From: Gordon Fitch <gcf-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: avant garde
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 1994 10:41:21 -0400 (EDT)


> avant garde is a metaphor, a way of understanding art (& by extension 
> politics):  art (politics) as a military operation.  to speak of an avant 
> garde politics is to speak of a revolutionary politics that understands 
> itself according to the models of "advanced" art.  it may seem natural to 
> conceive of politics in military terms, as a progress toward some goal 
> achieved in the manner of a military goal, but to think of art this way is 
> (was?) startling:  the power of this metaphor, the hold it displayed over 
> thought in the era of high modernism, is evident in the seemingly redundant 
> application of it to politics (i.e., the peculiar desire to say that 
> revolutionary politics is like an art that is like revolutionary politics!).
> ...

Well, High Modernism was the final summit of the
organization of Art (capital _A_) as a bourgeois
enterprise.  And the term "avant-garde" comes from
precisely the bourgeois belief in progress and eschatologic
(one-way) revolution, which started up in the middle of the
17th century.  About 150 years later, the Art World caught
on....  "The antennae of the race" indeed, but listening to
the echoes of the past.

So the avant-garde are the Art bourgeoisie, in effect --
the _spiritual_ bourgeoisie, the vanguard or leading class,
who, after toil and struggle, become Great, Dead, and
Revered.  There _is_ a redundancy, in that this pattern of
elite-progressivism and bourgeoisification was followed in
revolutionary politics as well.

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