Two, Three, Many Octobers: The Vanquished Tradition of the Avant-Garde, Part II
— But what was the avant-garde?
For Althusser it had been the vanguard of the proletariat, the Bolsheviks, and revolutionary leaders of the Third International who had had the radical insight to break with the parties of the Second International (most importantly with the ‘center’ of Marxist orthodoxy, the Social-Democratic Party of Germany) when its leadership capitulated to the impulse of saving the party by whatever means necessary (supporting the national cause in WWI), even if that meant sacrificing the long dreamt-of goal of the social revolution for the sake of preserving the powerful political apparatus that had been so dearly won over decades of bitter struggle. [1]
It was just this sort of conservative turn which Althusser feared the official communist parties of the Third International had taken again by the 1960s, and for which his “aleatory materialism” — a kind of faith in the eventual advent of communism due to the inevitability of rupture in the economic structure — could only seem to offer a philosophical interpretation. The abandonment of dialectical theory and with it, the entire critical perspective of classical Marxism, was a resignation to the blind forces of historical contingency and a pious wish that in the final analysis (perhaps on the eve of the Apocalypse) “all shall be well.” [2]
The postmodernism of the October group was similarly a reaction to a related crisis: that of avant-garde modernism. The postmodernists had become suspicious of the aesthetic dimension of artworks which perhaps was nothing more than ornament and style, “pretense and glittering misery” [3] — not only a poor concillitation for human suffering but even a downright piece of deception, an apparatus of bourgeois ideology which aped at a partial freedom in order to mask the universal dependence on force and violence in the capitalist production process. With the ‘late’ modernism announced in the grandiose style of Abstract Expressionism, the radical tradition of the avant-garde (the trajectory of Realism - Impressionism - Cubism - Surrealism) seemed to have become its opposite: an academy of decorative crafts (‘pure’ painting and ‘pure’ sculpture) in which the ideals of the ruling power could be enshrined in the value of the absolute commodity of art.
Was this the logical outcome of the artists’ revolt, the indelible mark of original sin?
Or could history have been otherwise? Was perhaps another future than ours intended?
Althusser’s work can be read as a last lament, a painful farewell to the project of classical Marxism — for “hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” [4] On the cultural front, the writers of the October group sought to escape from the problem of the autonomous work of art that had plagued the artistic avant-garde since its ambiguous inception in the social crisis of 1848. Confronted with the wreckage wrought by the failure to transform the world, Althuser and the October group experienced a crisis of faith in the old spirits of change. Even the bohème had turned out to be nothing but a bourgeois in disguise, the barricade a sacrificial mound…
The slope of the sides of the vast funnel became momently less and less steep. The gyrations of the whirl grew, gradually, less and less violent. By degrees, the froth and the rainbow disappeared, and the bottom of the gulf seemed slowly to uprise. The sky was clear, the winds had gone down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I found myself on the surface of the ocean, in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the Moskoe-ström had been. It was the hour of the slack — but the sea still heaved in mountainous waves from the effects of the hurricane. I was borne violently into the channel of the Ström, and in a few minutes was hurried down the coast into the ‘grounds’ of the fishermen. A boat picked me up — exhausted from fatigue — and (now that the danger was removed) speechless from the memory of its horror. Those who drew me on board were my old mates and daily companions — but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land. My hair which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed. I told them my story — they did not believe it. I now tell it to you — and I can scarcely expect you to put more faith in it than did the merry fishermen of Lofoden. [5]
Clement Greenberg, in his essay on “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” had written that, “[a] society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences. It becomes difficult to assume anything.” [6] As the product of a declining social order, the avant-garde was faced with the problem of surmounting the decadence that had hollowed-out the substance of art and resulted in the formulaic systems proffered by the outdated authority of the Académie des Beaux Arts which, as Baudelaire noted in The Salon of 1846, “had a vested interest in ceaselessly depicting the past; it is an easier task, and one that could be turn to good account by the lazy.” Baudelaire paints the predicament of the modern artist: “It is true that the great tradition has been lost, and that the new one is not yet established.” [7]
Greenberg goes further in attributing to the avant-garde a “superior consciousness of history” made possible by “the appearance of a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism” which penetrated the static surface of bourgeois society in order to “find a path along which it would be possible to to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence.” Artistic production thus took an inward turn toward what Greenberg characterized as the imitation of “the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves … the imitation of imitating.” [8] In the shadow realm of Capital, the position of art had become profoundly unclear, its purpose had turned into an open question, and even the place of its past glory — as the shining pediment of the Catholic Church — had been vacated by the secular power of the industrial revolution.
For the avant-garde artist, history had ceased to appear as a series of inevitable closures, and miraculously transformed into an opening for probing the depths of the imagination and testing the reality of its power, for running “up and down the immense keyboard of the universal correspondences!” [9] The poetry of Mallarmé, for instance, has a rattling effect on the mind that is hard to reconcile with its lyrical refinement. Consciousness of the decay of bourgeois culture had allowed the avant-garde to recast the entire history of art as the long development of metaphysical forms, the emergence of strange images with a power unique to themselves; the homelessness of art in the industrial age had granted a certain freedom of movement that drove the avant-garde to the constant rediscovery of old and new techniques capable of conjuring the full fantasy of their paradis artificiels.
Accompanying the aesthetic innovations of the avant-garde was an Alexandrian attitude that always suggested the retreat or even the complete resignation of the defeated artist, as in the famous case of Rimbaud, who it seemed could only sustain his poetic vision in the youthfulness of adolescence. Picasso’s return to the problem of classical figure after his foray with Braque into Cubist abstraction is perhaps another case in point, although the terrifying power of Guernica might ultimately prove the correctness of his retreat. The avant-garde was founded on a deep ambivalence towards the entire history of civilization: “A total absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it.” [10] In pursuit of some kind of deliverance, the avant-garde had undertaken to record the endless parade of human suffering as it appeared in both the costume of a present ‘now’ and in the torn, worn-out rags of an unresolved past. Above all, what signified the outbreak of modernity were the symptoms of a profane illumination:
These thoughts, whether they come from me or spring from things, soon, at all events, grow too intense. Energy in voluptuousness creates uneasiness and actual pain. My nerves are strung to such a pitch that they can no longer give out anything but shrill and painful vibrations.
And now the profound depth of the sky dismays me; its purity irritates me. The insensibility of the sea, the immutability of the whole spectacle revolt me… Ah! must one eternally suffer, or else eternally flee beauty? Nature, pitiless sorceress, ever victorious rival, do let me be! Stop tempting my desires and my pride! The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist shrieks with terror before being overcome. [11]
* * *
Next week I will continue my history of the avant-garde by returning to the source of its origin, as I suggested above, in the revolutionary crisis of 1848. My hope is to eventually return to Hal Foster and his Bad, New Days in order to take stock of what the postmodern retreat from aesthetic experience has accomplished for the continued possibility of art, but first it seems necessary to recount precisely what postmodernism wished to forget. //
James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, 1888. From: Getty.
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. From: Kottke.
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950. From: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. From: Holt Smithson Foundation.
Jacques-Louis David, Leonidas at Thermopylae, 1814. From: Wikipedia.
Autograph layout of Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, 1897. From: Sotheby’s.
Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. From: Museo Reina Sofia.
[1] For more on the change and continuity between the Second and Third Internationals see James Robertson, Lenin and the Vanguard Party (Spartacist Publishing: 1978). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/pamphlets/Lenin_Vanguard_Party.pdf
[2] See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto. (Verso, 2011), 107-8:
Adorno: … Today, everything is supposed to be practice and at the same time, there is no concept of practice. We do not live in a revolutionary situation, and actually things are worse than ever. The horror is that for the first time we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better one.
Horkheimer: The party no longer exists.
[3] Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784). From: marxists.org
[4] 1 Corinthians 1:20 (KJV)
[5] Edgar Allan Poe, “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841) in Selected Prose and Poetry. (Rinehart and Winston, 1961), 148-9. From: gutenberg.org
[6] Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) in Art and Culture: Critical Essays. (Beacon Press, 1961), 3-4.
[7] Charles Baudelaire, The Salon of 1846 in Art in Paris: 1845-1862. (Phaidon, 1965), 116.
[8] Greenberg, 5-7.
[9] Baudelaire, The Exposition Universelle (1855) in Art in Paris. 123.
[10] Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” (1933) in Selected Writings, vol. 2. (Harvard, 2004), 733.
[11] Baudelaire, “Artist’s Confiteor” in Paris Spleen (1869). (New Directions, 1947), 3.