From: fjackson-AT-diana.cair.du.edu (FLANNON P. JACKSON )
Subject: Re: the avant-garde
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 1994 17:38:14 -0600 (MDT)


> 
> malgosia wrote -
> 
> > Can the term "avant-garde" be properly applied to some set of present
> > phenomena?  Or is it associated with a specific period of history,
> > now passed?

 and I.P.Write responded -

> I might argue that the fortune of the `avant-garde' is inextricably
> linked to the belief in `revolution' - both social and personal.
> Bolshevism was destroyed in an orgy of reaction, and belief in a
> viable, implementable alternative diminished. Perhaps we are only
> just beginning to recover from Stalinism. I don't want to imply here that
> the `avant-garde' must or does draw its strength solely from socialism,
> rather that the idea of revolution is one of the omega points of the
> imagination: a concept of just-imaginable beauty with which one can
> accuse the world ...

(stuff deleted)

I would agree that revolution and the avant-garde proceed according to some
sort of inextricable link, however, I would add the proviso that the existence
of this link produces the avant-garde as a conceptual frame-work, and not 
a specific group of people, in that it plays off against revolution not as
merely a subjective belief in the creation of a certain set of political
circumstances, rather revolution denotes a particular set of hostorical
circumstances by which both subjective and objective relations become 
determinant.  That is, the avant-garde and revolution form a virtical series 
of effect that is bisected at a pirpendicular angle by modernity, where 
modernity is understood as the present state ofthe traditionof Western-culture.
At the intersection of these two lines would be the paradoxical state of the
tradition of the New.  (This formulation comes from Manfredo Tafuri's study
of avant-garde architecture "The Spere and the Labyrinth", though I have used
it in a slightly different manner than Tafuri).

In this sense the Copernican Revolution, in both its literal and figurative
sense as applied by Kant, are an avant-garde effect, as well as the enthusiasm
or the belief in the necessity of revolution that can be found as a pervasive
force in both political and commodity relations since the French revolution.
If you are willing to accept the notion that the avant-garde and the revolution
have contributed to the creation of a tradition that demands the recurrent 
production of the New then, in responce to Malgosia's question, yes the avant-
garde to a present set of phenomena.  Isn't post-modernity itself an attempt 
to create the new from a stand-point at which the paradox of the tradition
of the new has become a self-conscious effect of this tradition?  Even if all
we are left with is the is a sense of irony produced through the juxtaposition
of historial styles, this irony is itself an attempt to create the new from
the old.  However, its all to easy for this irony to lapse into a reactionary
accusation against the past in a lament tht would see the past as having 
consumed all forms of cultural expression, leaving the present merely to 
reconfigure the detritus of eras gone by.  It seems to me that the direction
to be taken is to use the concepts of the avant-garde and the revolution to 
formulate a critique of the self-consciousness that has created the loop of
irony.

Flannon 
 
 

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