Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Jan Mukařovský's Structural Poetics and Esthetics

Author(s): Jiří Veltruský
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 2, No. 1b (Winter, 1980-1981), pp. 117-157
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772240 .
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 JAN MUKAROVSKY'S
STRUCTURAL POETICS AND ESTHETICS

JIRI VELTRUSKY
Paris

I. INTRODUCTION
Jan Mukaiovsk~ (1891-1975) was one of the greatest theoreticians of literature
and estheticians of his time. He was among the leading architects of the original
structural conception of language, literature, art, folklore and culture which
was produced by the so-called Prague School (the Prague Linguistic Circle).
He outlined a coherent semiotic theory of art as early as 1934 and many of his
essays, on subjects as diverse as sound and meaning in both poetry and prose,
versification, the unit of sense and the context, dialogue, the plurality of views
in sculpture, time in the film, the esthetic function, norm and value, the
phenomenology of functions, the relations between art, culture and society or
the role of the individual in the history of art, remain unsurpassed to this day.
Among the many factors that influenced Mukarovsk,'s thought three were
particularly important - the tradition of Czech esthetics, modern linguistics
and the Russian formalist school of literary theory.
Czech esthetics had pursued a vigorous and quite original course ever since
the period of the Enlightenment, unlike the other related disciplines to which
only a few Czech scholars made original contributions during the 19th and early
20th century. It developed in a sort of symbiosis with the study of literature and
language, and while it set out to construct systematic theories, it also produced
a great many studies of specific problems by philologists, ethnographers,
philosophers, psychologists and sociologists, as well as critics and artists. This
tradition culminated in the work of Mukaiovsk,'s teacher, Otakar Zich, who
was both a scholar and an artist in his own right. His contributions to musi-
cology, poetics and the theory of dramatic art (Zich, 1910, 1918, 1931), though
practically unknown abroad because of the language obstacle, had their place
among the best work that was being done in those fields anywhere in the world
(Mukaiovsk~, 1934b, 1935). Mukafovsk, inherited Zich's determination to
develop esthetics as a scholarly discipline free from any taint of metaphysics,
?Poetics Today, Vol. 2:lb (1980/81), 117-157
118 JIRI VELTRUSKY

although he did not share Zich's positivist distrust of philosophy. At the same
time he considered it vital not to leave aside any of the traditional problems of
this discipline; indeed, he devoted considerable energy to the study of the
esthetic norm and value, of the esthetic phenomena outside art, and such like.
It was thanks to the Prague Linguistic Circle that Mukaiovsk~, who had been
trained in linguistics as well as in esthetics and literary history, found himself
taking part in the actual development of modern linguistics. What made the
Prague School linguistics especially fruitful for the study of art and literature
was that it had radically expanded the sphere of semantics, studying all the
elements of language, sometimes including sound, as vehicles of meaning.
While he concentrated on esthetics and literary studies, Mukaiovsk, himself
also contributed significantly to linguistic theory, especially in such matters as
contextual semantics and the linguistic features of dialogue.
The Prague Linguistic Circle was a joint venture of Czechoslovak and
Russian scholars, closely connected with new currents in contemporary lin-
guistics. Thanks chiefly to Roman Jakobson, who lived in Czechoslovakia
from 1920 to 1938, they all took an interest in the Russian formalist school of
poetics. It had long been recognized in the Czech lands that linguistics and
poetics were interdependent. Jakobson, for his part, represented that par-
ticular trend of Russian formalism which saw linguistics as an essential safe-
guard against the temptation of literary theoreticians to rely on intuition;
already before the Circle was born, he had revolutionized the traditional
approach to Czech versification by relating the prosodic principles to the
phonemics of the language (Jakobson, 1923, 1926, 1974).
Mukarovsky joined the Circle right after its foundation and immediately
took an extremely active part in its work (Mathesius, 1936). By that time he had
published a remarkably original book on the esthetics of Czech verse (1923),
reviewed Jakobson's book on Czech versification (1926) and written a stylistic
analysis of Boiena N6mcova's Babicka, a classic of 19th century Czech narra-
tive; this paper already contained, in germ, the main elements of his future
theory of structure and contextual semantics (1925). His encounter with Russian
formalism provided him with the conceptual framework he needed to cross the
boundary between the analysis of specific materials and the exploration of
general theoretical problems.
Although some of Mukaiovsk~'s major studies were originally published in
French and many others have been translated into English, German, Italian,
Spanish and other languages during the last twenty years or so, his theory has
so far had little influence on contemporary thinking about art and literature.
This may seem strange considering the magnitude of his intellectual achieve-
ment. However, several aspects of his work created positive obstacles to a real
understanding of his thought on the part of the international academic com-
munity:
1. Mukaiovsk~ devoted only a short period of his life, hardly a quarter of a
century, to research. His first major study appeared in 1923 and he wrote his
last scholarly papers during the first few years after World War II, when he was
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 119

already writing political propaganda as well; some of his articles in this period
presented a mixture of serious scholarship and Communist Party propaganda
(Mukaiovsk2, 1947-8). His gradual surrender to the official dogma reached its
nadir soon afterwards, when he first proclaimed the necessity to subordinate
science and art to the Party spirit (Mukarovsk~, 1949) and then publicly
repudiated and condemned the whole of his past work (Mukarovsk~, 1951). He
never resumed his theoretical studies again, although the ban on his original
conceptions was gradually lifted towards the mid-1960's.
2. Though he wrote many important papers on specific works or aspects of
theater, film, architecture, painting, sculpture and folk art, and devoted many
pages of his studies in general esthetics to all forms of art and to esthetic
phenomena outside art, the overwhelming majority of his concrete analyses
concerned literature, and here he confined himself almost exclusively to mod-
ern literature in Czech. Apart from intermittent references to French litera-
ture, his paper on intonation as a factor of poetic rhythm is the only place
where he based his demonstration systematically on French and German, as
well as Czech, material (Mukaiovsk2, 1933).2
3. Mukaiovskp's concentration on Czech literature makes it all the harder
for scholars unfamiliar with Czech to grasp his thought since most of his studies
in general esthetics and theory of literature were closely linked to his empirical
analyses. He regarded theoretical work as a complicated interplay between
epistemology and the analysis of specific facts. In his view, any scholar's choice
of facts to be examined was to some extent predetermined (whether conscious-
ly or not) by his philosophical outlook, that is, by the hypothetical anticipation

'The purpose of the present paper is to review Mukarovsk3's original contribution to literary
theory and esthetics, not to examine the complex motivations of his political capitulation. Two
points, however, must be made here. First, the standard explanation that Mukafovsk~'s philosophy
moved toward historicalmaterialism in the course of the 1940's is totally unfounded. Second, it is to
be noted that the "Party spirit" which destroyed Mukarovsk~'s scholarly abilities continues to
impose its censorship to this day, even beyond the frontiers of the Communist world. Witness the
ominous notes appended by the Yale University Press to the forewords to the two collections of
Mukarovsk2's papers published in 1977 and 1978. The following note stands at the end of Wellek's
foreword to the first: "In the above Foreword, Professor Wellek had hoped to provide a fuller
account of Jan Mukarovsk~'s career between 1948 and 1971 (cf. Wellek, 1969). However, under
the conditions of the contract with the Czech copyright holder we were compelled to delete this
information, despite all efforts to reach an agreement" (Mukarovsk?, 1977). Steiner's introduction
to the second volume is accompanied by the following note: "Terms imposed by contract required
that this introduction be approved by the Czech copyright holder before publication. It has been
slightly edited in consequence" (Mukaiovsk2, 1978).
2In Wellek's view, this extreme concentration on Czech literature showed that Mukaiovsk2 was
"resolutely provincial" (Wellek, 1969: 26). Perhaps a more pertinent explanation can be found in
Mukafovsk)'s deep conviction that a work of verbal art is perfectly accessible only in the reader's
own mother tongue, where he commands the whole wealth of associations connecting the words
and the forms of the language to one another and to reality (Mukarovsk3, 1940c). In this respect he
has much in common with another leading figure of the Prague School, the Geneva linguist Serge
Karcevski, whose far-reaching contributions to general linguistics were based exclusively on the
study of his mother tongue, namely contemporary urban Russian (Jakobson, 1956).
120 JIRI VELTRUSKY

of the results such an examination might yield; at the same time, the original
epistemological approach was subject to revision in the light of new materials.
In this way Mukaiovsk~ opposed his conception of scientific method to posi-
tivism on the one hand and metaphysics on the other (Mukaiovsk~, 1939-40).
In practical terms it meant that the studies he wrote on general problems
were often in the nature of theoretical conclusions, sometimes of an avowedly
provisional character, which he had drawn from various concrete analyses.
When they are severed from these analyses, mostly unsuitable for translation
because of their concentration on Czech material, a great many implications of
the theoretical studies remain hidden.
4. Another consequence of his conception of theoretical work as an interplay
between epistemology and concrete analysis was that Mukaiovsks's thought
was in constant flux. It was mainly under the influence of Roman Jakobson that
toward the end of the 1920's he became interested in Hegel's dialectics. But his
own way of thinking provided a striking example of the dialectical process. An
idea that first appeared in his work as an incidental remark, and sometimes
reappeared under this form in various papers over several years, often devel-
oped eventually into one of his crucial points. At the same time an idea that
was gradually becoming obsolete and inadequate was sometimes maintained
for a long time, even indefinitely, while its interpretation gradually changed.
Mukarovsk~ was aware of all the intricacies and dangers involved in abandon-
ing any concept which had proved fruitful, even though it might be theoretical-
ly inadequate. He explicitly stated that it was preferable to keep the traditional
concepts alive by constantly renewing their meaning, rather than to replace
them precipitately with new ones (Mukarovsk3, 1939-40). As a matter of fact,
the reason why a concept is inaccurate is more often than not that it implies
some oversimplification. Therefore, if one inaccurate concept is eliminated, it
may become necessary to create an entire set of new concepts instead.
5. Mukaiovsk~ gave up his scholarly work at a crucial point in his own
intellectual development, when he was getting ready to produce a full-fledged
treatise on esthetics. He intended to bring together all his theories and findings
and revise them in a systematic fashion so as to give each one its appropriate
place in this magnum opus. The project preoccupied him from 1942 onwards. It
gave rise to several papers in which he set out to reexamine and rethink, or to
put in a broader context, some of the fundamental points of his whole theory,
such as the concept of the esthetic function (Mukaiovsk,, 1942a, b), intention-
ality in art (Mukaiovsk~, 1943) and the semantic peculiarity of the word in
verbal art (Mukaiovsk5, 1946). Precisely because so many of his general papers
had been closely linked to concrete analyses of mostly Czech material and
because his thought was so fluid, a systematic exposition of the theory would
have been of paramount importance. Since the project did not materialize, his
work has remained a torso.
Despite all this, present-day esthetics and literary theory cannot afford
simply to ignore Mukaiovsk~'s conceptions and findings if they are to deal
adequately with the problems that face them. To say the least, a better
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 121

knowledge of his work could help them to avoid some of the most dangerous
pitfalls. Perhaps interest in Mukaiovsk~ will increase after the recent publica-
tion of two large selections of his studies in the theory of literature (Mukaiov-
ski, 1977) and in esthetics (Mukaiovsk3, 1978), translated into English and
edited by John Burbank and Peter Steiner.

II. POETICS
Erlich's book on Russian formalism (Erlich, 1955) has spread the entirely
mistaken notion that in the study of literature the Czechoslovak structuralism
was just an offspring of the Russian formal method. In fact it was as much a
negation of the formalist school as its continuation. It developed in several
stages and every stage negated, dialectically, some basic principle of Russian
formalism. Jakobson set it on this course when he had the idea that only a
systematic exposure to Hegelian dialectics could do away with the limitations
of the formal method, and it was mainly thanks to the closely associated work
of Jakobson and Mukaiovsk~ that this program was gradually put into effect
and the new conceptual system took shape.3
The very fact that the new theory could arise only as a result of several
successive negations of the Russian formal method proves the extraordinary
vitality of the method. Throughout its development the Prague School never
ceased to refer to the findings of the formalists, either as definitive discoveries
or as starting points for fruitful polemics. Moreover, as Matejka points out, the
dialectical negation which eventually led to the creation of the Prague School
theory actually sprang from the internal contradictions within the Russian
formalist school itself and from a conflict between its different streams (Matejka,
1976: 269-71).

1. From Form to Structure

Mukaiovsk?'s role in this involved historical process was itself complicated.
Russian formalism strongly affected his thinking but at a time when he was
already a mature scholar. He drew on its findings and methodology while
pursuing his inquiry into problems which had preoccupied him a long time
before. It was his book on Karel Hynek Macha's Mdj, the most important
poetic work of Czech Romanticism (Mukaiovsk3, 1928), and his paper on the
connection between the phonic line and word order in Czech verse (Mukaiov-
ski, 1929a) that reflected the influence of the Russian school the most strongly.
Yet both studies logically followed on his earlier works and the influence of the
formalists combined organically with the influence of such Western thinkers as
Eduard Sievers, Franz Saran, Antoine Meillet, Maurice Grammont, Paul Ver-
rier, Karl Vossler, Leo Spitzer, Paul Valery and, of course, Otakar Zich.
Perhaps even more characteristic is the fact that by far the most important
feature of both studies was their careful investigation of the complex structural

3Important contributions were also made by Rene Wellek, Dmitrij Cyzevskyj (Tschizewskij),
Josef Hrabdk and Felix Vodicka, as well as Vilem Mathesius and Bohuslav Havrdnek.
122 JIRI VELTRUSKY

relations between each component of a literary work and all its other com-
ponents. In this Mukarovsk~ was a typical representative of the Prague School
linguistics. He explained later that though he had shared the formalists' view of
literature and art as an autonomous area independent of outside influences, his
growing interest in the semantic construction of the work of art had prevented
him from wholeheartedly adopting the formalist position (Mukarovsky, 1941b).
The impact of the formal method on Mukarovsk~'s thinking was indeed
somewhat offset by the influence of linguistics. It was in consequence of de
Saussure's distinction between parole and langue that the work of art came to
be seen as a concrete manifestation of an immaterial, supra-individual, con-
stantly changing structure (Mukaiovskg, 1941b). As early as 1929 Bogatyrev
and Jakobson characterized the literary work as a fact of la parole (Bogatyrev
and Jakobson, 1929). The collective "Theses" which the Prague Linguistic
Circle submitted in the same year to the First Congress of Slavic Philologists
described the language of the literary work as a form of parole, or an individual
act of speech, and related it not only to the contemporary langue but also to the
living literary tradition ("Theses," 1929: Thesis 3(c)1).
As soon as the work of art was seen as a concrete manifestation of a
constantly changing supra-individual structure, a new complication arose. The
concept of structure manifestly applied to an individual work as well. The term
seemed to have a double meaning. But the ambiguity was more apparent than
real. On the one hand, with respect to an individual work, the term referred to
a quality belonging not to the artifact itself but to its correlate in the perceiver's
consciousness, sometimes called the "esthetic object." The structure of this
esthetic object was a network of multifarious relations among the components.
The structure of a work, therefore, though related to, was not identical with,
the material organization of the artifact. Mukaiovsk~ sometimes described it
metaphorically as a dynamic equilibrium of the forces represented by the compo-
nents (Mukaiovsk3, 1939-40). On the other hand, the structure of the individ-
ual literary work was not separate from the constantly changing structure lodged
in the collective consciousness under the form of the living tradition, but was per-
ceived against the background of this tradition. Furthermore, various pheno-
mena situated between the two, such as the complete work of an artist, a whole
literary school, a historical style, etc. were regarded as structures, too.
Mukafovsk3 later redefined the whole problem in its various aspects. First of
all, what was called living tradition was in fact the artistic structure properly so
called. It was a social reality comparable, mutatis mutandis, to language, law,
etc. Secondly, the structures of individual works of art were only single, often
quite ephemeral, moments of this ever-changing yet continuously persisting
structure. Finally, the material works of art were "realizations" of these
moments. Their initial structure was apt to change against the background of
the ever-changing artistic structure ("living tradition") lodged in the collective
consciousness. In this sense, even the structure of an individual work of art
appeared as a process (Mukarovsk~, 1945).4
4The dialectics of the three aspects of structure involves two related antinomies: one between the
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 123

The gradual development of the concept of structure constituted the first

negation of the formal method in literary theory.
Mukaiovsk2's research into the semantic construction of the literary work
or, to put it differently, into the construction of its sense implied the concept of
structure even before this concept began to crystalize. This is clearly illustrated
by his paper on Bozena Nemcovd's Babicka, a structural analysis avant la lettre
(Mukarovsk2, 1925). The one stylistic feature of this novel that caught the eye
was its vividness. Yet the author's vocabulary was extremely inconspicuous,
making a very sparing use of metaphors and words designating colors, sounds
and movements. Nemcovd had a strong tendency to divide every topic - be it
an episode, an action or a piece of scenery - into a great many details, and to
break up even these into still more minute elements. She was also inclined to
present simultaneous aspects of an event through a succession of sentences or,
on the contrary, assemble in a single sentence details belonging to many events
scattered in space and time. However, the text did not tend to disintegrate into
a mass of separate details because none of them was semantically independent
of the rest. This was due partly to the inconspicuous vocabulary, partly to the
rapid succession of the details, a sort of flow in which they were to some degree
apt to merge together. This rapid succession in its turn resulted from a set of
factors: on the semantic plane, from the absence of drastic semantic reversals
between successive details; in the syntactic construction, from the predomi-
nance of parataxis, frequently combined with asyndeton; on the sound level,
from the continual, smoothly undulating intonation. The general effect of
vividness was therefore due to the fact that as the details followed one another
they built up a homogenous semantic atmosphere in which the reader found
himself immersed. On the epistemological plane, the novel conveyed a har-
monious image of reality where everything was part of an endless stream, of
constant coming and going, springing up and withering away, coming to the
fore and fading into the background.
Although he was already exploring the semantic construction of the literary
work and gradually developing the concept of structure, Mukarovsk2 did adopt

structure as living tradition and the structure of the individual work of art, the other between the
structure of the individual work and the material qualities it has as an artifact. To remove the
difficulties this dialectics has been creating for students of Mukaiovsk2's theory, Steiner substitutes
"code" for "structure" when he deals with the living tradition, and frequently uses the term
"organization" in reference to the material work (Steiner, 1978). This introduction of the term
"code" seems merely to mask the problem, especially since in Mukarovsk2's own view the living
tradition was the artistic structure properly so called. However, the emphasis on the "organization"
of the artifact, as distinct from the structure of its correlate in the perceiver's mind, could be very
fruitful. It tends to bring out the fact that the perception of the work of art is complicated not only
because it involves the living tradition of art but also because the relationship between the qualities
of the artifact and those of the structure called forth in the perceiver's consciousness is itself
complicated. The need to explore this second relationship is underlined by Herta Schmid, who tries
to define its various aspects. But the model she has worked out, though intended to revise
Mukarovsk)'s theory from within its own logic, tends to sever the connections between the
structure of the work and the living tradition (Schmid, 1976).
124 JIRI VELTRUSKY

the formalist conception without any apparent reservations in two methodolo-

gical texts, the "Preface" to his book on Macha's Mdj, dated October 1928
(Mukaiovsk3, 1928), and a popularizing lecture on the general problems of
contemporary poetics in April 1929 (Mukarovsk~, 1929b).5 Mukaiovsk~ did
not include this lecture in his selected papers on poetics in 1941 and when it was
reprinted in 1971 he pointed out that it was to be considered purely informa-
tive, not an integral part of his own intellectual development (Mukaiovsk3,
1971:136). Nonetheless, the two wholeheartedly formalist statements cannot
easily be discarded because they were Mukaiovsk~'s first attempts ever to
define his general approach. As has already been pointed out, the principal
contribution of the formal method to Mukaiovsk~'s thinking was to provide
him with an acceptable theoretical framework.
The paradoxical aspect of Mukarovsk3's adoption of the formalist theory in
the two texts just mentioned is that they coincide in time with the first
structuralist critique of that theory, the theses on problems in the study of
literature, jointly formulated by two of the leading formalists, Tynjanov and
Jakobson. This text rejected, among other things, the tendency to isolate
literature from other historical phenomena and the attempts to explain specific
changes in the literary structure by the immanent laws of its history alone. It
defined the literary structure as a set of multifarious relations, governed by its
own specific laws just as all the other historical phenomena were respectively
governed by theirs. The correlation between the literary "series" and other
historical "series" was itself subject to structural laws. Immanent laws of
literary history could not fully explain specific changes in the structure because
they only limited the range of possibilities at any given juncture but did not
determine the choice of any one solution; this depended on the correlation
between the literary and the other historical "series." The correlation was a
"system of systems" (Tynjanov and Jakobson, 1928).
This was another negation of the formal method. Mukaiovsk? translated
Tynjanov and Jakobson's program into actual literary analysis in his book on
Milota Zdirad Poldk's monumental descriptive poem Vznesenost prirody, a
highly intriguing phenomenon in early 19th century Czech literature (Muka-
rovskp, 1934c); Jakobson himself applied the principles he had worked out
with Tynjanov when he set out to elucidate the place of Hussite poetry in the
history of medieval Czech literature (Jakobson, 1936).
Considered a historic event by the leading critics and literary scholars when it
was published, Poldk's poem fell into oblivion a few years later and it was not
till some four decades later that it began to attract attention again, no longer as
a living poetic work but as a fact of literary history; toward the end of the
century it was violently attacked by a prominent literary historian and greatly
5This lecture was delivered at a congress of Czechoslovak high-school teachers of philosophy,
philology and history, where the Prague Linguistic Circle tried to enlarge its domestic audience
after the success it had obtained the previous year at the First International Congress of Linguistics
in The Hague; Vilem Mathesius, Bohumil Trnka and Bohuslav Havranek also lectured at this high-
school teachers' congress (Mathesius, 1936).
 JAN MUKAROVSKY' 125

admired by one of the most outstanding poets of the day. Obviously, a poetic
work that had such a strange history was an ideal subject for a scholar who
wished to test the viability and fruitfulness of a new approach to literature.
Mukaiovsk~ studied Polik's poem in its most varied aspects: its verse system,
syntax and sound pattern, the rhythmic, stylistic and semantic implications of
its very distinctive vocabulary, the links between the morphological and seman-
tic characteristics of the author's use of language on the one hand and the
descriptive genre on the other, and so on. At every step of his minute analysis
he explored the interplay between the living literary structure and the new
tendencies as well as between the multifarious factors, both literary and extra-
literary (such as authoritative scholarly opinion, remote religious traditions,
national objectives, appeal to "high" society, etc.) by which the various aspects
of the poem had been determined.
He subsequently explained that in this book he had tried to deal with the
work of art as a concrete manifestation of an immaterial, supra-individual,
constantly changing structure; the concept of structure had by that time so
firmly established the autonomy of art that it was possible, without calling this
autonomy in any way into question, to take account of the relations between
art and other social phenomena (Mukaiovsk2, 1941b).

2. Literary Semantics
Meanwhile, Mukaiovsky developed his semiotic conception of art. Its origin-
ality lay in regarding the work of art not only as made up of signs but also as a
sign in itself. He first expounded this view in a paper produced the same year
that his book on Poldk's poem was published (Mukaiovsk2, 1934d). This, too,
was a radical negation of the formal method but it was not immediately
obvious - either to Mukaiovsk, himself or to his associates of the Prague
School - because in this case there were no explicit polemics with the formal-
ist conception.
The implied negation emerged gradually as the work of art came to be
conceived as a single, though complex, sign and this in its turn led to the
discovery that any literary structure, whether of a single work or of an author's
complete production or of an entire school or period, was determined in all its
components and aspects by what Mukaiovsk2 called a "semantic gesture" -
the "gesture" by which the poet selected the elements of his work and merged
them into a unity of sense. He defined this new concept as an intention, in the
phenomenological (rather than psychological) sense of the term; it was the-
matically unspecified - or, to put it differently, qualitatively indeterminate
in itself, yet by no means abstract because it constituted the dynamic construc-
tive principle acting in the same way throughout the structure and determining
its smallest parts as well as the whole. Only the reconstruction of this single,
although far from simple, semantic intention could prove conclusively that
despite all its diversity the structure was one and indivisible. The traditional
division between language and content disappeared by the same token since all
126 JIRI VELTRUSKY

the meanings, both linguistic and thematic, resulted from the same semantic
"gesture" (Mukarovsky, 1938, 1939c, 1940c).
In his effort to define this single constructive principle in different literary
structures, Mukaiovsk2 increasingly concentrated on contextual semantics, in
particular on the sentence as the lowest unit of sense of a dynamic nature (that
is, realized in time). The principles that governed the semantic construction of
the sentence, which he discovered in the process, appeared to govern the
semantic construction of more extended contexts as well. The construction of
every semantic context resulted from the interplay of three principles, namely
the unity of its sense, the semantic accumulation, and the polarity between the
whole context and the single units which made it up (Mukaiovsk2, 1940c):6
1. The unity of sense was an intention implied in the semantic context. As
soon as a sequence of words appeared as part of a context, the perceiver
automatically tried to grasp the integral sense of this context, although it
remained merely potential as long as the context was not finished.
2. The principle of semantic accumulation had two aspects. On the one
hand, the units of meaning making up a context were perceived as a continuous
succession of meanings, irrespective of any syntactical links, subordinations,
etc. On the other hand, each of these units was perceived against the back-
ground of the preceding ones. The combined effect was that when the context
was completed, all its component units were present in the perceiver's mind, in
the same order as they had come up.7
3. The polarity between individual units of meaning and the context sprang
up from the interdependence of the context and the units which made it up.
Every unit of meaning tended to enter into an immediate relation to the reality
6With respect to the third principle, Mukarovsk~ mostly spoke about the opposition of semantic
statics and dynamics. The reason why I prefer to avoid these terms here as far as possible is that
they in fact undermine his claim that the opposition can be found not only in the language context
but in any context made up of meanings. I believe this claim is fully justified. But what is "static"
and what is "dynamic" depends on the nature of the sign system. In language and music, single
units are static, that is, grasped by a single act, whereas the context is dynamic because it is
perceived in time, as it unfolds. In the pictorial sign, however, it is usually (though not necessarily)
the other way round: the whole context is grasped by a single act whereas its various components
are gradually identified one by one, as the picture is viewed in time. In sculpture, the distinction
between the static and dynamic meanings is a priori indeterminate, depending on the specific way in
which the organizing principles of sculpture combine in every given case. These are very important
and quite complicated problems of the semiotics of art, which obviously lie outside the scope of the
present paper.
7To illustrate this combined effect of the two aspects of semantic accumulation, Mukarovsk) drew
a diagram in several respects similar to the one Husserl used in his 1904-1905 course on internal
time consciousness (Husserl, 1928). This resemblance has led Peter and Wendy Steiner to think
that Mukarovsk, derived his concept of the semantic context from Husserl's time object (Steiner &
when
Steiner, 1976; Steiner, 1976). As a matter of fact, Mukarovsk, did not know Husserl's course
he wrote the paper in which he defined the three principles and drew the diagram in question
(Mukarovsk,, 1940c), and when he learnt about Husserl's diagram a year later, he expressed
same
surprise at the similarities; had he known it in time, he could have improved his own. At the
of accumulation of meanings was semantically more elaborate than
time, Mukarovsk2's concept
Husserl's concept of the time object (Veltrusk), 1977: 28-29).
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 127

which it signified by itself, yet as part of the context it could establish contact
with reality only through the intermediary of the context as a whole. That is to
say, the context transformed the units of meaning, while at the same time every
unit put up a resistance to the context by bringing pressure to bear, through its
own semantic associations, on the direction in which the semantic intention of
the context pointed, and indeed even strove for complete independence.
The polarity between the single units and the context seemed to be much
more complicated than the other two principles, but it proved easier to ana-
lyze. Mukaiovsk~'s first attempt to do so can be traced as far back as his article
on the style of Bozena N6mcovd's Babicka. It may be recalled that in this early
paper he found a close connection between the author's inconspicuous vocabu-
lary, the absence of drastic semantic reversals from one detail to the next, the
predominance of parataxis and the smoothly undulating intonation; these
factors concurred to prevent the details into which every topic was divided
from becoming semantically independent and brought them forward in a quick
succession where they tended to merge and cluster so as to create a homogen-
ous semantic atmosphere (Mukarovsk~, 1925). In terms of Mukarovsk,'s even-
tual contextual semantics, this could have been described as an instance of the
context strongly predominating over single units of meaning.
The problem of the polarity reappeared in an article Mukaiovsk~ wrote in
the early 1930's about Karel Hlaviaek, a Czech symbolist poet. The article fo-
cused on Hlaviaek's vocabulary, namely his constant repetition of the same words
and his tendency to accumulate words of similarsound, with the result that his vo-
cabulary was strikinglymonotonous. The primarysemanticconclusionMukaiovsk4
drew from these observations was simple enough: the poet was concerned with
what might be called the microscopicdifferentiationand confrontationof a few lexi-
cal meanings rather than with the infinite variety of many. But in the same breath,
so to speak, Mukarovsk, added another considerationwhich went far beyond the
immediate implicationsof this analysis. He pointed out that an essential feature of
every context was that its sense developed gradually,in contrastwith the meaningof
a static semantic unit, such as a word, which was given by a single, momentary
act. And he observed that in Hlavdcek's poetry the monotony of the vocabu-
lary hampered and counteracted the gradual unfolding of the context and its
integral sense; the static quality of the meaning of single words superseded and
negated the dynamic quality of the sense of the context (Mukaiovsk~, 1932c).
In a paper published the same year on an entirely different subject - the
relations between standard and poetic language - Mukaiovsk~ mentioned
that another Czech symbolist poet, Otakar Biezina, brought out the essence of
the meaning carried by the sentence and the dynamic nature of its construction
by combining words within it in such a way as to produce constant semantic
shifts and reversals and to create a certain tension between the topic of the
sentence and the meanings of the words. He did not pursue this analysis
because his purpose was merely to illustrate how poetry sometimes helped to
refine the standard language. And, to illustrate yet another point in the same
article, he mentioned in passing that intonation and the word as a unit of
128 JIRI VELTRUSKY

meaning could not stand out at the same time, because the semantic independ-
ence of the word within the context disrupted the continuity of the intonation
(Mukaiovsk~, 1932b). The complicated relationship between the technique of
naming and the sound structure of the text was eventually to become one of the
crucial points of Mukarovsk~'s contextual semantics. For the time being, his
interest in intonation went in a different direction.8 But it is fairly obvious that
at this stage he was already aware of the semantic polarity between the context
and its single units, although he did not yet distinguish the sense of the context
from the theme of the literary work. As he was to discover later, the sense of
the context was the sense the speaker introduced into the theme by virtue of
the attitude he adopted toward the theme and of his valuation of it (Mukaiov-
ski, 1940b).
This polarity was still the main issue in the major studies Mukaiovsk$
devoted several years later to the problems of the "semantic gesture" and
contextual semantics in the work of the 19th century romantic poet, Karel
Hynek Mdcha (Mukaiovsk~, 1938) and the 20th century prose writer (Karel
Capek (Mukaiovsk~, 1939b, c), studies from which he derived his three princi-
ples of the semantic construction of context (Mukaiovsky, 1940c). Here the
analysis was, of course, much more comprehensive and refined than in the
earlier papers, but the focus remained basically the same. Mdcha's semantic
structure was an extreme case of single units of meaning achieving independ-
ence at the expense of a disrupted context. In Capek's work, on the contrary,
the main emphasis fell on the connections between the units, on their interpre-
tation and their merging in the context. The meaning first conveyed by a unit at
the moment it was uttered was not definitive but kept shifting afterwards, in
the light of the subsequent unfolding of the context. At the same time, the
words were chosen and combined in such a way as to oscillate between two
simultaneous meanings, such as a literal and a figurative sense.
Despite this opposition, the two writers' ways of constructing the sense of a
work were the same in one important respect: both tended to conceal from the
reader the reality to which the work referred (Mukaiovsk$, 1939c). Since they
shaped the polarity between the context and its units in contrary fashion, this
common tendency, too, was based on diametrically opposed procedures. In
Mdcha's work it arose from the fact that the semantic context was not only
fragmented so as to give independence to the single units but was also, as a
rule, in the nature of a torso; a great many of its components were left for the
reader to guess (Mukaiovsk$, 1938). The reality to which Capek's novels,
stories and plays referred remained hidden for the opposite reason that the
context was left open (Mukaiovsk3, 1939c). In this respect, then, the major

"it led up to his study of intonation as a factor of poetic rhythm, in which he showed that in
French, German and Czech - and indeed in all languages where intonation is a matter of the
- the contour of poetic rhythm resulted from the
phonology of the sentence but not of the word
interplay of two virtual intonation patterns, namely the sentence intonation determined by the
semantic structure of the sentence, which varied from line to line, and the recurrent rhythmic
intonation (Mukarovsk,, 1933).
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 129

studies of concrete materials which led up to Mukaiovsk)'s formulation of the

three principles governing the construction of the semantic context did not stop
at the polarity between the context and the single units. Though focusing on
that polarity, they also explored the first principle, namely the unity of the
sense conveyed by the context.
The real nature of the interplay between the three principles appeared only
later, in Mukaiovsk2's unsuccessful attempt to write a book about the impor-
tant avant-garde novelist (and a close personal friend of Mukarovsk2's),
Vladislav Vancura, executed by the Nazis on June 1, 1942.9 The study of
Vancura was so revealing for the simple reason that he, unlike Mdcha and
Capek, did not base the semantic construction of the context mainly on the
polarity between the context and each separate unit of meaning but on seman-
tic accumulation. Fragmentary and incomplete as it was, Mukaiovsk2's work
on Vancura showed how interdependent the three principles were and how the
action of each one was determined by the hierarchy of all three.
Semantic accumulation was brought out in Vancura's prose by his tendency
to include in every sentence and every broader context meanings as numerous
and as heterogeneous as possible, that is to say, belonging to the most different
and mutually distant spheres of reality. This so much complicated and ham-
pered the process of accumulation that the reader could never lose sight of the
fact that the unfolding of the context was wholly subject to the narrator's
decision. There were striking semantic gaps and reversals between successive
units of meaning such as words, segments of a sentence and sentences, with the
result that each unit asserted its independence to the detriment of the continui-
ty of the context; this, of course, affected the polarity between the units and the
context. Thus the author's specific method of semantic accumulation deter-
mined the shape this polarity took in his work. But the tendency of every unit
of meaning to relate to reality directly, without the intermediary of the context,
did not weaken the syntactic cohesion of the sentence, as it did in Mdcha's
work. On the contrary, Vancura's syntax was strikingly elaborate. Since the
polarity of the unit of meaning and the context was subordinated to the
semantic accumulation, the semantically independent units were enclosed in a
complicated, yet rigorous, syntactic framework. Vancura's choice of words was
marked by a double tendency to exploit the fact that, though constituting a
static unit of meaning in relation to the context, the word itself was potentially
9Mukarovsky had great difficulty in writing this monograph. If my recollection is correct, he
actually drafted no more than two chapters, only one of which was published, many years later, in a
collection of some of his articles, lectures and manuscripts (Mukafovsk?, 1944-45). The date
indicated by the editors of the collection, the second half of the 1940's, is erroneous. In fact,
Mukaiovski worked on the Vancura monograph during the last years of World War II. He may
have tried to redraft the chapter once again later, but I remember reading it during the war.
Therefore the date has been corrected to 1944-45 in the list of references attached to the present
paper. It was never clear why Mukarovsk2, who as a rule worked very fast, found it so difficult to
write the study on Vancura and why he finally failed. This is of more than anecdotic importance. It
tends to indicate that even before he succumbed to the pressures and temptations of totalitarianism
he had already experienced some serious intellectual crisis.
130 JIRI VELTRUSKY

dynamic: on the one hand he turned to account the word's potential ability to
become the source of a whole context either by its semantic associations or by
its sound; on the other, he strove to particularize the act of naming by choosing
such words as would single out whatever they referred to and separate it from
the continuum of reality, not only by designating it but also by bringing a value
judgement to bear on it (Mukarovsk~, 1944-45).
Mukarovsk2 did not examine the way the principle of the unity of sense
operated in Vancura's construction of the context, but a brief attempt to fill the
gap may be in order. Vancura subordinates this principle, too, to the semantic
accumulation, not, like Mdcha and Capek, to the polarity between the unit of
meaning and the context. As a result, the integral sense of his context does not
merge with the theme but consists only in what distinguishes the context from
the theme, namely the valuation of the theme by the speaker (be it the author,
the narrator, or the characters). To put it differently, the unity of sense is to
some extent reduced to the minimal differentia of the context, the value
judgement. In fact, value judgements are implied both in the narrator's open
demonstration that the unfolding of the context depends on his own decision
and in the choice of words capable not only of designating a thing but also of
implicitly attributing a certain value to it. Moreover, since the unity of sense is
subordinated to the semantic accumulation, the stress on valuation does not
lead in any one of Vancura's works to an integral value judgement. Far from
sitting in judgement over reality, humanity and society, the author uses all sorts
of procedures, among which irony is the most frequent, to impose the task of
valuation on the reader himself.
Contextual semantics also permitted Mukaiovsk2 to clarify the linguistic
relations between dialogue and monologue. Though the distinction between
these two basic aspects of the semantic organization of an utterance depended
on whether the utterance came from one speaker or more, the differences
between them could not be studied without contextual semantics. The interpene-
tration and alteration of two or more semantic contexts and the corresponding
semantic shifts and reversals were, indeed, among the chief characteristics of
dialogue (Mukarovsk?, 1940b, c).
In the last analysis, Mukarovsk2's contextual semantics centered on the
classic problem of the relations between signatum and denotatum. Depending
on the specific characteristics of a context and of its component units, as well as
on the way these units combined, a unit of meaning could relate directly or
indirectly to the particular reality or thing it signified, or could hover between
the two possibilities; when the link was indirect, it could be mediated by
another, contiguous, unit (subordination) or by the context itself and its own
relation to the world of things. Within this conceptual framework, the distinc-
tion between the linguistic and the thematic elements of a literary work was no
longer qualitative but derived from the contribution the various units of mean-
ing were to make to the semantic structure of the whole work. Thematic
elements, too, were meanings. They differed from the linguistic meanings only
by being more closely related to the world of things; there were many degrees
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 131

of this closeness, unevenly distributed between the units of which a work was
made up, be they words, groups of words, sentences or broader segments
(Mukarovsk~, 1938, 1939c).
The Russian formalists never succeeded in applying the same method of
analysis to poetry and prose. Verse was the natural starting point in the study
of poetry and the immanent development of poetry was derived from the
history of verse. By contrast, in analyzing prose they concentrated on the
compositional procedures and devices or, to put it crudely, on the formal
aspects of the plot.'l In this respect the Russian scholars never severed their
links with the 19th century formalism of the Herbartian school. Mukaiovskp's
new contextual semantics enabled the analysis of prose to be founded on the
sentence just as the analysis of poetry was founded on the verse, and so
overcame the methodological dichotomy of the formalists. He was convinced
that the history of the sentence would provide a solid thread in the study of the
immanent development of narrative prose (Mukaiovskp, 1940c). Accordingly,
he decided to write a history of the sentence in modern Czech narrative prose.
This was to complement his history of modern Czech verse (Mukaiovskp,
1934a) which, together with Jakobson's study of Old Czech verse (Jakobson,
1934), was among the Prague School's most important and influential contribu-
tions to literary history. The project unfortunately failed to materialize.
This did not mean that no more negations were to come. On the contrary,
Mukarovsk~ was now intellectually ready to revise the tenets of the formal
method and of his own earlier approach one by one, be it the somewhat
schematic opposition between the esthetic and the practical function (Muka-
iovsk3, 1939-40, 1940-41, 1942a, b), the oversimplifiedview of the intentionality
of the artistic structure (Mukaiovsk/, 1943a), the relations between the writer
and his work (Mukarovsk~, 1941a) or the role of the individual in the history of
literature (Mukarovsk~, 1943-45). That was why he planned to write a system-
atic treatise on esthetics; but that, too, never materialized.
Nonetheless, the discovery that a single, identifiable semantic intention or
"gesture" determined the structure in its entirety, including every one of its
components, constituted a watershed in the development of Mukaiovskp's
thought, and of the Prague School literary theory and esthetics in general. The
concept of structure, though still open to further elaboration and refinement,
was firmly defined. At the same time it was clearly distinguished from other
1
contemporary concepts of the whole.

3. Structure and Other Concepts of the Whole

In the course of an illuminating controversy between structuralism and holism
which took place in the Prague Linguistic Circle in the second half of 1945,
'0In this respect, the Russian formalists were very close to the early 20th century German
philologists' "compositional analysis." However, their knowledge of this school of thought seems
to have been limited (Doleiel, 1973).
''All these concepts, including that of structure, arose in reaction to the atomizing tendency of the
positivist era.
132 JIRI VELTRUSKY

Mukarovsk~ contrasted structure as a phenomenon specific to linguistics, es-

thetics, social science and the humanities in general with other types of whole,
which existed in a much broader area of reality, namely the Gestalt, the
context and the organism (or structure in the biological sense) (Mukaiovskp,
1945).
Structure was defined on this occasion as a whole which was not closed and,
therefore, was not determined by its overall shape or contour. What made it a
whole was that the various types of its components were related to each other
in a consistent fashion, and all the relations between them were unified or
integrated to such a degree that the structure could be seen as a hierarchy of
components. Moreover, these relations were not only positive but also nega-
tive, that is, they could harmonize but they could also clash; and the negative
ones, too, contributed to the unity of the structure. Contradictions within the
structure helped to differentiate and individualize it. Finally, as already men-
tioned, the work of art as an artifact was merely a "realization" of a single
fleeting moment in the existence of the structure properly so called, the
immaterial structure of art constantly changing in the collective consciousness;
mutatis mutandis this last point, too, applied to any structure in the field of the
humanities.
By contrast, Gestalt was a closed whole which, in addition to the qualities
stemming from its parts, possessed yet another, the so-called Gestalt quality; it
was this that characterized it as a whole. Wholes of the Gestalt kind also
existed in art, so that the theory of art had to distinguish them from structures.
Such was the case, for instance, of melody in music, of the verse in poetry and
of composition in different arts. To illustrate the point, Mukaiovsk~ took as
examples the verse and composition, especially literary composition.
As long as verse was analyzed from the angle of its constituent elements,
such as feet and hemistichs, poetic rhythm was inaccessible to theoretical
explanation. But when Meillet discovered that it was based on the verse as a
whole, and that the internal organization of the verse was just a diversification
of this indivisible unit (Meillet, 1923), he opened the way to the study of every
sort of poetic rhythm, using any types of verse, including the most complicated,
the most irregular and the freest. A typical Gestalt, the verse was not a
structure. It was a closed whole and its internal articulation itself served to
enclose it in its wholeness.
As for composition, it could be defined as a set of procedures on which the
Gestalt quality of the work of art reposed. Compositional analysis which set
out to reassemble the work of art from its parts instead of starting from the
global arrangement of those parts - from the Gestalt quality of the work -
was doomed to sterility. At the same time, the minutest compositional analysis
could not get at the structural characteristics of the work. Proportionality,
symmetry, concentricity and similar compositional devices were not structural
features, although composition was strongly affected by the structure and could
be used as a symptom in the study of the structure.12
12Herta Schmid considers that Mukaiovskp did not pay enough attention to the role of Gestalt
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 133

The context was not a whole unless it was closed. Its basic principle was that
the units of meaning succeeded one another in an order which could not be
modified without modifying the whole. In this succession, the sense accumu-
lated step by step, so that both the whole and the single successive units
acquired a definitive relation to reality only when the context came to an end.
Although its integral sense remained uncertain until the end, the context was
perceived from the very outset as the bearer of a semantic intention tending
towards wholeness.13
The difference between the Gestalt and the context on the one hand and the
structure on the other came to the fore in the case of a literary work preserved
only as a fragment or torso. A literary fragment had no compositional unity
and no Gestalt quality because its proportionality and other correspondences
between its parts were doubtful. It was not a complete context either, so that it left
the reader free to imagine the missing elements of "information" in the most
varied ways. Yet it definitely was a structure because it displayed specific
relations between intonation and meaning, between sentence structure and
intonation, between intonation and the syllabic composition of the words, and
so on. Its relationship to the works that had preceded it in history could also be
determined.
The Gestalt and the context also differed from one another. A literary work
had different qualities as a composition and as a context. Compositional
elements did not interpenetrate or merge. They were factors of the composi-
tion precisely because they were separate and distinct. By contrast, the mean-
ings conveyed by the units making up a context affected each other and
interpenetrated, both by anticipation and retroactively.
Like the Gestalt and the context, the organism (or what was called structure
in biology) was a closed whole determined by its overall characteristics. More-
over, unlike the structure, which was a social fact lodged in the collective
consciousness, the organism was a material reality.14
The concept of function, crucial for the study of structure, was derived from
biology (the mathematical concept of function was of minor importance with
respect to structural phenomena); but in connection with structure its meaning
was not exactly the same. Biology was concerned with the functions performed
qualities in the creation and perception of the works of art (Schmid, 1976). Her observations on
this point tend to rectify Mukaiovsk~'s tendency to disregard the complications of the relationship
between the material artifact and the immaterial structure it conjures up in the perceiver's mind.
'3Although the purpose of Mukarovsky's lecture was to define the distinction between the
structure and other types of wholes in general, his discussion of the context was manifestly based
only on his study of contextual semantics in language and literature. It is true that he also referred
to the pictorial sign in this connection but he did so fleetingly, just mentioning that the perception
of a picture, too, was a process unfolding in time, without any further elaboration. The pronounce-
ments pertaining to the fixed order of the units and the uncertainty concerning the integral sense of
the context apply only to signs organized in time, such as language, literature, music, dance,
theater, etc.
'4In the Russian formalism, on the contrary, the literary work, especially its "morphology," was
often studied as an organic whole and many notions were derived, by analogy, from biological
theories (Steiner & Davydov, 1977).
134 JIRI VELTRUSKY

by individual organs in relation to the whole organism. The term was some-
times used in a similar way with reference to structure - the functions of
single components with respect to the entire set of mutual relations among all
the components - but that was a loose way of speaking; the components and
their relations could be dealt with more accurately as factors of the structure.
In connection with structure, the concept of function was essential to an
understanding of the relations between art and society or, more exactly,
between art and the objectives society assigned to it. This was clearer in
linguistics. The terms "functional linguistics" and "structural linguistics" were
almost synonymous, because the language structure could be conceived only as
differentiated according to the ends for which language was used. The reason
why linguistics and esthetics emphasized different aspects of the relation be-
tween structure and function was that language was primarily an instrument of
practical use while the specific function of art was the esthetic function which
disconnected the work of art, at least seemingly, from the sphere of practical
interests.
Furthermore, in the field of social facts, structure was closely connected with
norm. This applied not only to such specifically normative spheres as law or
language but also to art. Structure could be defined as a set of norms, provided
the norm was viewed not as a static rule but as a living force subject to constant
change.

4. The Concept of Actualization

In view of his successive negations of the formal method, it is strange that
Mukarovsk, never gave up the concept of "actualization." After playing a
crucial role in the early days of the Prague School poetics, this concept grew
more and more obsolete in the light of later discoveries. Ultimately it became
all but incompatible with Mukaiovsk~'s most refined and sophisticated defini-
tion of structure, as characterized by unity and indivisibility.
In the "Theses" submitted in 1929 by the Prague Linguistic Circle to the First
Congress of Slavic Philologists, actualization appeared, for all practical pur-
poses, as a synonym of the formalists' concept of ostranenie, "making strange"
or "defamiliarization" ("Theses," 1929: Thesis 3c). For Viktor Shklovskij,
who perhaps used this concept more systematically than any other representa-
tive of the formal method, the purpose of art was "to impart the sensation of
things as they are perceived and not as they are known." This sounded rather
like the idea of the "innocent eye," which has haunted art criticism ever since
John Ruskin. But, though derived from the same theory of perception, the
concept of defamiliarization counted on the artist's sophistication and on the
artfulness of his devices, not on his innocence; the opposition between "things as
they are perceived" and "things as they are known" had shifted from the artist
to the perceiver, probably because the formalists studied verbal, rather than
mimetic, art. Shklovskij typically put it like this: "The technique of art is to
make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the dfficulty and
length of perception, because the process of perception is an esthetic end in
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 135

itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an

object; the object is not important" (Shklovskij, 1917). Actualization, like
defamiliarization, was intimately connected with yet another concept, namely
deformation ("Theses," 1929: Thesis 3c(1)).
The concept of actualization was vague in itself as well as ill-defined in its
relation to that of deformation, and its content kept shifting. On the one hand,
in accordance with the formalist view, actualization was opposed to automati-
zation, which precluded an esthetic effect, and was therefore defined as the de-
automatization of an act. In this sense, living poetic language was opposed both
to the language of communication and to poetic language automatized by
tradition. On the other hand, actualization served to describe the relations
among the components of an artistic structure. In this sense, the components
which stood out or predominated were deemed actualized while the others
were not (Mukarovsk~, 1932b). The ambiguity of the term has created a
revealing problem for those translators who feel that it is not acceptable in
English: Garvin's felicitous "foregrounding" (Garvin, 1964) eliminates the first
sense while "de-automatization," preferred by Burbank and Steiner (Muka-
iovsk~, 1977, 1978) and sometimes also used by Mukarovsk3 himself, eliminates
the second.
As a criterion of what is esthetic, actualization has always rested on ex-
tremely shaky epistemological grounds, quite apart from the problem of the
"innocent eye" (the opposition between perception and recognition). The
esthetic function is not the only one that tends to counteract or hamper the
automatization of an act, such as an act of speech. The expressive and the
conative functions often produce the same effect. Moreover, the theoretical (or
cognitive) function, although it tends to isolate the speech act from the extra-
linguistic situation, does not always push it toward automatization. As an
instrument of cognition, language is under constant pressure to convey new
meanings or shades of meaning, so that the speech act must innovate, to some
extent, in the lexical or the syntactic sphere or both; incidentally, as Muka-
rovsk~ noticed, the theoretical function of language is one of the sources of
new metaphors and metonymies (technical terms) (Mukaiovsk~, 1940a).15
When the concept of actualization was used in the sense of "foregrounding"
its inaccuracy was less visible at the early stages, particularly since hierarchy is
one of the important aspects of the relations among the components of the
structure and, indeed, an aspect which it is relatively easy to analyze. The
components which occupy a higher place in the hierarchy tend to stand out

'5Havranek tried to discuss this away with an extraordinary argument: he contended that when
the author of a scientific treatise used new expressions he automatized them, at least for the
purposes of a given work or a given school, by exactly defining their meaning; and he added that
automatizing here meant making such expressions intelligible (Havrdnek, 1932). Mukarovsk2 also
used this argument in his contribution to the same collection of essays (Mukaiovsk2, 1932b). If the
simple fact of defining a new word amounted to automatizing it, the very concept of automatiza-
tion, which corresponds to an extremely important phenomenon in human behavior, social
psychology and the functioning of signs, would of course become meaningless and superfluous.
136 JIRI VELTRUSKY

whereas the subordinate ones to some extent recede into the background.
Even in this limited perspective, however, actualization was a somewhat mis-
leading concept in so far as it was confused with deformation. A subordinate
component can, in fact, be as deformed as a dominant one. In poetry, for
instance, a dominant component can be shaped in a way that deviates from
common usage in order to attract attention but a subordinate one can deviate
just as much - perhaps more - in order to bring out the dominant com-
ponent or at least not to distract attention from it.
But it was only Mukarovsk.'s concept of the single semantic intention
determining the entire structure - the semantic "gesture" - that revealed
how inaccurate the notion of actualization was even when it chiefly meant
"foregrounding." The structure's unity and indivisibility could henceforth be
seen to arise from the fact that every single component, from the most subordi-
nate to the dominant, was a specific factor in building up the structure and
holding it together. While some components appeared as esthetically effective
and others as esthetically indifferent, it was the structure in its entirety that had
an esthetic value. And this, in Mukafovsk~'s view, distinguished the work of
art from other esthetic phenomena: in a communicative utterance it was only
the "actualized" components that were esthetically relevant (Mukarovsk~,
1940a).
Mukarovsk~ himself felt increasingly dissatisfied with the concept of actuali-
zation. In 1940, when preparing the collection of his studies in literature, he
decided not to include his important paper on standard language and poetic
language, written eight years earlier (Mukaiovsk?, 1932b). In the preface to
the collection he simply mentioned this paper among those left out because of
their polemical character (Mukafovsk~, 1941b). But that was not the whole
story. Privately he expressed the feeling that the paper laid too much emphasis
on actualization and equated it too far with deformation; he was afraid that if it
were reprinted in the collection it might throw a misleading light on his later
writings. In his article "On Poetic Language" he warned that the term "de-
formation" should be used cautiously (Mukaiovsk~, 1940c). Yet he never gave
up the concept of actualization until he renounced all his scholarly work. As
already mentioned, he always preferred to keep old concepts alive by constantly
renewing their meaning, rather than replace them with new ones. The gradual
shift of emphasis from "de-automatization" to "foregrounding" was a typical
case in point.
There is, however, more to be said about Mukaiovsk5's reluctance to aban-
don the concept of actualization. It provided an element of a solution to one of
the most difficult problems of esthetics, the problem of why something is
esthetic and something else is not or, to put it differently, why one thing produces
an esthetic effect and another is esthetically indifferent. If it is not to fall into the
trap of pure subjectivism or relativism, the theory of art must never lose sight of
this problem and must continue to seek the answer in the object itself. The prob-
lem has not been solved to this day. Though the element of solution provided by
the concept of actualization might have been limited, it was not negligible.
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 137

III. ESTHETICS
The negation of the formalists' tendency to isolate literature from other
historical phenomena was fruitful in more ways than one. Besides stimulating
the study of the multifarious relations between literature and society, it also
opened the way from poetics to esthetics.
When the autonomy of literature and its immanent development no longer
appeared as the only aspects accessible to structural analysis, the need arose to
examine literature not only in its social setting but also as part of the whole area
of art and even of the much broader area of esthetic phenomena. There was,
indeed, no way to mark literature off from the other forms of art and circum-
scribe art as such. The distinction between art and all sorts of esthetic pheno-
mena outside art was historically variable. Moreover, it was obviously impossi-
ble to separate esthetic phenomena, whether artistic or not, from other human
activities and their products (Mukarovsk~, 1936a: Preface). The actual nature
of the esthetic function and its place among the other functions gradually
moved into focus.
It was against this steadily broadening background that Mukaiovsk? re-
turned to the classic questions of the esthetic norm and value, which students of
art had for some time neglected (Mukarovskp, 1936a: Preface). There was no
question of restoring esthetics as a normative discipline. A sharp distinction
between scholarly objectivity and subjective criticism or value judgement was
one of the tenets of the Prague school.16 Mukarovsk,'s purpose was to submit
the phenomena of norm and value to theoretical investigation.
Mukaiovsk?'s interest in literature did not diminish when he extended his
research to the theory of art and general esthetics; literary studies continued to
form by far the greatest part of his writings. But many of them, perhaps most,
reflected his growing preoccupation with problems transcending the bound-
aries of verbal art. For example, the semiotic conception of the work of art, which
had originally been formulated in an esthetic study (Mukaiovsk~, 1934d), was
later developed and revised in two papers dealing with literary phenomena
(Mukaiovskp, 1936b, 1946). Again, in a paper on the esthetics of language
(Mukaiovsk~, 1940a) he thoroughly revised the theory he had worked out in
his earlier book on the esthetic function, norm and value (Mukarovskp, 1936a).
However, he was not inclined to derive a general theory and philosophy of art
from the study of literature. He condemned esthetic systems built up chiefly on
the basis of a single art (Mukaiovsk~, 1942a) and insisted on the comparative
approach (Mukarovsk2, 1940-42).
1. Work of Art as Sign
Mukaiovsk2's first study in general esthetics, a paper presented to the Eighth
Ih Rene Wellek was the only prominent member of the Prague Linguistic Circle who considered
that literary scholarship was inseparable from value judgement (Wellek,
1936). It should be
pointed out, however, that while Wellek has always held that literary theory, criticism and history
are inseparable, though distinct, he has not attempted to work out a theory of value (Wellek &
Warren, 1949: 29-37; Wellek, 1960).
138 JIRI VELTRUSKY

International Congress of Philosophy, dealt with the semiotics of art (Muka-

iovsk~, 1934d). It set out to outline the main aspects of the work of art in its
quality of sign and the main features that distinguished it from other types of
signs.
The paper stated categorically that the work of art could not be reduced to
the "thing" existing in the sensory world (the artifact); the internal structure of
the work of art could change, sometimes in a considerable degree, from period
to period and from place to place, though the artifact remained materially the
same; the "thing" existing in the sensory world and capable of being perceived
by all was a signans. Neither could the meaning corresponding to the artifact be
identified with the author's or the perceiver's subjective state of mind, since the
work of art was to mediate between the author and a community. It was rather
situated in the collective consciousness as that which was common to the
subjective states of consciousness which the work evoked in the members of a
given collectivity.17 The structure of the work of art was not a matter of the
signans but of the signatum.
Mukarovsk, did not seek to brush aside the subjective states of mind
connected with the work, whether at the author's or at the perceiver's end of
the semiotic process. His point was that even in its innermost layers the
individual consciousness was to some extent determined by "contents" lodged
in the social consciousness. By the very fact that it could be communicated, all
psychological "content" transcending the bounds of purely individual conscious-
ness was a semiotic fact. Mukaiovsk2 conceived the signatum belonging
to the social consciousness as a sort of nucleus which in every act of perception
of the work of art was accompanied by subjective psychological elements
roughly corresponding to Fechner's "associative factor" (Fechner, 1876).
These subjective elements, too, had an objective semiotic aspect inasmuch as
their general quality or quantity derived from the central nucleus. To illustrate
the point, he mentioned the qualitative difference between the subjective
states of mind respectively generated by an impressionist and a cubist picture
and the different quantity of subjective associations evoked by literary works
belonging to the surrealist and the classical school respectively (the first sought
to stimulate the reader's imagination, the second to control it and limit his
associations to those intended by the author). The semiotic nature of these
subjective responses was comparable to that of the "accessory" meanings of a
word.
As to the denotatum, the work of art was an autonomous sign relating to the
total context of social phenomena, or collective views, rather than to a distinct

'7Mukaiovsky was aware that the term "collective consciousness," which had spread in social
science thanks mainly to Emile Durkheim and his school, was ill-defined and potentially mislead-
ing. On other occasions, he pointed out that he did not mean to interpret collective consciousness
as a psychological reality or a set of components common to individual states of consciousness. He
then defined it as the locus of different systems of cultural phenomena such as language, religion
and so on. Though not directly perceptible by the senses, these systems were realities exerting a
normative power over empirical reality (Mukarovsk?, 1935-36, 1936a: 19-20).
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 139

and delimited reality. Yet the work of art was also, to a variable degree, a
communicative sign. This was particularly apparent in the thematic arts;
though not altogether absent, the communicative element was diffuse in music
and architecture. The functions the work assumed as an autonomous sign on
the one hand and as a communicative sign on the other were inseparable. They
formed a dialectical antinomy. Mukaiovsk~ later refined upon these early
formulations. Since the work of art was an autonomous sign, its "unequivocal"
connections with the reality which it stood for (or which it pointed to), with the
originator and with the addressee were severed. Therefore even when it made
a communication, the work of art did not have the validity of a communication
(Mukarovsky, 1943b).
In his subsequent elaboration of this basic outline, Mukaiovsk, identified
the esthetic function as the factor which made the work of art an autonomous
sign. Being a negation of any practical function, and indeed of all other
functions, the esthetic function tended to invalidatethe relations of the sign to the
external realities and focus attention on the sign itself. By the same token, the
integral unity of the work of art, that is, the uniform treatment of the com-
ponents belonging to the same category (vowels or consonants or both, intona-
tion, denomination, syntax, sentence as unit of sense and such like) and the
coherence of the multifarious relations among its components and units of
meaning, was brought out. It will be recalled that the relation between signa-
tum and denotatum, or between the meaning conveyed by a sign and the
particular reality it related to, was the crux of Mukaiovsk~'s contextual seman-
tics, and that the directness or indirectness of the relation of an individual unit
to the thing it signified depended on its relations to the context. In a communi-
cative utterance, the relation between each unit of meaning and the thing it
pointed to mattered much more than in the work of art, where the main feature
was the close interdependence of all the units of meaning and their integration
in the structure. Rather than relating to reality through its individual com-
ponents, the work of art as a whole related to it directly. Metaphorically
speaking, the work in its entirety was a sort of denomination. On the other
hand, the fact that the meaning of its component units was determined much
more by their respective place in the structure of the work than by their
reference to individual realities tended to attenuate the link between the whole
sign and the particular reality it immediately designated. That was why the
work of art was an autonomous sign. But this did not in any way exclude, and
in fact emphasized, the relation between the work and all empirical reality. The
work of art, therefore, referred in a general way to all reality known to man
(Mukaiovsk~, 1936b).
According to Mukaiovsk,'s ultimate formulations - which were not, how-
ever, meant to be definitive - reality was not an immediate object of the
esthetic function but a mediated one. The immediate object was the esthetic
sign which reflected reality as a whole and projected its internal structure into
all reality as its general law. From the point of view of the phenomenological
Wesensschau, it made no sense to ask whether the esthetic sign conformed to
140 JIRY VELTRUSKY

any reality outside itself, because under the impact of the esthetic function both
the sign and the reality were objects facing the subject and both confronted one
another as independent wholes. The esthetic sign in general, and the work of
art in particular, was a sign sui generis which at once expressed and affected
man's attitude to reality (Mukarovsk~, 1942a, b). Therefore, though negative
in relation to the other functions, the esthetic function was positive in its
relation to man: by making everything within its scope a center of attention for
its own sake, it perpetually renewed his sense of the diversity and multifarious-
ness of reality (Mukaiovsk~, 1940a).
Since it never was the only function of the work of art, the esthetic function
could in fact only negate, not eliminate, the communicative quality of any work
and its corresponding relation to the specific realities which it referred to. But
in art, even in the thematic arts, the relation of the sign to the specific reality it
represented was peculiar. This specific reality itself stood for the whole uni-
verse of things and processes, for all the realities the perceiver ever had
experienced or ever could experience (Mukarovsk~, 1942a).
Mukarovsk''s ultimate emphasis on the epistemological implications of the
work of art, on the relation between subject and object, and on the ways in
which the esthetic sign was related to reality, seemed to contradict his earlier
contention that the denotatum of the work of art was the total context of social
phenomena, or collective views (Mukarovsk~, 1934d, 1936a, b). In fact the two
formulations were to a large extent complementary. Although the later one
reflected a considerable progress in Mukarovsks's thinking, it did not cancel
the earlier; a deeper penetration toward the essence of the esthetic sign
revealed that the previous examination had merely clarified the ways in which
this essence manifested itself. The apparent contradiction would no doubt have
vanished had he ever got round to presenting his ultimate conception in a
definitive form.

2. Esthetic Function
Mukarovsky's esthetics was marked by his functional approach even more
deeply than by his semiotic conception. In fact, he had come to consider that
the esthetic function itself was semiotic by its very nature, in the sense that it
transformed everything within its reach into a sign (Mukaiovskl, 1942b).
It will be recalled that he based this theory on the biological, as distinct from
the mathematical, concept of function. But it was the biological concept as it
had been modified by the functionalist schools in architecture and in linguistics
that formed his starting point. In architecture function had acquired a distinctly
teleological meaning: defined as the relation of a thing to the end which it was
designed to serve, the function determined the thing's qualities. In its turn,
functional linguistics showed that any language form or device could assume a
variety of functions and that the same function could be borne by a variety of
language phenomena. Moreover, whereas the biological model centered on the
functions performed by single parts within a whole, theoreticians of modern
architecture and linguists were also, and equally, interested in the functions
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 141

of the whole itself, which were intrinsically social or cultural, rather than
natural.
The esthetic function was not, and could not be, the only function of art. It
could not possibly occupy such as exclusive position because it was essentially a
dialectical negation of all the other functions. Tending to transform everything
within its scope into an end in itself, it lacked an external objective which
would set it off qualitatively from the others; it was therefore less capable than
any other of overshadowing and silencing the concomitant functions (Muka-
rovsk5, 1940a). It was dominant in art, but in the history of art it was often
subordinated to another one. As long as society spontaneously perceived
something as a work of art it remained a work of art, even if the esthetic
function did not actually predominate. Its dominant position was felt to be the
basic, "unmarked" case, the predominance of another function to be "marked"
as a negation of the normal state of affairs (Mukaiovsk~, 1936a:7-8).
The view that in art the esthetic function predominated, which was one of
the constant tenets of the Prague School, was manifestly oversimplified. With-
out abandoning the concept, Mukaiovskp later provided a more accurate
description of the relations among the different functions in art. Because it
lacked an external objective, the esthetic function had no "content" and
therefore could not by itself endow the sign to which it gave rise with a full
sense. The work of art as an esthetic sign received its concrete "content" from
its extra-esthetic functions, which put it in direct contact with realities external
to it. The predominance of the esthetic function in art merely prevented any of
the extra-esthetic functions from completely prevailing over the other functions
and adapting the organization of the work of art to a single external end. The
esthetic function controlled the other functions by organizing their mutual
relations and the tensions among them so as to bring out the multiplicity of the
functions concentrated on a single "thing," the work of art (Mukarovsk~,
1943b). Naturally, the question arises whether this can still be called the
dominant position of the esthetic function; that, however, is merely a question
of terminology.
The range of the esthetic function was by no means limited to art. Any thing
or process could acquire it. None was endowed with it by virtue of its own
nature or shape, irrespective of period, place and appraiser, and none was
excluded by its real properties from its reach. Even works of art turned into
non-art, and vice versa, with the change of time and space (Mukaiovsk~,
1936a:1-3). In the collective consciousness of a given society or social group,
the distribution of the esthetic function in the world of things and processes was
fairly stable. However, the esthetic and extra-esthetic areas were not firmly
separated and there was a constant tension and fluctuation between them; they
formed a dialectical antinomy. The esthetic area itself was considerably diversi-
fied and at the same time divided into two main segments, art on the one hand
and the rest of esthetic phenomena on the other. In art the esthetic function
was dominant (in the specific sense of the term which has just been explained);
outside art it was not. Within the esthetic area, too, there was constant tension
142 JIRI VELTRUSKY

and fluctuation, and a dialectical antinomy, between art and non-artistic phe-
nomena, just as there was between esthetic and non-esthetic areas (Muka-
rovsk~, 1936a:5-9).
Moreover, art was not even clearly delimited from the extra-esthetic phe-
nomena; the impossibility of drawing a firm distinction between artistic and
purely utilitarian buildings was an eloquent example. These tensions between
what was and what was not esthetic, and between art and non-art, provided the
impetus behind the constant change which characterized art and the esthetic
phenomena in general (Mukarovsk~, 1936a:9).
This was how society perceived the esthetic phenomena. But the basis of this
social fact still remained to be clarified. Only a phenomenological analysis that
placed the subject and the object in their respective places could explain why
society perceived the esthetic phenomena as it did.
From this point of view, the esthetic function turned out to be a specific
aspect of man's attitude toward things, and its most general characteristic lay in
the fact that it made the thing which became its carrier an esthetic fact, without
endowing it with any other quality that would assign it a specific place in reality
as a whole. Consequently, the esthetic function often manifested itself as a
fitful gleam passing over things, as an accident produced by a unique mo-
mentary rapport between the subject and the object. The reason why this rapport,
though unique, was still accessible to a phenomenologicaldescription,and not only
to an analysis of the subject's psychology, was that the esthetic function in its
"pure" form was only one of two poles inseparablyunited in the esthetic attitude
to things, and the other pole was supra-subjective.The dialecticalantithesisof the
esthetic function was the esthetic norm, a generalizing and systematizing force
which regulated man's esthetic attitude to things and strove to detach every
esthetic phenomenon from any individual thing or subject, so as to make it a
matter of the general relationship between man and the world of things (Muka-
rovsk~, 1940a).
Mukaiovsk~ spent several years investigating the nature and effects of the
esthetic function, as well as the conditions under which it came to the fore and
the whole area in which it manifested itself, and then sketched out a rigorously
phenomenological description and classification of functions in general. He did
so in two short lectures dating from 1942 but not published till 1966: a popular-
izing one (Mukaiovsk,, 1942a) and another, presented in the Prague Linguistic
Circle (Mukarovsk~, 1942b). The chief points of his new theory were these:
1. In the last analysis, all the functions in the social or cultural field had their
origin in the subject, not the object. They were "modes of the subject's self-
assertion toward the external world." Any theory which projected them into
the object was inclined to attribute only one function to a single thing or action.
As soon as they were examined from the point of view of the subject, an
entirely different picture appeared. Man's every reaction to external reality
pursued several ends simultaneously and indiscriminately. All the functions,
including the esthetic, were potentially omnipresent; like any other, the esthetic
function was an integralpart of the subject'sgeneral reactionto the externalworld.
 JAN MUKAROVSKY1 143

2. No function was superior to the others in itself. Their hierarchy was a

matter of specific cases, that is, of specific activities and their products. There-
fore, to define the essential differences between them, Mukaiovsky outlined an
all-inclusive, though simple, typology based on two criteria. On the one hand,
man could assert himself toward reality either directly or through the inter-
mediary of a sign, so that a function could be either immediate or semiotic; the
use of a tool or instrument was a secondary feature of the immediate functions,
since it only complicated but did not modify the difference between the direct
and the semiotic approach to reality. On the other hand, whether immediate or
semiotic, a function could be oriented either toward the object or toward the
subject.
3. On the basis of the second criterion, the immediate functions separated
into the practical and the theoretical. The practical functions were oriented
toward the object, because through them man asserted himself by trying to
change the external reality. The theoretical function was oriented toward the
subject, because the general and ultimate end of any theoretical approach was
to project reality into the consciousness of the subject without affecting the
object of the function, reality itself.
4. The semiotic functions were divided by the second criterion into the
symbolic and the esthetic. The symbolic function was object-oriented, because
it dependedon an effective relation between the symbol and what it stood for. The
subject could affect symbolized realityby actingupon the symbolicsign or the sym-
bolized reality could itself act through the symbolic sign. Whenever this effective
relation between two objects of the symbolic function vanished, the symbol turned
into a mere allegory. By contrast, the esthetic function was subject-oriented.
Contrary to what the theories of the expressivity of art claimed, the subject was
here in the foreground not as an individualbut as a human being in general, while
emotional reactions belonged by definition to the individual sphere. Unlike the
symbol, which was linked (by an "effective relation") to a particularreality, the
esthetic sign reflected the whole of reality, organizingit into a unity in the image of
the subject's own unity, And, unlike the symbol, it neither acted upon external
reality nor was it a means of carrying out an action which originated there.
Instead, the esthetic sign projected the subject's attitude, as realized in the
structure of that sign, into the whole of reality as its general law.
5. The theoretical and the esthetic functions shared the tendency to organize
reality into a unity corresponding to the unity of the supra-individual, generally
human, subject. This was because both were subject-oriented. The theoretical
function strove to produce a general and unified image of reality; the esthetic
function aimed to bring about a unifying attitude toward reality. Moreover, the
image of reality resulting from the theoretical function, though general and
unified, reflected the basic nature of human attention, namely its ability to
concentrate on only one point at a time. By contrast, the attitude induced by
the esthetic function, mediated as it was by the direct object of attention (the
esthetic sign), was simply directed toward reality as a whole.
The typology had some weak spots. One of them was that it did not give due
144 JIRI VELTRUSKY

weight to the use of a tool or instrument. There are cases of practical functions
that require no tools, while in others a tool is indispensable. Still other practical
functions are performed without any tool in some circumstances and with a tool
or set of tools in others, depending on the nature of the object they pertain to
or the end at which they aim. When functions are studied as man's reactions to
reality, these distinctions are by no means negligible. The theoretical function
differs from the practical ones in that it is wholly dependent on the use of tools
in the broadest sense in which Mukarovsk? used the term (this includes
language, systems of measurement, logical and mathematical formulae, and
such like).
The symbolic function was another weak spot. It was totally absent from
Mukarovsky's first attempt to overcome the somewhat schematic opposition
between the esthetic and the practical function; at that stage, he added only the
theoretical function to these two (Mukarovsk?, 1939-40, 1940-41). When he
finally introduced the symbolic function, he treated it differently in each of the
two texts outlining his new typology. In the popular lecture, which probably
came first, the actual term "symbolic function" did not appear at all; Muka-
rovsk~ spoke instead of a religious or magico-religious attitude (Mukaiovsky,
1942a). In his lecture in the Prague Linguistic Circle, however, he stated that
the magic function was a combination of the practical function with the sym-
bolic. Yet the only examples he gave to illustrate what he meant by symbolic
function were typical magic acts: stabbing the effigy of an enemy in order to
harm him, and shooting at the image of an animal before a hunt in order to
ensure success in the hunt (Mukarovsk~, 1942b).
No doubt Mukaiovsk, could have straightened out such problems if he had
further elaborated the typology which was only outlined in these two texts. But
he himself pinpointed its most problematic aspect: his typology split the realm
of signs by excluding the signs serving the practical and the theoretical func-
tions from the category of semiotic functions. The reason was that signs used in
practical and theoretical functions were instruments of these functions whereas
the symbolic and the esthetic signs were the objects of the two functions
concerned. He considered that the resulting dichotomy was merely apparent,
because the qualities that were common to all signs whatever were too essential
to allow a real dichotomy to arise (Mukaiovsk,, 1942b). Nonetheless, the fact
that the semiotic functions did not cover what was, after all, by far the most
widespread occurrence of signs was obviously paradoxical. Mukaiovsk, was
also convinced that the implied fragmentation of the concept of sign would
disappear once he had worked out his theory of functions and their mutual
relations in full detail. Since the project never materialized, this cannot be
verified. But it seems likely that something more than a detailed elaboration
was needed.
In any event, the typology of functions did a good deal to clarify the esthetic
function by opposing it to the symbolic and the theoretical, as well as the
practical, functions. As long as it was defined merely by opposition to the
practical function it had appeared as a somewhat hybrid concept, inasmuch as
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 145

the practical function, which is directly oriented toward reality and "ensures
the most basic conditions of man's existence," is the function par excellence (or
"unmarked" function) around which all the other functions gravitate (Muka-
rovsk,, 1942b). Yet though it retroactively injected many additional shades of
meaning into Mukaiovsk,'s previous theories about the esthetic function, the
typology did not invalidate them. The esthetic function still appeared as the
most radical negation of the practical: it tended to transform any act or thing
within its reach into an end in itself; and wherever the practical function
receded, the esthetic function immediately tended to step in as its negation
(Mukarovsk~, 1942b).

3. Esthetic Norm
It may be recalled that Mukaiovsk3 ultimately described the esthetic norm as
the dialectical antithesis of the esthetic function and considered that the two
were inseparably united in man's esthetic attitude toward things (Mukarovsk~,
1940a). Even before reaching this conclusion, he always studied the esthetic
norm in close conjunction with the esthetic function.18At the same time he ana-
lyzed the norm in general, as a factorin social life and man's attitudeto reality,so as
to identify the features which the esthetic norm shared with any kind of norm
as well as those which differentiated it from other norms.
A norm was by definition a social fact lodged in the collective consciousness.
Although striving for universal validity, it was entirely different from a law of
nature: on the one hand, a norm could be violated; on the other, several norms
could compete in the evaluation of the same work (Mukarovsk~, 1936a:23-26).
Moreover, every norm was constantly subject to change, because each applica-
tion to a specific case entailed some modification, however slight, of the norm
itself (Mukaiovsk~, 1936a: 31-32; 1937). The norm reposed on a dialectical
antinomy between universal validity and a merely regulative or even orienting
power. Different kinds of norms gravitated unequally to one pole or the other
(Mukaiovsk), 1936a:26-27).
A norm was not only a social fact but also a social factor. In this respect it
differed from an explicitly stated rule: certain norms could not be formulated in
words; on the other hand, an explicit rule could be false in the sense that it
conflicted with a norm existing in the collective consciousness. Springing from
a general consensus among the members of a community, a norm brought
pressure to bear on their individual behavior and attitudes. It made the acting
individual feel this pressure as a restraint on his freedom of action, and the
evaluating individual as a force guiding his judgement. A norm could manifest
itself as a mere feeling of spontaneous approval or disapproval, very often
impossible to formulate, let alone justify (Mukatovsky, 1935-39, 1937, 1940a).
However vague it might be, the feeling of approval of a specific thing, process

'8According to one of Mukaiovsk?'s early definitions, the norm was the measure of the ability of
a phenomenon to perform a certain function; this ability was the value the phenomenon had with
respect to the function concerned (Mukarovsk~, 1935-39).
146 JIRI VELTRUSKY

or action could imply that any other thing, process or action was undesirable.
In the esthetic sphere in particular it was easier to say what must not be done
than what was desirable (Mukarovskp, 1940a).
Although its changeability varied a great deal between different periods,
places and societies, the esthetic norm was apt to change much more than the
other norms (Mukarovskp, 1936a:23-28).
This was partly due to the fact that it was rather tenuously connected with its
own foundations in man's psycho-physiological constitution. All the norms
derived in the last instance from man's relation to the world. This applied to
the esthetic norm as well. It was bound up with certain esthetic postulates
immediately rooted in the psycho-physiological constitution, such as rhythm,
symmetry, perpendicularity and horizontality, the complementarity of colors,
the stability of the center of gravity of three-dimensional bodies and such like
(Mukarovsk., 1936a:28-30; 1935-39; 1937). Yet these anthropologically
founded postulates were not ideal esthetic norms (perfect rhythm and perfect
symmetry, for instance, were esthetically indifferent) but merely guideposts
constituting a principle of order in the perpetual change of the esthetic norms
(Mukarovsk~, 1935-39).
Another distinctive characteristic of the esthetic norm sprang from its rela-
tion to the esthetic function. Any norm, including the esthetic, governed the
performance of the corresponding function. What distinguished the esthetic
norm in this respect was the manner in which it governed that performance: its
infringement did not necessarily jeopardize, and could actually further, the
performance of the esthetic function. This peculiarity of the esthetic norm
involved three aspects of the norm in general, namely the degree of its unity,
the degree of its exclusivity and the modalities of its application. To illustrate
this, Mukaiovsk~ compared the legal, the linguistic and the esthetic norms
(Mukarovsk?, 1935-39, 1937):
1. As regards the degree of unity, in the legal field there was a strong social
need for a single system of norms, in every aspect strictly comparable with each
other. Language, on the contrary, was made up of a whole range of norms, or
rather systems of norms (dialects, so-called functional forms of language, etc.).
In the esthetic field, too, a whole range of systems of norms existed simulta-
neously.
2. The fact that a community needed a single and consistent system of legal
norms automatically implied the requirement that this system should exclude
any other. This aspect was somewhat more complicated in the case of the
linguistic system of norms. A member of a language community usually had a
command of more than one of these systems (for instance, a dialect, the
standard written language, perhaps the standard spoken language and proba-
bly several of the other functional languages). Yet these systems of norms were
to a large extent mutually exclusive in any given usage; the fact of mixing them
was often perceived as a mistake. But this mutual exclusivity was by and large
limited to utterances dominated by the referential function; their mixing was
quite frequent in chiefly emotive utterances, for example, and could even
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 147

become systematic when the esthetic function prevailed. The esthetic norm,
too, tended to exclusivity in its own way, but this tendency was even more
limited than in the case of the language norm. In art several successive norms
could be alive and accepted by the same public. Moreover, a whole cluster of
esthetic norms operated within the structure of the same work of art: the norms
proper to the materials used, the technical norms based on long tradition
(metrical schemes, traditional musical forms, etc.), the norms of a particular
genre of a particular style, the ethical, political, religious and other extra-
esthetic norms which acquired the quality of esthetic norms because of their
part in the structure of the work of art, the esthetic norms themselves, and so
forth. The interplay of heterogeneous or even conflicting canons within the
same work of art could be an important factor of its esthetic uniqueness.
3. Legal norms required a positive and direct application. That was also true
of the linguistic norms, but to a lesser degree. Especially in utterances not
strongly dominated by the referential function, the application of a linguistic
norm sometimes oscillated between its observance and its infringement. The
positive and direct application of the esthetic norm was rather untypical in art.
What made every work of art unique was that the pertinent esthetic norms
were applied more or less negatively, that is, that they were in some measure
intentionally violated.
However, the specific features of the esthetic norm as brought out by this
comparison did not hold good for the entire esthetic area. The esthetic norm
was much more binding with respect to esthetic phenomena outside art. In this
broad field, where the esthetic function was subordinated to other functions,
an esthetic norm really did measure the esthetic value (Mukarovsk~, 1936a:
40-41). In art, on the other hand, it did not stand in a direct relation to the
esthetic value. As the work of art embodied a whole cluster of esthetic norms
which were partly in harmony and partly at odds with each other, the value of
the work resulted from the balance of these complicated relations (Muka-
iovsk), 1935-39). Outside art compliance with the esthetic norm was called
taste and the canon itself had such authority that its infringement - perceived
as "lack of taste" or "bad taste" - could discredit or even socially depreciate
the offender, be it an individual or even an entire social category (Mukaiovsk~,
1935-39, 1937).
The fact that the esthetic norm operated in opposite ways with respect to
non-artistic esthetic phenomena on the one hand and to art on the other tended
to confirm Mukariovsks's theory that within the esthetic area there was a
dialectical antinomy between art and the rest (Mukaiovsk~, 1936a:5-9). It was
nonetheless disturbing that, at this stage, he tried to define the specific features
of the esthetic norm by comparing its operation in art alone with the universal
operation of the other two norms, the legal and the linguistic. The fact that out-
side art the esthetic norm displayed entirely different features was thus reduced
almost to the level of a simple epistemological reservation.
Quite characteristically, a few years later Mukaiovsk~ thoroughly revised
the concept of the esthetic norm without, however, invalidating his previous
148 JIRI VELTRUSKY

findings. He did so in the only systematic paper he was ever to write about
esthetic phenomena other than art, an article on the esthetics of language
which made an important contribution to both esthetics and general linguistics
(Mukarovsk~, 1940a).
He concluded in this paper that underlying both the esthetic norms implied
in works of art and the canons governing taste, there was something more
general and fundamental, namely "the esthetic norm in the strict sense of the
word." Rooted in a general social consensus, this norm differed from the
"poetic norm," which was generated by an individual initiative and derived its
authority from that initiative even if it achieved general recognition. (It was
only because the problem was explored in a study specifically dealing with
language that he spoke about "poetic" rather than "artistic" norm.) The poetic
norm could not achieve the general consensus until later, whereas a truly
general esthetic norm originated from it. That was why a poetic norm more
often than not remained confined to literature; the lack of previous consensus
prevented it from regulating the general use of language. Deliberate efforts
could possibly help to clarify and systematize the esthetic norms, but they could
not create them: the source of those norms was in the joint life of society.
This recognition that art was not a privileged sphere of the esthetic norm
brought Mukarovsk,'s idea of this norm into harmony with his general theory
of norms. His previous findings about the influence of the artistic norms on the
esthetic norms governing taste were not called into question (Mukaiovsk5,
1936a:38-40), but their theoretical implications were henceforth limited. The
esthetic norm as a social fact was no longer regarded merely as the product of
the reflections and residues of the artistic norms, and as a social factor it was
much more than just a matter of taste subject to the vagaries of fashion. The
esthetic norm "in the strict sense of the word" appeared as a full-fledged norm,
which held no less important a place among the other norms than the esthetic
function did among the other functions.
Mukaiovsk~ never submitted this general esthetic norm to an analysis com-
parable to his typology of functions (Mukaiovsk~, 1942b). But he did describe
its main characteristics (Mukaiovskg, 1940a).
It has already been mentioned that he saw the esthetic norm as inseparable
from its opposite, the pursuit of esthetic uniqueness and unpredictability.
Every esthetic phenomenon, like every esthetic approach to reality, oscillated
between its "norm-free" and its "norm-bound" aspects, and the two were
united by a dialectical antinomy within which they constantly engendered one
another. As soon as the esthetic function touched something, it imperceptibly
gave rise to a norm-building tendency, that is, a tendency to repeat, imitate or
stabilize this unique occurrence. An accidental esthetic element could thus
spread in society and become general, even permanent, without quite falling
under the control of the esthetic norm, inasmuch as it was not subject to
systematization. Or else it could also become systematized and still remain
"norm-free," so long as it was confined to a single individual, for instance as his
personal style, without being generalized. On the other hand, wherever the
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 149

esthetic norm was brought to bear, the tendency toward uniqueness was always
permanent, albeit covertly, just because it was impossible to sever the link
between the esthetic norm and the essentially uncontrollable esthetic function.
The main characteristics of the esthetic norm derived from this link:
1. As the esthetic function itself consisted in negating all the other functions,
it was qualitatively indeterminate in itself. So was the esthetic norm. Therefore
the chief characteristic of the esthetic norm lay in its tendency to sort out and
organize; it aimed to bring order into the chaos of all the extra-esthetic values,
norms and functions carried by, or implied in, the phenomena within its reach.
In other words, it represented the culmination of the principle of order.
2. For the same reason, the esthetic norm was mainly prohibitive; since it
was qualitatively as indeterminate as the esthetic function, it was easier for any
member of the community to condemn a given phenomenon on esthetic grounds
than to state positively what was esthetically desirable.
3. The whole set of esthetic norms, as well as each one of them, was subject
to historical change. In this process the esthetic norms might be perfected, but
that was not an evolutionary goal but rather a passing phase which came about
when the esthetic attitude continued for a certain period of time to lean more
toward order than toward uniqueness. Esthetic perfection could be attained
when clear and consistent norms, which became the more binding the more
elaborate and interdependent they were, became established and systematized.
This perfection was not an unmixed blessing; it tended to restrain individuality,
sometimes even to impede further development and change.19
Mukarovsk,'s theory of the esthetic norm "in the strict sense of the word"
removed some of the contradictions inherent in his earlier view of the esthetic
norm, derived mainly from the study of art. Yet the very idea of a more general
and fundamental esthetic norm underlying both the artistic norms and the
canons controlling taste in the broader area of esthetic phenomena raised new
questions which found no answer. Its weak spot was that it arose from a study
of the esthetic aspects of language. In fact, language is governed by a great
variety of its own, linguistic, norms, many of which are quite stringent. Muka-
rovsk~ himself pointed out that in language it was not always possible to
distinguish esthetic factors from the others, because the esthetic function and
norms mingled with properly linguistic functions and norms. Without further
inquiry into more fields of esthetic phenomena other than art, a doubt remains
about the borderline between social reality and logical abstraction with

19 The perfectibility of the esthetic norm is not the same thing as perfectibility in art. In connection
with poetic language, Mukaiovsk~ also examined this second question. On the grounds of the
relativist argument that every period and each state of poetic structure had its own degree of
artistic as well as linguistic perfection, he rejected the evolutionist idea of absolute perfection
which would become invariably binding. But he pointed out that poetic expression was susceptible
of another sort of perfection: a given national language could perfect its capacity to master the
problems arising from the internal tendencies of literary development. And, contrary to the
relativist view, he recognized that this capacity increased as the number of problems that had been
solved grew (Mukaiovsk., 1940c).
150 JIRI VELTRUSKY

regard to what Mukaiovsk, called the "esthetic norm in the strict sense of
the word."

4. Esthetic Value
Contrary to the esthetic function and norm, the esthetic value essentially
concerned art. In the much broader field of esthetic phenomena in gener-
al, where it was a concomitant aspect of a thing or action, esthetic value
was synonymous with compliance with the esthetic norm; consequently, it raised
no problems by itself, beyond those pertaining to the esthetic norm. It was
quite a different matter in art. First of all, the esthetic value here tended to
prevail over all the other values and became the very end of an action or its
product. Secondly, both compliance with the esthetic norm and its infringe-
ment were only means to this end (Mukaiovsk?, 1936a:59-60). Finally, since
the structure of a work of art was perceived as esthetic in its entirety, indepen-
dently of the esthetic effect produced by some of its components and not by
others, the esthetic value was not dispersed between single, isolated elements
as it was outside art, but belonged to the whole work (Mukaiovsk~, 1936:60;
1940a).
In one of his early formulations, Mukaiovsk~ described the predominance of
the esthetic value over the other values of a work of art as an "epistemological
postulate" which "theoretically" drew the line of demarcation between art and
non-art (Mukarovsk5, 1932a). Inasmuch as the esthetic value prevailed in art,
it was due to the dominant position of the esthetic function, which focused
attention on the work of art itself. As has already been said, Mukaiovsk,
considered that the esthetic function could not suppress the other functions
because, lacking an object of its own, it was essentially a negation of function-
ality; its predominance in art affected the other functions only in that it
prevented any one of them from prevailing too much over the others, and that
it organized their mutual relations and tensions (Mukarovsk,, 1943b). Nor
could the esthetic value suppress, or even absorb, the other values carried by
the work of art (Mukaiovskp, 1936a:87-89). Sometimes, when a work strongly
attracted the perceiver's attention to its artistic character, the impression could
arise that the extra-esthetic values were by and large outside his field of vision.
But they affected him even then, in their quality of components of an esthetic
structure (Mukaiovsk,, 1932a).
Since the esthetic value was a matter of the entire structure, rather than of
its individual components or parts, it tended to integrate all the extra-esthetic
values in an indivisible unity (Mukaiovskp, 1936a:88-89). Therefore the
work appeared as a complex yet unified set of extra-esthetic values and,
indeed, as nothing other than that set. The esthetic value was, in a way,
only a general denomination of the dynamic totality of the mutual rela-
tions established, within the work of art, among the extra-esthetic values
(Mukarovsk,, 1936a:88). Mukaiovsk, later attenuated this rather sweep-
ing thesis. In connection with the problem of universal esthetic value,
he mentioned this sort of relation between the esthetic and the extra-
 JAN MUKAROVSKY' 151

esthetic values merely as a possibility worth exploring (Mukaiovskp,

1939a).
The whole conception has been severely condemned by Wellek: "Here
esthetics is asked to commit suicide. Art is merely an arrangement or combina-
tion of non-art" (Wellek, 1969:21). This wholesale rejection would be more
justified if an unquestionably more accurate non-metaphysical theory of es-
thetic value were available, which is not the case; the very concept of esthetic
value is still as difficult to grasp without the expedient of metaphysics as it was
in Mukaiovsk,'s days. Moreover, Wellek's harsh judgement manifestly springs
from a misunderstanding. Mukaiovsk, did not, of course, suggest that art was
merely an arrangement or combination of non-art. His assumption that the
esthetic value was just a set of relations among extra-esthetic values was based
precisely on specifically esthetic factors, namely the esthetic function, norm
and value, and the effect they produce, in art, on the extra-esthetic values.
This effect was twofold: every extra-esthetic value was to some extent
separated from the role it played in everyday life; all the extra-esthetic values
were to some extent integrated in a particular set which was proper to the work
of art (Mukarovsk5, 1935-36; 1936a: 89, 95-96). As a result, the whole
dynamic set of values comprised in the work of art was brought into contact
with the system of values accepted by society, from which it usually differed.
Since none of the values comprised in a work of art had any direct practical
implications, all of them could change and move in relation to each other and
form, experimentally, new constellations. They could also respond more readi-
ly to new social situations and new aspects of reality (Mukarovsk2, 1936a:
89-90). And because the esthetic value predominated, the entire set of values
contained in a work of art could enter into an active relationship with the
general attitude man as a social being adopted toward reality for the sake of
action (Mukaiovsky, 1936a:95-96). Conversely, through its impact on the
perceiver's attitude to reality as a whole, the work of art affected all his values
and value judgements (Mukaiovsk?, 1936a:83-84).
At all events, Mukaiovsk,'s final analysis presented the esthetic value as a
dialectical synthesis of the "norm-free' and the "norm-bound" aspects of the
esthetic phenomena, that is, of their contradictory striving at once for unique-
ness and for supra-individuality, stability and perennity. The work of art was
perceived as an esthetic value precisely because it was a complex phenomenon,
unique and canonical at the same time. Its uniqueness lay in its indivisibility, its
canonical character in the equilibrium of the mutual relations between its
components. In its uniqueness it was unrepeatable and accidental, yet in its
canonical character it laid claim to general and lasting recognition. This claim,
implied in the creation of the esthetic value, was in no way impaired by the fact
that the esthetic value itself was, like any other value, subject to change
(Mukaiovsk~, 1940a).
Changeability belonged to its very essence. Esthetic value was a process,
not a state (Mukaiovsk,, 1936a:64). How it changed was determined by
the immanent development of the artistic structure and by social change
152 JIRI VELTRUSKY

(Mukaiovsk~, 1936a:67). Like all the other values, it was lodged in the collective
consciousness. Its own change was therefore also related to the change in other
values and in the whole hierarchy of values (Mukaiovskp, 1935-36).
Nevertheless, Mukaiovsk~ rejected the relativist interpretation of esthetic
value. In this respect, he insisted on three basic facts. First, to the perceiver
situated at a specific point in time and space and belonging to a certain social
milieu, the value attributed to a given work of art appeared as necessary and
definitive (Mukarovsk~, 1936a:67). Second, certain works of art stood out as
endowed with an objective or universal esthetic value independent of external
circumstances; universal esthetic value operated through their intermediary as
a powerful factor in the history of art (Mukaiovsk?, 1935-36; 1936a:67-69;
1939a). Third, though esthetic value kept vacillating, artistic creation hardly
ever let up in its unswerving search for perfection. Had it not been so, the
history of art would have been a flux lacking specific direction and sense. At
every juncture, universal esthetic value responded to current tendencies by
throwing new light on the past history of art and thereby always revealed afresh
previously unknown aspects of it. This was a constant source of fruitful tension
between the past and the future of art, which influenced current artistic activity
(Mukarovsk~, 1939a).
Mukaiovsk? explored the problem of universal esthetic value in three suc-
cessive stages, first in a university course during the academic year 1935-36
(Mukairovsk~, 1935-36), then in his book on the esthetic function, norm and
value (Mukaiovskp, 1936a:67-94) and finally in a paper he wrote for an inter-
national philosophical symposium (Mukarovsk~, 1939a). Although his concep-
tion developed quite noticeably from one stage to the next, the three studies
are complementary and can be summarized only as a single whole.
Universal esthetic value was subject to change. The importance attached to
it also varied from period to period. Some periods were marked by efforts to
live up to, or surpass, the standards achieved by the greatest works of the past.
In other periods the chief aim was to innovate, to the point where the emphasis
fell on the purely momentary validity of the work of art; in extreme cases,
universal value could make its presence felt only in a negative maner, through
the tendency of every artist or school to dismiss the work of other contem-
- its resistance in
porary artists. Moreover, the criteria of universal value
time, its geographical spread, its self-evidence - as well as their relative
weight kept shifting in history. The situation was further complicated by the
fact that quite often genuine universal values affecting the life of art at a given
moment had to compete with "phantom" values which were actually dead, at
least for the time being, but derived considerable authority from convention.
As a result of all these factors, the works endowed with universal esthetic value
were by no means exempt from the vicissitudes of history. Some were recog-
nized as such only long after their creation, others made a strong impression
right away but were soon forgotten, still others survived over many centuries
while their impact fluctuated, and so forth. A constant factor affecting, to a
variable degree, both the creation of art and its perception, universal
 JAN MUKAROVSKY 153

esthetic value was something other than the perennial value of specific
works of art.
Though subject to change, universal esthetic value indicated by its very
existence that there was something in art that went beyond the response to the
immediate historical and social circumstances in which the artist or his public
found themselves and corresponded to what was general in man under any
circumstances.
Mukaiovskp examined, at least tentatively, various aspects of this general
human nature, or anthropological essence of man, in their relation to universal
esthetic value. To do so, he had to attenuate the clear-cut distinction he had
previously drawn between the material artifact and its correlate in the per-
ceiver's consciousness, that is, between the mere signans and the "esthetic
object" which alone had the quality of structure and was endowed with esthetic
value. In its history, a work of art that resisted the destructive effects of time
over a long period was bound to call forth many, and quite different, "esthetic
objects"; yet its value remained. So this objective esthetic value was clearly a
matter of the artifact itself, rather than of the transient "esthetic objects" it
evoked. As distinct from the actual value of the "esthetic object," the indepen-
dent value of the artifact was merely potential. Still, the properties of the
artifact constituted the very foundation of universal esthetic value. This did not
undermine Mukaiovskp's conception of the work of art as sign. It only in-
creased quite radically the importance of the material work in the whole
semiotic process and revealed that the relations between the signans and
signatum were much less simple than he had described them as being in his
report to the Eighth International Congress of Philosophy (Mukaiovsk~,
1934d).20
In its quality of sign, the work of art could convey a great many meanings,
both simultaneously and successively. The wealth and diversity of meanings a
single work was capable of conveying no doubt determined its ability to resist
the effects of change in space, time and society. A different, yet correlated,
factor was the wealth and diversity of extra-esthetic values; this also implied
that the relations among these values displayed a degree of dynamism irrespec-
tive of the qualitative change each value underwent in time.
Mukaiovsk~ also speculated about the unity of the work of art, frequently
accepted as the main yardstick of its value. What mattered was not a static
unity, based exclusively on harmony, but a potential unity to be realized by the
perceiver. If this task was too easy the effectiveness of the work did not last. If
it was too difficult, because the conflicts and contradictions concealed the
correspondences, the perceiver might be unable to grasp the work as an
intentional whole.
Finally, the internal construction of the material artifact was related to the
2"This naturally gives additional weight to Herta Schmid's and Peter Steiner's concern with the
relations between the organization of the artifact and the structure of its correlate in the perceiver's
consciousness, although both scholars raise this problem in connection with the concept of
structure, rather than signans and signatum or esthetic value (Schmid, 1976; Steiner, 1978).
154 JIRI VELTRUSKY

psycho-physiological constitution of the human being. This was a constant to

which universal esthetic value kept returning in ever new ways. The number
of paths leading to this anthropologicalconstant was infinite, so that art could go
on for ever discovering new ones in response to the perpetual change of society
and of man's attitude to reality. This emphasis on constant renewal radically
distinguished Mukarovsks's theory from the assumption of early experimental
esthetics that absolute rules of esthetic value could be discovered in the
anthropological constitution (Fechner, 1876). The difference sprang from
Mukarovsk,'s realization that there was a third factor between man in general
(man as a psycho-physiological constant) and the work of art as a value: in
every specific case, the human being was also an individual and a member of
society, and the work of art was also a sign and therefore a means of establish-
ing contact between individuals.
Mukarovskp did not propose to solve the problem of universal esthetic value
in art. His aim was to describe the phenomenon in its various aspects and
define some conditions of the solution to be found on the grounds of esthetics
and art theory, without resorting to metaphysics. He felt that after the liberat-
ing sweep brought about by the relativist conception, it was important to raise
the problem of universal esthetic value afresh, even though the time had not
yet come to work out a new, coherent, theory.
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156 JIRI VELTRUSKY

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