avant-neo-post

There is a tendency in narratives about the avantgarde to devolve into trenchant debate about its revenant failures, its historical discontinuity & its contemporary impossibility. Conspicuously, the locus of much of this debate isn’t a material history of the avantgarde itself, but a subjective psychodrama around another supposed “failure,” that of 1968 (itself a relay between the “failure” of the wider revolutionary project in Europe after 1917 & of the worldwide antiglobalisation movement at the end of the millennium). In many ways, the supposed recuperation of the discourse of the avantgarde has served as a proxy for the disillusionments & resentments of a historical moment it is often itself excluded from, by an act of critical foreclosure that seeks to terminate its historical project. In this manner, the tragic view of revolutionary possibility after 1968 is given to reprise the tragic view of aesthetic possibility after Auschwitz, itself a discordant reprise of the Dadaist’s parodic view of political morality after WW1 & that of Rimbaud et al. after the Paris Commune. At each point something like an End of History has been evoked, in a continual renovation of Hegel’s messianic view, & in language often attributed to Marx in which it is in the “nature” of history to repeat, only with the terms inverted: farce & then tragedy (farce being the temper of the avantgarde; tragedy, that of its critics).

Recuperation, assimilation, institutionalisation: these recurrent motifs point towards a curious phenomenon. The oft’ repeated claim of the death or failure of the avantgarde is unable to mask the fact that institutionalisation remains an ongoing – which is to say, incomplete – project. In this sense, institutionalisation appears to be marked by a certain insufficiency. While the accelerated cycle of recuperation – to the point of seeming instantaneous in an age of digital media – implies that the avantgarde function has itself become increasingly “internalised” to that of the institution, this image of totality nevertheless remains, despite many apocalyptic claims to the contrary, unable to suture itself, to constitute that unique “autonomy” of an ideal-ego.[1]

Doubtless the omnipotence of the institution – its inexorable tendency to neutralise everything upon which its gaze happens to fall – has been grossly overstated. Its apparent “success” at incorporating various notions of the avantgarde, moreover, are not what they seem: its exhibits, we might easily suspect, are caricatures, a Wunderkammer stuffed with taxidermized corpses, a trophy room. Moreover, these creatures never existed, they were invented in an anatomy theatre, pieced together from the merely recognisable orts, scraps & fragments of something incomprehensible to a “science” capable of no other interest in them. But it isn’t merely that the spectre of the avantgarde haunts the institutions of art capital, rendering these caricatures grotesque, but that an “unassimilable” element persists – not in upsetting the arrangement, but in making it possible.

Crisis doesn’t befall the system of representation

Let us suppose that avantgardism (a concept that emerges more or less contemporaneously with Hegel’s thesis on the end of art) bears within it the assertion that history (too) has an end – & that this end of history is expressed through the belief that it can be precipitated through a direct assault on a teleological order of fixed hierarchical (aesthetic & social) values, in order to bring a previously occluded future into being. If the avantgarde emerges or merges with a certain dialectical thought of human consciousness, of the “present of the human mind” enchained to the past & desirous of projecting into the future (emancipation), this is because under conditions of modernity the prospect of a universal consciousness first comes into being as a constituent of everyday life. It is in this sense that the avantgarde speaks of aesthetic revolution as a direct relation between art & life, which is to say between two modes of representation. 

The avantgarde can thus be seen as an assault upon the concept of history as foreclosure of revolutionary thought: that is to say, as a history of impossibilities.One of the significations of the term avantgarde, then, is revolution of history or the demand for the impossible. Insofar as Hegel bequeaths to it the idea that history itself can be thought as a mode of revolution, then the avantgarde presents itself as revolution of revolution. It is for this reason, among others, that the historical ruptures within the avantgarde need to be understood in terms not of a self-negation by successive countermovements, but in terms of the seemingly contrary phenomenon of institutionalisation.

To paraphrase Kojève, a term is “only” the history of its interpretation – a notion, constitutionally rife with contradiction (history, i.e., not of but as a sum-total of contradictory “interpretations”) which has led to a paradoxical sense of the avantgarde as a tendency to perpetrate acts of insurrection doomed to a negative existence: that avantgardism, by pursuing a permanent revolution, nihilistically subverts the very gesture of a “seizure of power.” Doomed, therefore, to a form of impotent recuperation within the confines of those institutions of art capital against which its subversive force is intended to be directed. This in turn has given rise to a way of thinking that orientates the idea of the avantgarde in a fixed relation to “its object,” as a kind of rectifying conscience in a system of social relations in demand of a moral imperative. The avantgarde’s failure to supply such rectifications has given rise to a certain “tragic view,” by which the various “neo-avantgardes” are perceived as cynically defeatist re-enactments of a false promise (rather than a consciousness, for example, that such rectification is impossible: at a fundamental level, there is not social relation). In this narrative, the avantgarde becomes a myth, parallel to that of the political itself, one that is animated solely by its failure.[2] And yet, the recurrent paroxysms of socalled “culture wars” would seem to indicate that the “subversive” power of certain avantgardist ideas in & of art, literature, cinema etc., continues to exert a disproportional influence[3] – more than capable of incitement to the various hysterias that comprise the status quo – just as, over two millennia past, certain ideas of poetics & writing had done in the work of Plato.

There is no other “system of meaning”

In The Republic, the translation of poetry into prose, as the precondition for its representation before the tribunal of reason, provides a founding allegory of what institutionalisation entails.

From this, two parallel lines of thought unfold:

• The first implies an institution whose structures verge upon the logical rigidity of a psychosis, even if this rigidity takes on the appearance of a dialectics – an openness to incorporating the “other.”
• The second implies an “other” that is always already negated in advance, as poetry is negated in the Platonic schema & translated into the prose of reason: in effect, holding up a mirror to the power of its “subversion of subversion.”[4]

In these acts of enclosure of the cultural field, the avantgarde serves as an ideal trophy. So when it is said that the avantgarde is anti-institutional, what does this mean?

Jacques Lacan, referring to the paranoid ego of civilisation (culture), presents a counter-intuitive understanding of “true freedom” as stemming not from an overthrowing of institutions & a seizure of power, but from a consciousness of not being free at all. The Surrealist revolution, for example, was understood as first & foremost a revolution of consciousness. A consciousness, moreover, that necessarily remains divided. This division “represents” a fundamental irreconcilability. So that, to begin with, the avantgarde is not any thing that can be reconciled under that term: there is no Hegelian movement of sublation or synthesis. For Lacan, the consciousness of not being free at all is the mark of a subjective transference: it is the paradoxical sense in which autonomy expresses itself through subjection.

Let us consider a comparable but inequivalent thesis: that the avantgarde cannot be treated as some thing – some artefact or phenomenon or primitive commodity[5] – that may be incorporated into an institutional epistemology, even by modifying it – but is rather a kind of residue in advance, the inassimilable element of a reduction & attempted sublimation that is inevitably to come yet also interminable. In this, the avantgarde is the very mark of the institution as such. In other words, the avant of the avantgarde, & its (neo-) reiteration, is not so much derived from its coming before the recuperative act, but its coming into being as the anticipation of it: an institutional consciousness before the fact. Here, the supposed “institutionalisation” of the avantgarde resembles the “political” logic of the signifier as expressed in Lacan’s seminar on “The Purloined Letter,” in which – as Élisabeth Roudinesco summarises – “a letter always arrives at its destination because the letter – i.e., the signifier, as inscribed in the unconscious – determines, as fortuna did for Machiavelli, the subject’s fate in its various orientations.”[6]

Whatever is experienced as a “true representation” produces an experience of “truth as such”

This “fatalism” of the avantgarde, contrary to Peter Bürger’s tragic view, is in no way concerned with institutional escape (the avant as line-of-flight), but with a “ruse of reason” (Cixous), by which the institution is constantly lured into an errant terrain (“field”) that it can only seek to dominate by valorising the “impossibility” (however symbolic this gesture may be) of doing so. Were we to credit Bürger’s assertion that “the art of the twentieth century” can be seen as a movement “to which no historical necessity can be ascribed,” then this ruse is all the more remarkable.[7] Its demystifying effect has transformed the work of institutionalisation from totalising omnipotence to hysteric spectacle (whose “content” is anything or nothing). Moreover, this demystification is accomplished on the basis of something which – within the general scheme of power – is afforded a most trivial status. As in the contest between the Platonic ideal republic & poetry, the work of institutionalisation is always presented as vastly asymmetrical, yet its commodification as political drama declares that all is at stake. To accept that both of these characterisations can be simultaneously true cannot simply be resolved as “capitalist schizophrenia”: to begin with, for the reason that the commodity itself isn’t an invention of capital but rather the means by which capitalism was able to evolve, & to do so in contradiction not only with certain philanthropic views of society, but with itself also – just as the incorporation of “trash” into art, then of “products” & later of “concepts,” mirrors those Paracelsian tendencies of a capitalism adrift from fixed value, instead of contradicting them. Rather than signifying the nadir of institutionalisation, the avantgarde here performs a seemingly paradoxical function as its apotheosis – just as in Kant the law comes about & is revealed through nonlaw. As Lacan says, “Why is ‘liberation’ impossible without law?”[8] For this reason, we should be less concerned with the supposed “internal contradictions” of capitalism than with its “revolutions.” Likewise, the image of the avantgarde’s criminality, its transgressions, its insurrectionary provocations & “revolutionary violence” are not merely a kind of theatre that devolves into repetition, to then be neatly contained within the apparatuses of art capital. If we are to speak of repetition, it is necessary to do so with the full force of its Freudian signification, as the mark of a “primal scene” inscribed within the meaning of the avantgarde & which inaugurates its signifying force at every point. At the same time, this scene operates as a kind of “mirror stage” of subjectivisation – by which the “freedom-to-desire” of the avantgarde is transformed into a “desired servitude” of institutionalisation & vice versa.

It is as if Machiavelli’s fortuna were to elide with Derridean destinerrance – such that the institution, via the “detour” of recuperation, doesn’t arrive at a higher state of “totality,” but instead becomes the itinerary of an interminable detour. No matter how “devoid of meaning” the term avantgarde becomes in this process, it nevertheless “determines” the unconscious destiny of its subject, which the institution already is.

This is why Bürger’s argument in his 1980 “Postscript,” that “an institution prevents the contents of works that press for radical change in society (i.e., the abolition of alienation) from having any practical effect,”[9] is self-contradictory. In so far as it is meaningful at all to speak of “the contents of works,” this content – in relation to the avantgarde – is always already the institution. Bürger comes closer to this understanding when he writes, with regard to Aestheticism,[10] that it represents “that moment in history where the autonomy of the institution comes to manifest itself in the contents of works.”[11] The paradigm case for Bürger, which at first appears to represent an extreme point in the negation of Aestheticism, is the Duchampian readymade. In it, Bürger identifies the response to the question Duchamp posed in 1913, “Peut-on faire des œuvres qui ne soient pas ‘d’art’?”: “At first,” Bürger argues, “the readymade seemed to undermine the category of the work of art, now it looks as if even the readymade can be incorporated into it. The institutionalised discourse on art keeps the upper hand over the singular act of negation; but from now on it can make a claim on truth only by integrating its own negation.”[12] But rather than supposing the readymade to be Duchamp’s reply to his own (rhetorical) question, it needs to be considered that the readymade is rather the “ruse” by which institutionalisation offers itself as the reply, not by integrating its own negation but by affirming its own spectral character (institutionalisation is “revealed” as the mode of production of Benjaminian “aura,” whose ritualistic apparatus is equated to that of the commodity fetish).

This relation to auratic spectacle is twofold: in effect, coming in advance of itself, institutionalisation is détournement.[13]

It is then a question of repositioning Bürger’s enunciations, e.g., concerning “autonomy” or the “abolition of alienation” (i.e., subjectivity) as issuing from the institution itself in an abstract, metonymic form (unbounded – “like” the Duchampian readymade – by any “historical necessity”). Yet it is necessary to go further, to recognise that the institution, as institution, thus desires to occupy both of these positions simultaneously – as subject & subjectlessness, as aesthetic & anaesthetic, as historical & posthistorical – & it is for this that the (neo)avantgarde functions as a type of imago through which the trajectory of the institutional movement is inscribed.

The text isn’t a void into which meaning falls

Irrespective of the forms it assumes over time, one consistent feature of the avantgarde is its proclaimed incomprehensibility. The naïve view is that avantgarde ““subversion”” of the institutions of (cultural) power derives from the inability of these institutions to comprehend it. It’s not for nothing that the avantgarde has tended to elide with a critique of rationalism. The subversion of rationalism has always been assumed to be best directed at its modus operandi, its dependency upon categories, coherence, systems. If to comprehend is to be held within an ordered system of fixed polarities, then it is easy to see how such a comprehension is anathema to a critique of the ideology of reason.

And yet, where this line of argument tends is to the realisation that the institution doesn’t in fact need to comprehend anything. If there is any irony in this, it’s that the “meaning” of the avantgarde can subsequently be formulated in terms of precomprehension or precognition: that, to the contrary, it functions as an ideological prosthesis by which the very idea of the institution evolves, & to which it is increasingly bound & dependent upon.

Both the deconstructive force & apparent weakness of this critique rest upon an element of design in the avantgarde’s pursuit of the arbitrary, the indeterminate, the irrational, as anti-paradigms of systematicity (e.g., Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method”). That such design poses avantgardism as first & foremost a travesty of institutionalism nevertheless does not reduce its critique to the status of a mock-critique, since this critique begins at a point of self-subversion that in the institution is normally occluded. This point hovers constantly on the edge of instability, breakdown, autodestruction: it is the locus of a “desire” that at various times in cultural history has attached itself to terms such as the sublime, transcendence, catastrophe & crisis.

Epistemology doesn’t survive its experimental forms

If Bürger recognised in the neoavantgarde a dehistoricised institutional reduplication of what he considered the historical avantgarde, it’s because he looked within the institution to find it – a gesture of resentment[14] born of “revolutionary disillusionment” (there is a sense, in Bürger’s writing, in which the socalled neoavantgarde is held responsible for the failure of 1968).[15] The centrality that Bürger’s text has assumed in discussions of this “failure” should be reason enough to consider it an act of what Land & others have described as “occult time war.”[16] Bürger’s critical historiography enacts “powers of incantation and manifestation” & their opposite, as weapons beyond mere polemic, to negate an entire field of radical avantgarde activity (including Lettrism, CoBrA, the Situationist International, Gruppo 63, Provos, King Mob, the Motherfuckers, Fluxus, Guerrilla Girls, et al.[17]), in the service of an institutional “hyperstition” that will in effect materialise this fiction & provide the necessary pretence for his rejection of the neoavantgarde.[18] In a classic Situationist reverse, Bürger’s self-fulfilling thesis states that every neoavantgarde is a performance of institutional recuperation & that institutionalisation is the precondition of the neoavantgarde. Or, as Lacan said at the time, “the revolution” is never able to free the subject from its servitude.[19]

Likewise in his complaint about all things neo-, Andreas Huyssen turns exclusively to the mainstream of postwar commercial art (e.g., “Madison Avenue pop artists”[20]) which he then submits to a flagrantly anti-American critique[21] as if to pre-empt his (& Bürger’s) own thesis on the “failure” of this neo– as symptom of US culture-industrial appropriation of the aesthetic project of European modernity. Yet none of the many “European” groups operating within this same chronology are brought into the polemic, as exemplifiers of a viable neoavantgarde. In Huyssen’s The Great Divide, Situationism is only referred to as “the Parisian graffiti of May 68” calling for “cultural revolution” & dismissed as a “rhetorical gesture” declaring “the death of all literature” – itself nothing but a recycling of “the traditional anti-aesthetic, anti-elitist & anti-bourgeois strategies of the avantgarde.”[22] The events of 1968 are themselves described as having “foundered upon the hard realities of the status quo,”[23] an indictment assumed to be somehow definitive with regard to the Situationists’ otherwise “infantile” gesture (Peter Handke’s term) – as if Surrealism’s encounter with WW2 or Vorticism’s encounter with WW1 were not similarly terminal: certainly for Vorticism & Surrealism, yet hardly for avantgardism which, as an idea, immediately spawned Dada & Lettrism, for example, just as the post-68 period spawned Autonomia & Aktionism.[24]

This entire line of argument appears, in retrospect, determined by an underlying (& unacknowledged) subscription to the premise that avantgardism is bound to the fortunes of capital itself & that only in proximity to the dominant institutions of capital can legitimately avantgarde activity occur: in the postwar situation, this means proximity to a culture industry synonymous with America, whose social organisation is nevertheless such as to preclude the possibility of any such activity arising in the first place (this is – via Adorno & Horkheimer – Huyssen’s unstated thesis).This general argument finds its major institutional moment, ironically enough, in the ascendency of the October group of socalled “postmodern” art critics – Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois, Douglas Crimp, et al., which represents a predominantly Duchampian genealogy that runs through Pop Art & Conceptualism, to Fluxus & down to the present. The elisions of Bürger & Huyssen are significant not only in terms of the ideological foreclosure affected by their particular historiographic viewpoint, but for the way in which it bears upon the October group’s own major canonical revision of western art history, Art Since 1900 (published in 2014). Close on the heels of an attempt to manufacture a critical paradigm out of Bataille’s notions of the “formless” & “heterology,” so the October group’s canonisation of avantgardism as the major impulse in 20^th-century art implies the “forbidden jouissance” of an academicism fixated on resurrecting the transgressions of the avantgarde & making a kind of theoretical golem out of it, as – in a perverse refinement of Bürger’s critique – the agency of an institutional critique from within.

Exceptional conditions are the norm

Yet if we consider the nature of the unassimilability defined by Bataille’s concept of heterology – which “opposes every homogenous representation of the world – i.e., every philosophical system… It aims at a complete inversion of the philosophical process that, having formerly been an instrument of annexation, now enters the service of excretion & introduces a call for the violent satisfactions illicit in social existence“[25] – what we see is that there is, however, no binary opposition: power itself is heterological, there is no truly homogenous philosophical system, & the scientism conjured in Bataille’s polemic is a nineteenth-century phantasm at best (contemporaneous as it was with the work of Heisenberg, Poincaré & others). Just as the Foucauldian critique insists that reason includes madness, so the abjective functions of excretion are already contained within the “obscene” operations of power. The outward work of exclusion fully corresponds to the otherwise “forbidden jouissance” of excretion in a fort/da relation of narcissistic control. There is, in a sense, no “inversion of the philosophical process,” since in effect philosophy, as reason, is not one system among others (Hegelianism, Phenomenology, Existentialism), but a system-of-systems, just as capital is not one politico-economic system among others but increasingly identifies (through the commodity function) with a logistical capitalisation on emergent structural possibilities (means of valorisation) circumscribed only by dogma.

It is important to grasp, moreover, that between Bataille’s notions of heterology & the formless (defined as something like a spider or spit) & that status of poetry in The Republic, a certain equivalence obtains. Not on the basis of abjection or irrationality, but of a dissimulated force. A spider & spit are not, within the western imaginary, significatory voids: the phobia attached to spiders acquires, in Freud’s 1932 “Revision of the Theory of Dreams,” universal scope in relation to the incest taboo, while in the 20^th century spit has potent virological connotations. Likewise, Plato can’t truly be said to regard poetry as the language of unreason, on the margin of sense, but as a clear & present threat to philosophy’s own claim upon political authority, articulating a realm of thought unforeclosed by dialectics. In each case, the apparatus of subjection constructed in the name of “reason” is little more than an hysterical theatre (in Plato it perversely re-enacts the showtrial of Socrates & anticipates those of Stalinism), whose sole function is to sublimate the insufficiencies of a tenuous, narcissistic “dream of power.”

To speak of a “science” of the unassimilable is to speak in precisely these terms – as one might speak of a ‘Pataphysics: the “instruments of annexation” attributed to institutionalism appear less connived at, less of an ideological rationale, in the manner of a conspiracy against dissent, the free imagination, or merely for the purpose of profit, than they are a kind of “polymorphous perverse” upon which a retrospective rationalisation is imposed in the form of an institutional “ego boundary.” (Ideological “science,” too, must be subject to contingency & indetermination.) Rimbaud’s “JE est un autre” applies nowhere so incisively as it does to the situation of this boundary, to the extent that we might say that this is all there is: that if the institution functions as the “content” of the avantgarde, this is for the principal reason that it “itself” has no content, it is solely an opening, an orifice, like a blackhole ingesting & excreting in a purely liminal phenomenon. That this phenomenon is able to configure the very meaning of spacetime should give us pause for thought as to the gravitational effect of institutionalisation upon a cultural field that is often naively characterised as a system of discrete binary relations between autonomous historical subjects.

“To represent” equates to the production of crisis by means of crisis

Contrary to a certain way of thinking about societal & political structures, power does not reign over a state of equilibrium but exists as a tendency towards states that are far-from-equilibrium. This dynamic, being hierarchical, produces stability from a basis of instability (all dynamic systems are far-from-equilibrium). What is called a status quo is in reality a topology of relations-of-maximum-tension, between elements within a system, maintained in a state of perpetual conflict & thus in perpetually evolving balance. This evolution is arbitrary, but the relations it produces are causal, if indeterminate: the system of power is thus neither random nor mechanistic, rather it exhibits the characteristics of what physicists & information theorists call chaos. Chaos “reflects predictability over time. A system is said to be stable if it changes very little over a long timescale, and random if its fluctuations are unpredictable. But a chaotic system — one ruled by nonlinear responses to events — may be predictable over short periods but is subject to increasingly dramatic shifts”[26] at larger scales.

It might seem counter-intuitive to say that chaos doesn’t represent fluctuations in some predictable, stable norm – but that, insofar as there is a norm, chaos is it. And yet this is indeed what observation tells us.

Any far-from-equilibrium system “conceals” dominant chaotic structures within the information that can be used to describe it – i.e., to produce a stable image of what it is & how it operates (over time). For this reason, we must consider, counter-intuitively, a system’s “stability” as an expression of its entropy & not the contrary. Likewise, poetic structure doesn’t reduce to an inherently “stable” core within an otherwise “chaotic” arrangement of language: any attempt at reduction (Plato’s judicial sublimation of poetry into the prose of reason) produces only an artefact of its own procedures that interjects a fictive “sense” into what it cannot comprehend. (The work of making (producing) sense should never be treated as anything other than ideological, while the preclusion of its object is not a mark of this procedure’s insufficiency but its (alienating) condition.) Likewise, the tendency (capacity) to produce such rationalisations needs to be considered a measure of that system’s entropy (& not the contrary). That is to say, of a hermeneutics that works by deformation (detour, détournement, etc.). Programmed to assume that all signification must be “stability-dependent,” it produces representations of stability that substitute for the apparently anarchic operations of poiēsis (& thus mask its own involuted, heterological structures). Moreover, it itself produces the logic of dichotomy on which this appearance is founded. (Power first seeks to totalise in abstract (according to the exclusionary principle of binary opposition): it radiates an image of a rectified/rectifying totality, yet its armature is rather that of a singularity, a blackhole.) The paradox is that, in doing so, it itself “produces” entropy autopoetically. (The dialectical image is inverted: the work of totalisation – as with any system – always tends to decoherence.)

As Lacan argues in his 1971 seminar, XIX (“…ou pire”), rationalisation gives way to an “objective persecution” at that point at which a fundamental resistance arises out of a knowledge that appears incomprehensible (what Lacan terms “mathematical incomprehension”). Here we see the dilemma that is already elided in Plato’s schema, which has to do with the very status of the poetic object as something knowable – that is to say, subjectifiable – within a schema of philosophical reason – which is to say, of its power to know. The dilemma for the Platonic schema thus arises from an exclusionary force directed at what it cannot know, which it attempts to recuperate by causing to adopt a rational disguise. This neurotic double-bind – also the mark of institutionalisation.

The longevity of the avantgarde idea, in whatever iteration of neo- or post-,[27] is thus not unlike the Freudian “return of the repressed”: in the sense that, being unpresentable within a rigid framework of cultural values, it re-circulates as the trace of its own inassimilability (like Bataille’s accursed share). Rather than describing an inevitable trajectory of institutionalisation, as convention insists, this re-circulation describes the contrary: the glitch in the teleological scheme whose representation the socalled institution is. It isn’t a question, therefore, of the inevitable failure of the avantgarde project, or whatever it may be called from time to time, but of how it transpires that the omnipotent mechanisms of institutionalisation can only represent themselves by means of this apparently minor theatre of dissent, replayed merely (so we are to believe) as a kind of alibi for its on-going commodification under the false appearance of the “new.”

The economic relation here again invites parallels to the Freudian conception of the unconscious, which Lacan identifies as a circuit: a circuit by means of which the inassimilable thing (the “repressed”) is recycled via a network of homeostatic functions within an autonomously “governed” (regulated) system. This “circuit” is in fact an algorithm: a circuit of ramifying feedback loops – in the case of the Freudian unconscious, one of indeterminate complexity which “evolves” over time to behave as if capable of integrating everything. In this it bears uncanny resemblance to Marx’s analysis of the system of commodities & the illusion constructed by capitalism, not merely of being able to “transcend” its own “internal contradictions,” but to incorporate any contradiction whatsoever. It is in this respect, but only in appearance, the contrary of the Platonic system of exclusion: in fact, they are identical (the mode of comprehension of one is merely a transposition of the other).

There’s always a risk, here, of figuring THE INSTITUTION as a malevolent agent of social control, the conspiratorial nemesis of all things “ungovernable.” For example, in “Electronic Civil Disobedience,” the Critical Art Ensemble state (echoing Foucault, Guattari & Deleuze) that “One essential characteristic that sets late-capitalism apart from other political economic forms is its mode of representing power. What was once a sedentary concrete mass has now become a nomadic electronic flow.”[28] In an observation typical of its kind, they note that a new cybernetic mode of understanding information has obscured the location of power, producing decentred structures in which hegemonic relations are distributed across the entire social fabric, problematising the situation of its critique. Consequently, the work of “resistance” needs to be strategically re-conceived. What, however, is lacking here, is a reconceptualisation of the work of analysing the situation, a mantra of the revolutionary party that has long since become a mere formalism premised upon the inertia of its critical object.

An important question arises here: if neoliberal forms of “representing power” (that is to say, its “aesthetics”) corresponds to a broadly cybernetic conception of autonomous distributed networks, what distinguishes this description from that of e.g. an autonomist “seizure” of the means of production of social meaning? What the Critical Art Ensemble identify as a state of affairs necessitating a strategic reorganisation of the project of resistance, appears in Bürger as a (tragic) situation of revolutionary failure & disempowerment. The termination of the avantgarde in Bürger’s schema corresponds here to a termination of the revolutionary project – an “end of history” – & an assent to an institutional future (i.e., the failure of the neoavantgarde), impervious to avantgarde strategies of subversion & critique. A curious inversion has occurred here, such that the critical position can now be identified with a “concrete sedentary mass” while institutionalisation assumes the form of an unassailable, polymorphous & ultimately mythological antagonist. Is it not the case that, in doing so, the signifier “institution” is rendered not only ambivalent but attaches to an ideal (because unpresentable) “object” of desire: the mirror of a certain (dissident, avantgarde) revolutionary action itself? In this (illicit) desiring relation, the dyad avantgarde-institutionalisation is reversed, the “failure” of the one transposing into the “success” of the other, not through an incorporation of “ideological content,” but in a fundamental restructuring: a restructuring, moreover, that isn’t externally affected; it comes about as a general “solicitation” (as Derrida says) of the structure of capital (which is to say, of the system of value) from “within,” by way of the operations of the commodity.

Whereas, the institution, in its magic omnipotence, retains all the characteristics of a fetish (a spectre of power that haunts the consciousness of every social relation), the commodity names the fundamental absence of any such relation, beyond a significatory event that is without content. Now the question becomes, to what extent is the “avantgarde” produced (hypostasised) as an effect of this particular hauntology? To what extent does the “avant” correspond to a “preoccupation” with the spectral form of power – a preoccupation that, out of an initial frenetic encounter, acquires the subsequent form of a morbid hypnotic spiral (the reductio ad infinitum of two mirrors)? As it is haunted so it is drawn. But drawn to what? (There is no ego in the mirror.) Is this “institution” not, finally, the mirroring horizon of a perpetual negative dialectics, in which the fatal desire of a certain critico-revolutionary narcissism is put into operation, to come ever closer to this spectre & (as Joyce says) “look upon its deadly work”?[29]

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Notes

^[1] Are we not always at risk, here, of extending too much credit to a system built on a certain market confidence, whose predominant currency is self-assertion? Does not criticism acquiesce to power the moment it allows institutionalisation to define the comprehension, & thus recuperation, of that which “contradicts it” merely because it says it does? Merely, in other words, by sticking a pricetag on it in place of a target?

^[2] The “failure” of the avantgarde, which Peter Bürger identifies with its subsequent reiterations & post-effects, was already well in evidence in its socalled “historical” phase. We see the particular significance of Prague Dada in the “failure” of Dada globally not because of its obscurity or suppression, but because, as Hausmann noted, it was the site, in the early 1920s, of Dada’s greatest “success”: that is to say, of its total assimilation as bourgeois entertainment. The virulent Dadaism of John Heartfield’s Prague-period photomontages, produced in the service of antifascist critique, were likewise neutralised in their subversive force by an analogous populism. The same would occur with the advent of the Museum of Modern Art & the assimilation of the avantgarde within the spectacle of institutional art history, now defined by showcasing “movements”: modern art, it proposed, may be temperamental, but its temperamentality is still comprehensible within a broadly dialectical schema in which the foundation of continuity is discontinuity. What Rosenberg later termed the tradition of the new.

^[3] This disproportion expresses itself in the relation of force to farce – a common feature across an otherwise heterogeneous field. Even the most straightfaced rendering of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto cannot conceal the deeply farcical character of its bombast – a farce that isn’t merely for performative effect, but goes to the core of the inability of a regime of signifying power to comprehend & articulate that which is alien to it. The Futurist Manifesto is a masterclass in mixed metaphor – of organicism rent by an inchoate technopoetics: its magisterial tones underwhelm the language in which they are expressed & which in turn they fatally sabotage. Tzara’s Dada manifesto deconstructs the language & logic of the manifesto itself by a contrary strategy: it is nothing if not exemplary of a certain rationalism. As Foucault came later to demonstrate: reason includes the irrational within its own logic: Plato’s dichotomy of exclusion, isolation & disempowerment of poetry by way of the philosophic institution of syllogistic prose amounts to fiction.

^[4] One of the implications here is that – from its every inception – the poetics of the avantgarde has really never been anything more than an elaborate gaslighting exercise on the part of the operations of power (art capital). Just as poetry was the strawman for Plato’s ideal (totalitarian) polis. In this hyperparanoiac view, the proverbial “return of the repressed” is a built-in psycho-civilisational diversion tactic, “designed” to maximise the homeostatic operations of power itself. Operations that are themselves paragons of complexity, that only pretend to be those reductive caricatures of “pure reason” by which the world is divided unambiguously between ones & zeroes.

^[5] It is important not to lose sight of the fact that – within the history of social crises traced back through the industrial revolution – the universality of alienation & the ubiquity of the commodity form were not produced by capitalism, but (by coming to consciousness as the basic teleological condition of value itself) increasingly drove capitalism’s evolution towards a general system of abstraction, exchange & (re)circulation.

^[6] Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, 269.

^[7] Peter Bürger, “Duchamp 1987,” Avant Garde 2 (1989): 7-22 [7].

^[8] Roudinesco, Lacan, 346.

^[9] Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 95.

^[10] To speak of aesthetic autonomy is to necessarily position the question of art & institutionalisation on a continuum with an emergent commodity logic & to recognise the avantgarde as historically coterminous with that logic’s critique, not by virtue of chronology but of structure. This relation is the real basis of any “engaged art” that doesn’t merely represent a subordination to ideology, but which emerges from the very framework & possibility of representation itself. That is to say, of the “autonomy” of the signifier & the arbitrariness of signifying relations (& thus also of social relations).

^[11] Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 96.

^[12] Bürger, “Duchamp 1987,” 18.

^[13] See Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, 110: “Recuperation and détournement cannot be conceived as the strategies of opposing forces, but the eternal passage between equivalent contexts, so that the revolutionary posters printed in 1968 were no more real or authentic than their 1988 advertisers’ simulation; the simulation is not a recuperation, since the original was never outside the play of discursive networks in the first place.”

^[14] The judgements that Bürger hands down appear to us in retrospect as nothing if not themselves institutional. That they are handed down from a position asserted to be from within that of a critical theory, indicates a situation that in itself needs to be more thoroughly examined: of the relationship in Bürger (& elsewhere) between the institutionalisation of the avantgarde & the institutionalisation of theory (the one avowed, the other disavowed: Bürger indeed argues from a position of theoretical high moralism).

^[15] As a critique predominantly orientated around the work of Walter Benjamin, Theory of the Avant-Garde appears to take its historical framework & its ambivalences from Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility” (1935). Between Benjamin’s essay & Bürger’s thesis, the chronology of authenticity’s dissolution is simply transposed by several decades.

^[16] CCRU (Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit), “Lemurian Time War,” Writings 1997–2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2018) 33-52.

^[17] See, among others, Stewart Home, Assault on Culture (1988).

^[18] CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” 36.

^[19] Reported in Roudinesco, Lacan, 343.

^[20] Andreas Huyssen, The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1986) 168.

^[21] Huyssen goes so far as to deny the activities New York Dada, contemporaneous with those of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. See The Great Divide, 167.

^[22] Huyssen, The Great Divide, 165.

^[23] Huyssen, The Great Divide, 166.

^[24] While tendencies like those of the Italian autonomist movement appeared after the publication of Bürger’s text in 1974, the postscript to the 1980 edition makes clear that Bürger saw no reason to modify his text, instead the postscript serves as a response to theoretical & methodological criticisms of the first edition. Nanni Balestrini’s 1971 novel Vogliamo tutto (We Want Everything) was translated into German in 1972. Significantly, Balestrini’s flow chart for an earlier work, Tape Mark I (1961), was included in the London Institute of Contemporary Art’s 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition & catalogue, one of the first major international shows on the emerging computer art scene – also ignored by Bürger (the very first international exhibition of computer art took place in Brno, Czechoslovakia, earlier the same year, incidentally – curated by the experimental poet Jiří Valoch). A much more credible indicator is Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, which charts many of the pathways in which the technopoetics of the historical avantgarde evolved in the postwar period, often in a Duchampian vein. Bürger’s historiography, however, is openly biased against precisely this technological turn in “aesthetics,” which – alongside the commodity – represents the major constellation under which a certain notion of autonomy comes to exceed its Romanticist origins.

^[25] Bataille, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) 2:62-63.

^[26] Joanna Thompson, “Hidden Chaos Found to Lurk in Ecosystems,” Quanta (27 July 2022): http://www.quantamagazine.org/hidden-chaos-found-to-lurk-in-ecosystems-20220727/

^[27] Terms like avant-, neo-, post-, are conventionally employed as if in a time-sensitive relation to the evolution of an ideological system (e.g., western civilisation, the culture industry, etc.), or to the “periodicity” of that evolution, while they themselves are attributed a degree of “chaos” as perturbations on the periphery of a cultural mainstream. By plotting such periodicities against “hidden variables,” catastrophic (revolutionary) tendencies of this kind become stabilities. These “hidden variables,” like the “hidden hand” of the marketplace, represent the mysterious forces of institutionalisation. What are they? How do they produce magical “transformations,” from radically unstable (revolutionary) poetics to artefacts of commodity culture?

^[28] Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience (New York: Autonomedia, 1996) 7.

^[29] Is this, then, the unacknowledged “task” of the avantgarde – to have evolved, by a perpetual economy of institutionalisation, that universal commodity form of which it, itself, is the “tragic” figuration?

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Louis Armand is a writer, artist & theorist. His most recent works of criticism are Entropology (Anti-Oedipus Press) and Festins de Desmando, trans. Jorge Pereirinha Pires (Barco Bêbado), both 2023. He directs the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory at Charles University, Prague. www.louis-armand.com