzweig reduces oppositions to the basic conflict between the life and death urges of the Eros-Thanatos duality. Discontent with Freud’s admission in the late writings of no longer being able to distinguish the two, Ehrenzweig reasserts their opposition but sees a constantly alternating swing between the two. “The act of expulsion (dedifferentiation) in the service of Thanatos is linked with containment (re-differentiation) in the service of Eros.”⁶

Peckham speaks of the related tendencies to over- or under-pattern⁷ and assigns art the role of a practice run for life by providing an area within a psychically “insulated” framework where disorientation is the rule of the game in successive innovative moves. He hints at a biological foundation different from binary tendencies in his citing of the principle of “entelechy.” According to this, neural firings have tendencies for repeating sequences. Entelechy is seen as a tendency to pattern as built in as tendencies for binary patterning in the brain—although Peckham opts for the predominance of an “analogical” thought mode to follow from entelechy tendencies. De Saussure, on the other hand, concluded from his linguistic investigations that the digital and the analogical corresponded to the two available types of mental activity.⁸ The nature of the patterning is not so central to Peckham’s thesis as is the assertion that it is predominantly there in mental activity and it is the function of art to interrupt this patterning. That is, art’s function as an adaptive mechanism is as an antidote to the habitual. Its social value lies in its presentation of a practice area where one can embrace the disorienting experience. Since innovative art provides the most incisively disorienting art experience it is the most valuable, according to Peckham. Such thinking might seem to run counter to the structure of art isolated here: the accelerating tendencies toward avoiding the arbitrary would have to be identified with increased patterning. A few distinctions have to be kept in mind. Peckham’s term “disorientation” is one descriptive of the viewer’s response, not necessarily the artist’s. The term involves how art is read, or its semiotic functions. While this is not the area to be explored here it might be touched on in order to make the focus of this investigation clearer. The semiotic function of new art in terms of the viewer’s response has a diachronic structure. New art always disorients; only a posteriori is it seen to have presented orders and patterns. Duchamp in his famous single lecture⁹ would not allow an easy separation between art and its audience, the artifact and its semiotic radiations. For Duchamp the semiotic is more a function of the viewer’s projection and without it the art remains unfinished. That is, the diachronic shift from disorientation to perceived order in the artifact is the progress toward a definition provided by its viewers. The final definition can never be known by the artist in advance, since the work’s completion is in the hands of the viewers. Whether Duchamp, the most aristocratic of artists, was being ironic in making art a gift to democracy is impossible to know. In any case it is not a very convincing argument. What has been left out is the degree to which the elitist corps of subsequent artists, rather than the public viewers, “complete” and define a predecessor’s work by the way in which they move away from it in the future: by ignoring it, by extending its implications, or by having a dialectical relation to it. Duchamp’s still cogent statement of the problem of formalism and his uses of chance are cases in point.