File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1997/lyotard.9706, message 10


Subject: Re: paralogy and the Vortex
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 97 01:23:47 +0100
From: Giles Peaker <G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk>


I hope you will forgive a mail from a newcomer to the list, but I wanted 
to add some comments to the discussion on various avant-gardists.
On 1-6-97, EricMurph-AT-aol.com wrote
>I'm a little concerned about Pound being right wing art and Appolinaire being
>left wing art.  I'm with Benjamin here.  I don't know that such distinctions
>are really that useful. Granted Baudelaire was an extreme reactionary, but in
>his role as flaneur, he saw the changes taking place that would lead us from
>the arcades to the malls and their spectacles and captured it is his art.
[snip]
>I am concerned that judging an artist on his or her politics usually leads to
>bad art. I am certainly leftward in my leanings, but I  would not want to see
>art and literature return to the social realism of the thirties.  
>
>Also, I would argue that Appolinaire and Pound, despite their many
>differences, shared many technical innovations in common.  To a certain
>extent, they were both futurists!

Baudelaire could be taken as both revolutionary (he was on the streets in 
1848) or a reactionary (of the clerical variety). As Benjamin points out 
(via Marx), Baudelaire's politics (and, Benjamin suggests, his poetics) 
is that of the conspirator - the putschist. (see Benjamin - The Paris of 
the Second Empire in Baudelaire). The same could perhaps be said of Pound 
and Appolinaire. Benjamin, however, doesn't see distinctions between 
right and left wing art as not being 'useful', it is just that his 
understanding of what constitutes the politics of art goes far beyond the 
apparent political sympathy of the author or the material. His tirade 
against Marinetti at the end of 'The Work of Art in the Age of its 
Mechanical Reproduction' is a case in point (and not irrelevant when 
considering Pound and Wyndham Lewis, although perhaps not all of the 
Blast brigade).  

If we take this dandyism of the avant-garde as a more general phenomenon 
- as one frequent component of late 19th and 20th century modernism, I 
feel that it might raise some questions with regard to Lyotard; at least 
the Lyotard of 'Answering the question: What is Postmodernism'. To precis 
crudely, in this essay, Lyotard's account of the postmodern event is 
based on fundamentally modernist aesthetic practices (I use the term in 
its more general aesthetic sense, not in Lyotard's) in terms of the 
undermining of conventional 'language' (the examples are nearly all 
visual) in search of a new, or old, truth which is not put in place. This 
sublime moment, in which the presence of the unrepresentable is 
represented in the failure of representation, is what is important for 
Lyotard. Yet, without the underpinning of some form of metanarrative 
'truth' being at stake, even if never achieved, this sublime moment would 
seem to be far closer to the calculated and strategic ambiguity of the 
avant-gardist dandy. I am not sure whether the politics of the 
provocateur is quite what Lyotard had in mind, but the strategies of many 
of his own examples (Duchamp, Malevich, perhaps Picasso etc.) tend in 
that direction. My worries would be twofold. One that this is indeed an 
'aestheticised politics' to paraphrase Benjamin. Two, that as an 
aesthetic strategy, dandyism has long since been recuperated and its 
putschist nature turned to cynicism in a manner which is not effective 
either in Lyotard's terms or in a more practical politics (Warhol and all 
those who find some legitimation in him). The refusal of meaning/position 
can also be a game, as Duchamp well knew.

As a final gesture, I would agree that 'political art' is indeed 
frequently (if not always) bad. But then, all art is inevitably 
political...

I am very interested in the (post?) modernist sublime and would be 
delighted by any responses.
Yours

Giles


Giles Peaker, Historical and Theoretical Studies
School of Art and Design, University of Derby, Britannia Mill, 
Mackworth Road, Derby. DE22 3BL (U.K.)
(01332) 622222 ext. 4063    G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk
Editorial Collective:
Detours and Delays. An Occasional Journal of Aesthetics and Politics
http://art.derby.ac.uk/~detours/detours.html


   

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