historicizing the historical avant-garde
TRANSCRIPT
Historicizing the Historical Avant-Garde
Benedikt Hjartarson
(Manuscript of an article published in a Danish translation by Tania Ørum
and Claus Bratt Østergaard under the title “At historisere den historiske
avantgarde”, in: En tradition af opbrud. Avantgardernes tradition og politik,
ed. by Tania Ørum, Charlotte Engberg and Marianne Ping Huang. Hellerup:
Spring, 2005, pp. 44–61).
The somewhat tautological title “Historicizing the Historical
Avant-Garde” refers to the aim of the following discussion, to
present a critical revision of theories that have shaped our
understanding of the historical avant-garde and its successors
within the field of art and literature in the 20th
century. The main
question will be, in which respect the European avant-garde
movements that emerged in the early 20th
century have in fact
been grasped as historical and to what extent central categories
of the aesthetics of those movements have been described as
historical constructs. A further question to be posed is, to which
extent the theories of the avant-garde discussed need to be
critically revised as products of their own historical and
epistemological moment. Of central importance for this
discussion is Peter Bürger’s Theorie der Avantgarde, which not
only had a paradigmatic function in coining the concept of the
historical avant-garde, but also – as Dietrich Scheunemann has
noted – for almost three decades “has shaped our understanding
of these movements and has provided the frame for the
discussion of its innovations and manifestations” (2000: 7). The
following discussion will concentrate on the concept of
“everyday life” which has become central in recent theories of
the historical avant-garde, partly through a further development
of Bürger’s theory but more often through a critical analysis of
2
his approach. The growing interest in aspects of everyday life
has led many theoreticians to distance themselves from Bürger’s
theory and search for theoretical and methodological founda-
tions in theories of everyday life standing closer to the practices
of the historical avant-garde itself. This does not at least refer to
the writings of Henri Lefèbvre, whose critique of everyday life
poses other crucial questions concerning the historicity of the
historical avant-garde.
Everydayness and Praxis of Life
The importance of Bürger’s fixing of the project of the historical
avant-garde as the intention to “reintegrate art into the praxis of
life” (1984: 22)1 has been underlined in numerous recent works
emphasizing the importance of “everyday life” for avant-garde
aesthetics. Richard Murphy describes the historical avant-
garde’s attack on the institution of art as the attempt to drive
aesthetic experience “back into the real world, where it can play
its part in the transformation of everyday life” (1999: 11) and
Ben Highmore maintains that his analysis of the avant-garde
deals with “[l]ife praxis or more simply everyday life” (2000:
247), whereas Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders stress this
relationship somewhat more cautiously and speak of the avant-
garde’s “radical demand of a reintegration of art into (everyday)
life”.2 When describing the project of the avant-garde in terms
of a reintegration of art into everyday life, it should be noted that
the concept of the “everyday” only holds a marginal status in
Bürger’s work. The most important reason for this exclusion
may undoubtedly be found in the negative connotations the term
had gained in modern German philosophy, not least through
Heidegger’s influential definition of “everydayness”, or Alltäg-
lichkeit, in Sein und Zeit. In Heidegger’s work, the term “stands
for that way of existing in which Dasein maintains itself ‘every
1 “Kunst in Lebenspraxis zurückzuführen” (Bürger 1974: 29).
2 “[D]eren radikale Forderung der Rückführung von Kunst in (Alltags-)-
Leben” (Asholt and Fähnders 2000: 11). This and other translations of quota-
tions in this essay are my own, unless otherwise noted (BH).
3
day’” (1962: 422), thus describing the inauthentic forms of life
the German philosopher associates with Dasein. More important
for Bürger’s understanding of the term is the definition of
“everydayness” handed down by the discourse of marxism and
critical theory. The marxist definition of the term was coined by
Georg Lukács as early as 1911, in Metaphysik der Tragödie, in
which it is used to designate the “trivial life of the human being
[…] indistinguishable from the world of objects” which is the
opposite of an “‘authentic life’ thanks to which this being
accedes to himself through the work of art, or even better, turns
himself into a work of art” (Trebitsch 1991: xvii). A character-
istic example of the extrapolation of this notion of everydayness
in critical theory may be found among other in Adorno’s
description of Heinrich Heine’s poems as “prompt mediators
between art and an everydayness devoid of meaning.”3 Every-
dayness comes to describe the factuality of the meaningless and
reified modes of existence in social modernity.
In Prosa der Moderne, Bürger discusses Lukács’ notion of
“everydayness” and “ordinary life” as opposed to the idea of an
authentic life. He furthermore presents an extensive analysis of
the function of everydayness in modernist aesthetics, describing
it as “a central motive by exactly those authors of modernity
interested in formal experiments”.4 For Bürger, the emergence
of everydayness as a central aesthetic category can be traced
back to Heine’s integration of “fragments of reality”5 and the
“language of the everyday”6 into modern poetry, Flaubert’s
experiments to represent “everyday triviality”7 and Baudelaire’s
attempt to bridge “the gap between everyday experience and the
aesthetic norm”8 of classicism by “discovering the marvellous in
3 “[P]rompte Mittler zwischen der Kunst und der sinnverlassenen Alltäglich-
keit“ (Adorno 1974: 96). 4 “[E]in zentrales Motiv gerade der an Formexperimenten interessierten
Autoren der Moderne” (Bürger 1988: 28). 5 “Realitätsfragment” (Bürger 1988: 85).
6 “[D]ie Sprache des Alltags” (Bürger 1988: 81).
7 “[D]ie alltägliche Belanglosigkeit” (Bürger 1988: 277).
8 “Die Kluft zwischen Alltagserfahrung und ästhetischer Norm” (Bürger
1988: 106).
4
the everyday”.9 Bürger consequently discusses how the interest
of modernism in everydayness is further expressed among
others in Proust’s “defamiliarizing treatment of the everyday”10
and in Musil’s confrontation of “the banality of the everyday”11
with metaphysical thinking. Finally, Bürger sees the culmination
of the “poeticization of the everyday”,12
characteristic of
modernism, in Joyce’s Ulysses and its attempt to “recount the
contingency of everyday existence”13
by making it into the
structural principle of the literary text. In Bürger’s writings,
“everydayness” thus constitutes an analytical category meant to
describe formal characteristics and the technique of the literary
text. It refers to the methods used in the fictional text to
represent the factually existing conditions of everyday life in
social modernity.
In Theorie der Avantgarde Bürger does not describe the
project of the avant-garde as the intention to reunite art and
“everyday life”, but as the programmatic attempt to sublate art
in the “praxis of life”. Bürger’s concept of “life praxis” must be
clearly distinguished from the emphatic conception of everyday
life that has come to dominate descriptions of the avant-garde in
more recent theories. In Bürger’s writings, “everydayness”
designates the reified modes of existence in modern society,
whereas Lebenspraxis constitutes a social category that refers to
a mode of acting within that society and to the social function of
art.14
In this sense, he describes the revolt of aestheticism as the
9 “[D]as Wunderbare im Alltag zu entdecken” (Bürger 1988: 113).
10 “[V]erfremdende[r] Umgang mit dem Alltag” (Bürger 1988: 298).
11 “[D]ie Banalität des Alltags” (Bürger 1988: 430).
12 “[P]oetisierung des Alltags” (Bürger 1988: 320).
13 “[D]ie Kontingenz alltäglichen Daseins zu erzählen” (Bürger 1988: 324).
14 A striking example of a reductive interpretation of Bürger’s theory of the
avant-garde, in which its project is defined in terms of an attempt to dissolve
the boundary between art and everyday life, can be found in Richard
Murphy’s interpretation of Gottfried Benn’s poem “Schöne Jugend”, in
which he demonstrates how a fragment of everyday reality is integrated into
the text (1999: 61). The interpretation most obviously corresponds to
Bürger’s analysis of everydayness as a formal category of literary modern-
5
negation of a “praxis of life” dominated by the “means-ends
rationality of the bourgeois everyday”,15
whereas he maintains
that the avant-garde shares this revolt but intends to “organize a
new life praxis from a basis in art” (1984: 49).16
When de-
scribing the paradoxes of modernism in the conclusion of Prosa
der Moderne, Bürger again picks up the concept of a “praxis of
life”, hardly to be found in his discussion of modernism, in order
to describe “the attack of the historical avant-garde movements
on the institution of art”,17
thus clearly distinguishing their
project from the modernist conception of “everydayness” as a
formal category of the literary text. From Bürger’s perspective,
the modernist notion of “everydayness” is dependent on the
autonomy of the aesthetic. In order to integrate the everyday into
its own formal structure, the modernist text needs to cut itself
off from the everyday reality it seeks to represent. The
emergence of “everydayness” as a central aesthetic category is,
for Bürger, a product of the idea of the “purity of the aesthetic”
lying at the core of literary modernism, whereas the avant-garde
negates the reified modes of the everyday and aims at the
“transformation of the praxis of life”.18
Although it is necessary to distinguish between the categories
of “everydayness” and “praxis of life“ in Bürger’s writings, this
distinction should not be regarded as absolute. In works
published after Theorie der Avantgarde this distinction often
ism, but it has nothing to do with the avant-garde’s attempt to reintegrate art
into the praxis of life in Bürger’s terms. 15
“[D]ie zweckrational geordnete [Lebenspraxis] des bürgerlichen Alltags”
(Bürger 1974: 67). 16
“Die Avantgardisten intendieren […] von der Kunst aus eine neue Lebens-
praxis zu organisieren” (Bürger 1974: 67). 17
“Da aber weder die Politisierung noch die Sakralisierung das Dilemma zu
lösen vermag, erfolgt im Kontext der Erschütterung der abendländischen
Kultur durch den Ersten Weltkrieg der Angriff der historischen Avantgarde-
bewegungen auf die Institution Kunst. Die in ihr gebannten Potentiale sollten
entlassen werden in die Lebenspraxis.” (Bürger 1988: 451–452). 18
“Während die Moderne das autonome Kunstwerk zu ihrem Zentrum hat
und auf der Reinheit des Ästhetischen beharrt, geht es der Avantgarde
letztlich um eine Veränderung der Lebenspraxis […]” (1995: 23).
6
seems to be blurred. In Bürger’s later remarks on the
relationship between the historical avant-garde and the neo-
avant-garde, in which he has reconsidered the exclusively
negative perspective on the neo-avant-garde presented in his
earlier work, he sporadically describes the project of the
historical avant-garde as “the sublation of the boundary between
art and an everyday praxis of life”19
and even declares that the
aim of its project was “nothing less than to revolutionize the
whole of everyday life.”20
This does not only bear witness to a
more differentiated perspective on the interrelatedness of “life
praxis” and “everydayness” in Bürger’s later writings. It also
indicates, that the absence of the term of the “everyday” in his
earlier theory of the avant-garde has a programmatic aspect. By
describing the avant-garde’s attempt to reunite art and life in
terms of a “praxis of life” and not “everyday life” Bürger
distances his text from theories of “the everyday” which had
come to play a central role in cultural and social critique in the
post-war era. This refers primarily to the French context, in
which the publication of the two first volumes of Henri
Lefèbvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne in 1947 and 1962
opened the field for numerous theories of the everyday which
found their most exemplary expression in the writings of Michel
de Certeau (1994). It is relevant, that Bürger never mentions
Lefèbvre’s theory in Theorie der Avantgarde, although the
French philosopher’s analysis of the historical avant-garde
movements in many respect comes very close to Bürger’s own
theory.21
As the following discussion will show, however,
Lefèbvre’s analysis also presents a radical critique of the project
19
“[D]ie Grenze zwischen Kunst und alltäglicher Lebenspraxis aufzuheben“
(Bürger 1987: 199). 20
“Das Ziel war kein geringeres als eine Revolutionierung des gesamten
Alltagslebens.“ (Bürger 2005). 21
Bürger’s neglect of Lefèbvre’s theory of everyday life seems to be less
exceptional than characteristic of the reception of Lefèbvre’s work in
Germany. In one of the first extensive works on Lefèbvre’s theory of
everyday life published in Germany, Thomas Kleinspehn pointed out in
1975, that Critique de la vie quotidienne “had only been occasionally
received” and had not shaped the discussion in a decisive way (1975: 125).
7
of the historical avant-garde on the basis of a theory of everyday
life that is fundamentally at odds with Bürger’s theory and sheds
a critical light on the methodological premises of his approach.
Even more important is the role Lefèbvre’s theory played for the
emerging neo-avant-garde in France. It is not least through
Lefèbvre’s writings that the notion of “everyday life” comes to
function as an ideological watchword in the project of the neo-
avant-garde, which finds its programmatic expression in the
situationist attempt of “conscious alterations in everyday life”
(Debord 2002). By excluding the concept of the everyday
Bürger definitively distances his theory from the aesthetic
practices of the neo-avant-garde, which he describes in purely
negative terms as an inauthentic repetition of the historical
avant-garde. The exclusion of the concept of the everyday from
Bürger’s text also aims at distancing his theory from the
discourse of the historical avant-garde itself. Whereas “life” and
“the everyday” constitute an important category in the writings
of the historical avant-garde, Lebenspraxis is an analytical
category which corresponds to the methodological premises of
Bürger’s “critical hermeneutics”. Finally, it should be noted that
it is above everything else the category of social praxis which is
of importance to Bürger’s determination of the historical avant-
garde’s attempt to reintegrate aesthetic practices into life. The
concept of Lebenspraxis plays an important role in distancing
his theory from the metaphysical connotations related with the
terms “life” and “everyday life”. This is one of the most
problematic aspects of Bürger’s theory, because in the writings
of the historical avant-garde “life” represents primarily an
ontological and not a social category.
The Concept of Life and the Historical Avant-Garde
The authors of the historical avant-garde preferably describe the
projects of their movements as the bringing or begetting of a
new life. The imagery used to describe this process shows, that
it transgresses the boundaries of a purely metaphoric expression.
8
Richard Huelsenbeck describes dada for example as a pure
“creative action” and claims that “dada gave birth to the
numbness and pace of this time through its own head”,22
and
Ezra Pound defines the human brain as “a sort of great clot of
genital fluid held in suspense or reserve”, declaring that the
penetration of vorticism “into the great passive vulva of
London” was “a sensation analogous to the male feeling in
copulation” (1957: vii-viii). The formulations hardly describe
the aesthetic practices of the avant-garde as a social project of
“rejecting the world and its means-ends rationality”23
through
“the organization of a new life praxis from a basis in art” in
terms of Bürger’s theory (1984: 49).24
They rather articulate a
radical idealist conception of the powers of thought considered
as a magical or mystical origin of a new order of life. The
irrational understanding of the aesthetic imagination as a vital
and virile energy capable of regenerating the human spirit,
which is expressed in both texts, is characteristic of the rhetoric
of the historical avant-garde. It furthermore reveals that its
project is deeply rooted in anti-determinist theories, broadly
circulated within different scientific fields in European
intellectual discourse in the late 19th
and early 20th
century,
which stress the creative energy of human thought and its
dynamic role in the process of history or evolution.
The ideological basis of such logocentric ideas is primarily to
be found in theories developed within the context of a
philosophy of life and occultism. The conclusion of Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti’s preface to Mafarka le Futuriste, published
in 1911, gives a significant insight into the historical avant-
garde’s conception of the creative energy of the human mind:
In the name of human Pride, which we adore, I declare to you that the
time is near when men with huge cheeks and a chin made of steel will, in
22
“Dada ist die schöpferische Aktion in sich selbst. Dada hat die Erstarrung
und das Tempo dieser Zeit aus seinem Kopf geboren.” (Huelsenbeck 1980:
107). 23
“Ablehnung der zweckrational geordneten Welt” (Bürger 1973: 67). 24
“[V]on der Kunst aus eine neue Lebenspraxis zu organisieren” (Bürger
1974: 67).
9
a prodigious way and through the effort of their exorbitant will alone,
give birth to giants of infallible deeds… I declare to you that the spirit of
man is an untrained ovary… We will be the first to fertilize it!25
The metaphor of the male spirit taking over the procreative role
of the female body and giving birth to the man of the future is
symptomatic of the historical avant-garde’s understanding of its
aesthetic praxis as the unfolding of the fertilizing and virile
energies of the human spirit. The metaphor also gives a clear
picture of Marinetti’s definition of futurism as a “spiritual
hygiene”. In his critique of anarchism, in Le Futurisme, the
fertilization of the human spirit is unmistakably represented as
an operation on the human brain, which transgresses the limits
of a political program:
The anarchists give themselves satisfied […] with attacking the political,
juridical and economic branches of the social tree. We want much more;
we want to tear out and burn its deepest roots: those which are planted
into the human brain itself.26
In a rhetorical gesture characteristic of the historical avant-
garde, Marinetti degrades the idea of a political revolution to “a
minimal program” which can find its total unfolding only in a
“spiritual revolution”. He furthermore stresses the necessity of
surpassing the instrumental rationality inherent to the political
idea of social revolution by creating a new aesthetic subjectivity,
which he sees embodied in the symbol of a new futurist brain
giving birth to a new era. Consequently, he stresses the irrational
character of the futurist project and describes it as a new religion
25
“Au nom de l’Orgueil humain que nous adorons, je vous annonce que
l’heure est proche où des hommes aux tempes larges et au menton d’acier
enfanteront prodigieusement, d’un seul effort de leur volonté exorbitée, des
géants aux gestes infaillibles… Je vous annonce que l’esprit de l’homme est
un ovaire inexercé… C’est nous qui le fécondons pour la première
fois!” (Marinetti 1984: 17). 26
“Les anarchistes se contentent […] d’attaquer les branches politiques,
juridiques et économiques de l’arbre social. Nous voulons bien davantage;
nous voulons arracher et brûler ses plus profondes racines: celles qui sont
plantées dans le cerveau même de l’homme.” (Marinetti 1911: 54).
10
of “the omnipotent spirit of will which must be externalized to
change the world”.27
The description points to the key function
of the “manifesto” in this project, the traditional function of the
genre being to express or “externalize” the speaker’s will. In
Marinetti’s writings this traditional function is radicalized from
an aesthetic perspective. The genre no longer serves as a
medium to express one’s will. It becomes a complex and
irrational speech performance which aims at the transformation
of the human spirit, as can be seen from Marinetti’s description
of the birth of the new multiplied man: “On the day when man
will be able to externalize his will and make it into a huge
invisible arm, Dream and Desire, which are empty words today,
will master and reign over space and time” (1991: 99).28
The
futurist project is conceived of as an operation on the human
brain by the “huge invisible arm” of the will, the manifestos of
the movement functioning as the driving force of this project.
Marinetti’s description is symptomatic of the historical avant-
garde’s irrational conception of its own project as the begetting
of a new life through a radical process of spiritual purification,
described in terms of a transformation of the brain. To cite three
characteristic formulations, the Russian futurists describe their
activities as “tilling the human brain like ploughmen” (Khlebni-
kov et al. 1988: 103), Antonin Artaud defines the “surreal spirit”
as the “only one capable of enrooting us”29
by “turning over,
stirring up thought with the ploughshares of fear, with the blade
of an unbending doggedness”,30
whereas Tristan Tzara defines
27
“Divinité et continuité individuelle de l’esprit volontaire et tout-puissant
qu’il faut extérioriser, pour modifier le monde!… Voilà la seule religion!…”
(Marinetti 1984: 170). 28
“Le jour où il sera possible à l’homme d’extérioriser sa volonté de sorte
qu’elle se prolonge hors de lui comme un immense bras invisible, le Rêve et
le Désir, qui sont aujourd’hui de vains mots, règneront souverainement sur
l’espace et sur le temps domptés.” (Marinetti 1911: 74). 29
“[L]e surréel esprit […] le seul qui vaille de nous déraciner.” (Artaud 1968:
215). 30
“[A]vec des socs d’angoisse, avec le tranchant d’une obstination acharnée,
nous retournons, nous dénivelons la pensée.” (Artaud 1968: 214).
11
dada, somewhat more ironically, as “a formula for cerebral
acrobatics”31
and “a soap for cleaning the brain”.32
When discussing his ideas about the externalization of will,
Marinetti claims that it is “easy to understand these seemingly
paradoxical hypotheses by studying the phenomena of external-
ized will that continually reveal themselves at spiritualist
séances” (1991: 99).33
He not only alludes to the writings and
practices of contemporary occult authors like Charles Prot, Jules
Bois or Enrico Annibale Butti, integrating them into the
aesthetic project of futurism by radicalizing their prophetic and
magical elements, as Giovanni Lista (1980) has pointed out. The
picture of an omnipotent will shaping the world by mystical
means refers to one of the basic ideas of occult thought since its
emergence in the early modern era, expressed among others in
the writings of Paracelsus, that the original procreative act was
the pure creation of pre-lapsarian human or male imagination.
Even the metaphor of the “ovary” of the male brain, which
seems to belong to the hyperbolic rhetoric of the avant-garde,
turns out to be an allusion to the occultist idea of the male
imagination giving birth to man. In a text from 1683 the female
occultist Antoinette Bourignon claims:
there was in [Adam’s] belly a vessel where little eggs were born, and
another vessel full of liquid which rendered the eggs fertile […] and this
fertilised egg passed some time afterwards from this canal, outside the
man, in the form of an egg, and came a little afterwards, to hatch a perfect
man.34
Marinetti’s writings demonstrate that in the discourse of the
historical avant-garde, the concept of life represents a complex
idea which can not be satisfactorily described in terms of a
31
„[U]ne formule d’acrobatie cérébrale“ (Tzara 1975: 600). 32
„[S]avon à laver le cerveau“ (Tzara 1975: 600). 33
“Il est facile d’évaluer ces différentes hypothèses apparament paradoxales
en étudiant les phénomènes de volonté extériorisée qui s’opèrent continuelle-
ment dans les salles spirites” (Marinetti 1911: 75). 34
A. Bourignon. La Vie de Damlle
Antoinette Bourignon, écrite par elle-
même. Amsterdam, 1683 (cited in Gibbons 2001: 65–66).
12
social praxis. The importance of occultist theories also points to
a characteristic trait of the historical avant-garde’s notion of the
everyday. As B. J. Gibbons has noted in a trenchant description
of the occultist conception of life: “The occultists occupied a
relatively extreme position in this regard, believing that there are
two radically different selves, the empirical self of everyday life,
and a transcendent self grounded in the divine being” (Gibbons
2001: 100). The occult background of Marinetti’s definition
indicates that futurism represents an attempt to open up a new
space beyond the sphere of the everyday, meant to serve as the
basis for a new form of life. The rhetoric of his writings clearly
expresses a radical utopianism inherent to the project of the
historical avant-garde. Its aesthetic practices may certainly be
characterized by the attempt to integrate fragments of everyday
life into the work of art and bring art out into the public sphere.
The core of its praxis, however, lies in the attempt to open up a
mystical dimension beyond the space of everyday life, in which
a new aesthetic subjectivity unfolds itself in a dynamic process.
Whereas futurism is traditionally interpreted as the penetration
of an autonomous sphere of art by the technologized forms of
modern everyday life, it should be noted that Marinetti also
describes it as a response to “the urgent necessity of totally
freeing the Italian soul of the past and everyday mediocrity”.35
Equally, an analysis of surrealism should not only concentrate
on its treatment of everyday subjects but also consider the
programmatic concluding passage of Breton’s first manifesto, in
which he alludes to Rimbaud by claiming that “Existence is
elsewhere” (1969: 47),36
thus fixing surrealism as the search for
a sphere beyond the everyday, its space serving merely as a
springboard into the world of the marvellous.
The attempt of the historical avant-garde to give birth to a
new life in a sphere beyond the everyday finds its clearest
expression in the notion of the “fourth dimension”, a term,
originally stemming from geometry, which was widely distrib-
35
“[L]a nécessité urgente de désengager l’âme italienne tout entière du passé
et du médiocrisme quotidien” (cited in Lista 1995: 129). 36
“L’existence est ailleurs” (Breton 1988: 346).
13
uted in intellectual discourse in Europe in the late 19th
and early
20th
centuries. In its popularized versions it was related to
utopian and revolutionary aims, as well as radical mystic and
occult ideas, and as such it came to play an important role for
the historical avant-garde movements. In 1913 Alexej Kruche-
nykh describes Russian cubo-futurism, for example, as the
attempt to open up a “fourth unit” through “higher intuition”,
thus emphasizing both the close association between the idea of
a higher dimension and the aesthetic imagination, and the
historical role of art which “marches in the avant-garde of
psychic evolution” (1988: 70). Kruchenykh explicitly refers to
one of the most important works of Russian occultism, Petr D.
Ouspensky’s Tertium organum from 1911. For Ouspensky the
idea of the fourth dimension is related with the evolution of a
new “cosmic consciousness” (1998: 331) which creates “a space
of higher dimension” (1998: 263). He furthermore emphasizes
the key function of the aesthetic imagination in this creative
process: “[T]he artist must be a clairvoyant: he must see that
which others do not see; he must be a magician” (1998: 162).
Ouspensky’s representation of the modern artist as a clairvoyant
opening the way into another system of logic through a “poeti-
cal understanding of the world” (1998: 161) bears witness to a
close affinity with the traditional function of the metaphor of the
avant-garde in the discourse of aesthetic modernity, most symp-
tomatically expressed in Rimbaud’s “Lettres dites du Voyant”.
Kruchenykh’s text is symptomatic of a dualistic conception
of space related with the concept of the “fourth dimension” in
the discourse of the historical avant-garde, in which it becomes
the symbolic expression of a primal state of mind holding “the
key to the origin of thought and to the spiritual rejuvenation of
human life in a utopian future” (Rabinovitch 2004: 95–96).
Discussing cubism, Apollinaire defines the “fourth dimension”,
in Les Peintres cubistes, as a “utopian expression”37
which
painters had “been led to by intuition”.38
Somewhat more
37
“Expression utopique”(Apollinaire 1965: 52). 38
“Les peintres ont été amenés tout naturellement et, pour ainsi dire, par
intuition, à se préoccuper de nouvelles mesures possibles que dans le langage
14
radically, Umberto Boccioni maintains, in Pittura scultura
futuriste from 1914, that the Italian futurists are “approach[ing]
the concept of a fourth dimension” in its “dynamic continuity”
(cited in Henderson 1983: 100–111) and Mikhail Matyushin
refers to Russian futurism in 1913 by describing the future as a
time “when the conquered phantoms of three-dimensional space,
of the illusory, drop-shaped time, and of the coward causality …
will reveal before everybody what they really have been all the
time – the annoying bars of a cage in which the human spirit is
imprisoned” (cited in Markov 1968: 125). Finally, Theo van
Doesburg describes dada as the creation of “‘the point of
indifference’, a point beyond man’s understanding of time and
space” through the mobilization of “the optical and dimensional
static viewpoint which keeps us imprisoned in our (three-
dimensional) illusions” (cited in Henderson 1983: 328). Van
Doesburg’s text not only echoes the paradigmatic description of
the avant-garde’s dream of a total break with the past in
Marinetti’s first manifesto, in which the futurist had declared
that “Time and space died yesterday” and that the futurists
“already live in the absolute” (1991: 49).39
Van Doesburg’s
description also represents a variation on the occultist notion of
a “fourth dimension [opening] absolutely new horizons” and
“complet[ing] our comprehension of the world” as “one reaches
the country of the fourth dimension” and “is freed forever from
the notions of space and time”, to cite Gaston de Pawlowski’s
popular Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension from 1912
(cited in Henderson 1983: 53). In the discourse of the historical
avant-garde, the idea of a “higher” fourth dimension is picked
up and radicalized from an aesthetic perspective. It serves to fix
its project as the mystical creation of a sphere beyond the limits
of the everyday. The historical avant-garde represents less a
programmatic attempt to abolish the autonomy of art, than the
spatialization of the idea of aesthetic autonomy, its redefinition
des ateliers modernes on désignait toutes ensembles et brièvement par le
terme de quatrième dimension.” (Apollinaire 1965: 51–52). 39
“Le Temps et l’Espace sont morts hier. Nous vivons déjà dans l’absolu
[…]” (Marinetti 1973: 87).
15
as a utopian space opened up by the transgressive performances
of the avant-garde itself.
Henri Lefèbvre: Toward a Critique of Everyday Life
In his critique of Peter Bürger’s theory, Ben Highmore has
maintained that a more useful theoretical model for describing
the historical avant-garde’s conception of everyday life may be
found in the writings of Henri Lefèbvre. Highmore rightly
remarks that “Bürger joins the ranks of philosophers and
theorists for whom the everyday is singularly and negatively
associated with the inauthentic”, and consequently draws the
conclusion that Bürger’s theory “provides a one-dimensional (an
undialectical) account of modern life” (2000: 248), whereas
Lefèbvre’s critique “provides the dialectical approach necessary
for attending to the ambiguities of everyday life” (2000: 250).
The main reason lies, for Highmore, in Lefèbvre’s direct
relations to surrealism, his critique of everyday life thus being
developed directly out of the aesthetic project of the historical
avant-garde itself. When using Lefèbvre’s theory to gain insight
into the avant-garde’s notion of the everyday, however, it needs
to be located more precisely in its historical context. Highmore’s
claim, that Lefèbvre’s theory emerged “partly out of a response
to some of the inadequacies he sees in surrealism” (250) clearly
needs to be seen as an understatement. The radical tone which
characterizes Lefèbvre’s critique of surrealism in the first
volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne, in which the French
philosopher presented his ideas on everyday life in a systematic
way for the first time in 1947, speaks another language. He not
only defines surrealism as a “simple-minded Hegelianism”, but
also maintains that its idea of a “spiritual revolution” ended up
“as nothing more than a lot of superstitious nonsense”
(1991:113). Critique de la vie quotidienne represents Lefèbvre’s
radical break with the surrealist project and his own early
16
activities associated with the idea of a “spiritual revolution” and
a new aesthetic and philosophical “mysticism”.40
At the heart of Lefèbvre’s critique of surrealism lies the
concept of the everyday. He defines the movement as the
descendant of a tradition of aesthetic modernity that emerges in
the late 19th
century and finds its most exemplary expression in
the writings of Charles Baudelaire. He refers to the search for
“the marvellous in the familiar” which aims at establishing “the
unity of the world […] in the narrow, abstract form of the
symbol hidden behind the thing” (1991: 106). Lefèbvre
criticizes surrealism for its dualistic notion of everyday space
and relates its project with a late romantic conception of
aesthetic autonomy, which aims at an aesthetic confrontation
with the everyday in order to “tear through it” and reveal or
liberate “the living spirit”, the “strange, mysterious and bizarre”
enshrouded within it (1991: 107). Lefèbvre regards surrealism as
the latest expression of an immanent tendency of aesthetic
modernity to “belittle the real in favour of the magical and the
marvellous” (110), and describes it as a “sustained attack on
everyday life” (105). His critique aims at revealing the
contradictions of surrealism, which embodied a “search of the
marvellous, an imminent world of images and love” that were
“all mingled in a confusion from which lucid analysis was
permanently absent” (112). For Lefèbvre, the aesthetic ideology
of surrealism does not aim at a critical analysis of the everyday,
but merely regards it as a symbolic space from which the viewer
can “spring forth” into a space of aesthetic appearance “from
within the familiar” (110). His Critique de la vie quotidienne
presents a critical method for analyzing the everyday which
aims at surpassing the aesthetic project of surrealism. The
everyday shall no longer serve as a projecting surface for
40
These activities culminated in the publication of “La Révolution d’abord et
toujours” in 1925, a collective manifesto of the surrealist movement, the
Belgian avant-garde group “Correspondance”, Clarté and the periodical
Philosophies, which was founded by Lefèbvre and other revolutionary
intellectuals in 1924 and was intended to offer a forum for discussions on
modern art and a radical philosophical humanism.
17
aesthetic fantasies or an opening into another mystic dimension
or surreality, but is to be critically analysed in its own historicity
and materiality. By describing his critique as the “rehabilitation
of everyday life” and claiming that “[m]an must be everyday, or
he will not be at all” (1991: 127), Lefèbvre is not relating his
theory with the historical avant-garde’s attempt to “reintegrate
art into the praxis of life” or referring to the surrealist project of
recovering “an everyday (a marvellous everyday) that must be
rescued from everyday life (the repressive everyday of modern
bourgeois life)”, as Ben Highmore maintains (2000: 252). By
claiming that “[i]f a higher life, the life of the ‘spirit’, was to be
attained in ‘another life’ – some mystic and magical hidden
world – it would be the end of mankind, the proof and
proclamation of his failure” (199: 127) Lefèbvre is explicitly
distancing his critique from the dualistic conception of everyday
space inherent to surrealist aesthetics.
Lefèbvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne expresses a
discursive shift related with the emergence of a new conception
of everyday life, which he was to develop further in his writings
and which became a central notion in the social and cultural
critique of French intellectuals in the 1960s and early 1970s.
“The everyday”, le quotidien, comes to represent a place of
refuge within late capitalist society, the trace of an authentic
form of life which “the overwhelming means of modern
technique are not able to control”.41
When Lefèbvre describes
his critique in 1968 as a return to lived experience aiming at the
“transfiguration of everyday life” and presents it with the slogan
“Let everyday life become a work of art!” (1984: 204), it should
not be forgotten that the slogan is articulated in a different
historical context already shaped by the aesthetic practices of the
French neo-avant-garde and the various discourses on everyday
life that emerged in France in the late 1960s. By emphasizing
that “‘creation’ will no longer be restricted to works of art but
will signify a self-conscious activity, self-conceiving,
reproducing its own terms, adapting these terms and its own
41
“[…] que les moyens énormes de la technique moderne ne parviennent pas
à maîtriser” (Lefèbvre 1970: 91).
18
reality (body, desire, time, space), being its own creation” (204)
Lefèbvre again explicitly underlines the rupture of his theory
with the aesthetic ideology of the historical avant-garde. His
description of the creation of everyday life as “a work of art”
(204) does not “echo[] the credos of avant-gardism”, as Ben
Highmore claims (2000: 250). It explicitly negates the historical
avant-garde’s idealistic conception of the birth of a new life
through a process of cerebral purification, in which poetic
language is regarded as “a second nature” and “superimposed on
the perceptible, social nature” as in “surrealism […] expression-
ism, futurism, cubism etc.” (Lefèbvre 1984: 125–126).
The importance of Lefèbvre’s theory lies less in its continuity
than in its discontinuity with the project of the historical avant-
garde. This is all the more important, since the critical notion of
everyday life which can be seen emerging in Lefèbvre’s writings
has played a crucial role in shaping the dominant theoretical
discourse on everyday life since the late 1960s. The importance
of Lefèbvre’s critique and related theories is rightly described in
Ben Highmore’s remarks, that “[i]t is not until we reach the
work of Lefebvre and de Certeau that something like ‘the every-
day’ as a specific problematic emerges”, whereas in the works
of Simmel, Benjamin and the historical avant-garde “‘the
everyday’ begins to emerge as a critical concept and as an
imaginative fiction for approaching social life” (2002: 32).
Highmore’s remarks refer to a fundamental methodological
problem of an historical analysis of the concept of everyday life.
Yet, it oversees that a critical notion of everyday life in the early
20th
century is only perceivable within a theoretical paradigm in
which the everyday has already been articulated and made
describable as “a specific problematic”. The project of recon-
structing the meaning of “life” and “the everyday” in the
aesthetic ideology of the historical avant-garde confronts the
historian with the double task of simultaneously describing the
discourses related with these notions in the period to be analysed
and distancing his approach from later theoretical constructs.42
42
Highmore’s analysis of the project of the English avant-garde group “Mass
Observation” deserves special attention in this context. The movement’s
19
A close reading of Lefèbvre’s critique shows, that its program-
matic aim to transform everyday life into a “work of art”, which
seems to associate it with the historical avant-garde’s attempt to
reintegrate art into the “praxis of life”, rather proclaims the end
or the “failure” of its project. In this context it is important to
stress the common points of Lefèbvre’s critique and Bürger’s
theory. Both attack surrealism for defining its project in meta-
physical terms: Lefèbvre by negating its condemnation of “the
abject reality of the inter-war years along with human reality
itself” (1991: 112), Bürger by criticizing the surrealists for “ex-
pressing their protest against bourgeois society at a level where
it becomes protest against sociality as such” (1984: 66).43
Both
relate a critical analysis of social praxis with the attempt to re-
integrate aesthetics into life, and both stress the necessity of
distancing such an analysis from the aesthetic ideology of the
historical avant-garde itself. These affinities are of special
interest for the attempt to locate both of these theories in their
historical context by linking them to the emergence of a critical
notion of everyday life and the aesthetic practices of the neo-
avant-garde.
Reconstructing the Historical Avant-Garde: Guy Debord and the
Situationist International
The relevance of Lefèbvre’s theory for an historical analysis of
avant-garde practices in Europe in the 20th
century lie in his
direct connections with both the historical avant-garde and the
French neo-avant-garde. This refers primarily to the role his
theory played in the emergence of situationism and the dialogue
“science of everyday life” shows obvious traces of a critical notion of the
everyday and thus seems to mark a discursive shift within the history of the
European avant-garde in the late 1930s, a programmatic break with the
utopianism inherent to its aesthetic ideology and the emergence of a critical
notion of the “everyday” in which it “has taken centre-stage and […] become
the explicit ‘object’ of inquiry” (2002: 112). 43
“[…] ihren Protest gegen die bürgerliche Gesellschaft auf einer Ebene
anzubringen, wo dieser in Protest gegen Vergesellschaftung überhaupt
umschlägt.” (Bürger 1974: 90).
20
which takes place between Lefèbvre and the situationists from
the late 1950s into the late 1960s. With the emergence of
situationism, Lefèbvre’s theory comes to serve as a basis for
aesthetic practices of exploring the everyday which mark a
radical rupture with the historical avant-garde. An historical
analysis of Lefèbvre’s critique not only offers the possibility to
situate his own theory in the context of different aesthetic
concepts of avant-garde in the 20th
century, but also to rethink
the relationship of the neo-avant-garde with the historical avant-
garde by considering the ideological and discursive displace-
ments expressed in his writings.
Lefèbvre’s connection with the situationists is shaped by
complex reciprocal impulses that can be traced back to the
founding of Cobra in the late 1940s. As scholars have pointed
out, Constant’s manifesto for an architecture of situations
published in 1948 is “explicitly inspired by Critique of Everyday
Life” (Trebitsch 1991: xxvii), whereas Lefèbvre himself “admit-
ted to being inspired by Constant’s work of the early fifties” and
confessed to “a sort of unfinished love affair with the
situationists” (Sadler 1998: 44). The period from the late 1950s
into the late 1960s can be described as the phase of an unbroken
dialogue in which Lefèbvre’s critique of the everyday is
stimulated by situationist ideas and the situationists determine
key elements of their project on the basis of Lefèbvre’s writings,
the most intensive cooperation finding place in the “Research
Group on Everyday Life” founded by Lefèbvre at the University
of Strasbourg in the early 1960s (see Trebitsch 1991: xxvii).
Yet, when stressing the common theoretical aspects of
Lefèbvre’s critique and the situationist project, it should be
noted that the relationship was a controversial one, as can be
seen most clearly from the debate on Lefèbvre’s concept of the
“moment” in the early 1960s. On the one hand, as David Harvey
has pointed out, Lefèbvre’s doctrine of the moment “fore-
shadowed and to some degree paralleled the ideas of the
situationist movement” (1991: 429). On the other hand it later
became the subject of numerous attacks by the situationists,
which denounced Lefèbvre’s theory as metaphysical and
21
teleological, describing it as a “passive stance of experiencing
‘moments’ when they happened to arise” which failed to
“appreciate the revolutionary potential of their own tactic of
creating situations” (Harvey 1991: 429). The primary emphasis
which is put on the links connecting the situationist project and
Lefèbvre’s theory in the following discussion, ensues from the
aim to describe the discursive context leading to the emergence
of the Situationist International, as characteristic of the neo-
avant-garde of the post-war era.
A close affinity can be seen between Lefèbvre’s description
of late capitalist society as a “bureaucratic society of controlled
consumption” (1984: 60) dominated by the “terrorism” (106) of
publicity which controls everyday life in its totality, and Guy
Debord’s critique of “the society of the spectacle”. For the self-
appointed “leader” of the situationist movement, every society
dominated by “modern modes of production presents itself as an
immense accumulation of spectacles” where everything “which
was directly lived has faded into representation”.44
By
describing the praxis of his movement as a critique of the
predominance of the spectacle in a society where “everyday life
is literally colonized” (cited in Trebitsch 1991: xxviii) Debord
refers directly to Lefèbvre’s writings and underlines the central
role of the everyday for the situationist project. In “Thèses sur la
révolution culturelle”, published in 1958, he furthermore
declares that situationism aims at “the immediate participation
in a passionate abundance of life”45
and defines its project as “an
experimental method for constructing everyday life”.46
For
Debord, situationism constitutes a “radical critique in acts of
prevailing everyday life” (2002: 240) aiming at the “surpassing
of culture and politics in the traditional sense, that is, to a higher
44
“Toute la vie des sociétés dans lesquelles règnent les conditions modernes
de production s’annonce comme une immense accumulation de spectacles.
Tout ce qui était directement vécu s’est éloigné dans une représentation.”
(Debord 1992: 15). 45
“Le but des situationnistes est la participation immédiate à une abondance
passionnelle de la vie […]” (Debord 1997a: 20). 46
“[M]éthode de construction expérimentale de la vie quotidienne.” (Debord
1997a: 20).
22
level of intervention in life” (2002: 240).47
It marks the
emergence of an aesthetic avant-garde which defines its project
as a programmatic and conscious transformation of “everyday
life”. Debord defines situationism in terms of an historical and
materialistic project, describing it as an attack on the
reproduction of reified “moments of real life”48
in which the
lived experience of the everyday is deprived of its historicity
and recedes into “the spectacle’s false memory of the
unmemorable”.49
Consequently, he points out the direct relation-
ship between the false memory of the spectacle and the
traditional function of autonomous art by claiming that the
spectacle “has the function to let all traces of history within
culture be forgotten”50
by “constructing […] a complex neo-
artistic environment”.51
Situationism thus constitutes both an
attack against the dualistic conception of space predominant in
late capitalist society, “in which the real world is replaced by a
selection of images which exist above it”,52
and against the
institutionalized function of art within that society. Finally,
Debord explicitly distances the situationist project from
surrealism by criticizing the latter for its complicity in creating
symbols and visions that reinforce the domination of the
spectacle, which he describes as “the perfect incarnation of
ideology” and the “enslavement and negation of real life”.53
By
describing real life in terms of lived experience, Debord’s text
47
“En revanche la critique radicale, et en actes, de la vie quotidienne donnée
peut conduire à un dépassement de la culture et de la politique au sens
traditionnel, c’est à dire à un niveau supérieur d’intervention sur la vie.”
(Debord 1997b: 220) 48
“[M]oment de la vie réelle” (Debord 1992: 153). 49
“[L]a fausse mémoire spectaculaire du non-mémorable” (Debord 1992:
156). 50
“[L]e spectacle […] a la fonction de faire oublier l’histoire dans la
culture” (Debord 1992: 186). 51
“[À] recomposer […] un milieu néo-artistique complexe” (Debord 1992:
187). 52
“[O]ù le monde sensible se trouve remplacé par une sélection d’images qui
existe au-dessus de lui” (Debord 1992: 36). 53
“Le spectacle est l’idéologie par excellence […] l’asservissement et la
négation de la vie réelle.” (Debord 1992: 205).
23
performs a radical rupture with the mystical notion of “real life”
expressed in the paradigmatic concluding passage of Breton’s
first manifesto, which is based on the belief that “existence is
elsewhere”.
Debord’s definition of situationism as the conscious trans-
formation of everyday life by aesthetic means and a critique of
the institutional status of autonomous art shows interesting
affinities with Bürger’s Theorie der Avantgarde. As Asholt and
Fähnders have pointed out (1997: 1), many of the central aspects
of Bürger’s theory had been formulated in similar terms in
Debord’s La Société du Spectacle as early as 1967. The German
scholars refer primarily to Bürger’s description of the failure of
the historical avant-garde in this context, thus pointing out an
intertextual link which needs to be looked upon more closely. In
La Société du Spectacle Debord goes a step further than Bürger
and describes the failure of the avant-garde as an immanent and
programmatic element of its project:
In the epoch of its dissolution, as a negative movement aiming at
surpassing art in a historical society where history is not yet lived, art is
simultaneously an art of change and the pure expression of impossible
change. The more grandiose its demand, the farther beyond lies its true
realization. This art is inevitably avant-garde, and it is not. Its avant-
garde is its disappearance.54
From Debord’s point of view, the avant-gardeness of the
historical avant-garde lies in its deliberately paradoxical
intention to realize an unrealizable utopian project. In the
following passage he defines dada as the attempt to “suppress
art without realizing it” and surrealism as the attempt to “realize
art without suppressing it”.55
He consequently elevates situation-
54
“L’art à son époque de dissolution, en tant que mouvement négatif qui
poursuit le dépassement de l’art dans une société historique où l’histoire n’est
pas encore vécue, est à la fois un art du changement et l’expression pure du
changement impossible. Plus son exigence est grandiose, plus sa véritable
réalisation est au delà de lui. Cet art est forcément d’avant-garde, et il n’est
pas. Son avant-garde est sa disparition.” (Debord 1992: 185). 55
“Le dadaïsme a voulu supprimer l’art sans le réaliser; et le surréalisme a
voulu réaliser l’art sans le supprimer.” (Debord 1992: 186).
24
ism to a synthesis of both projects and defines it as the
“surpassing of art”,56
thus describing it in dialectical terms as
Aufhebung, which shows the proximity of his text to Bürger’s
theory of the avant-garde’s intended sublation of art in the
praxis of life. These affinities do less indicate a direct inter-
textual connection, in the narrow sense of that term, than point
to the common discursive context of their writings, both works
being based on a dialectical conception of history enrooted in
marxist and neo-marxist social theory. More importantly,
Debord’s description of a utopian project aware of its own
doomed failure articulates a radically new notion of an aesthetic
avant-garde which he projects into the past by describing it as
characteristic of the historical avant-garde. Debord’s text
belongs to a different epistemological moment, the ideological
position it represents is not expressly formulated in the writings
of the historical avant-garde and can not be grasped as part of its
programmatic intentions. His writings are symptomatic of a
fundamental ideological rupture in the history of the European
avant-garde in the 20th
century, the emergence of a new avant-
garde turning away from the utopian project of opening up a
new space or era and defining its aesthetic practices in terms of
a transformation of everyday life.
A symptomatic expression of this anti-utopian turn can be
found in the situationist theory of “drifting” (dérive). Drifting is
not “a modern day form of flânerie”, as Ben Highmore has
maintained (2002: 141), but a technique meant to surpass the
aestheticism inherent to this modernist notion. Highmore justly
remarks that “drifting” marks the transition from an “implicit
critique of modern everyday life” toward an “explicit social
critique” (141). Yet, he overlooks that this transition is
intimately related with the emergence of a critical notion of
everyday life. The importance of the everyday for the “flâneur”
needs to be critically regarded from an historical perspective, it
is the product of a discourse on the everyday that emerges in the
second half of the 20th
century. Debord describes “drifting” as “a
technique of rapid passage through the varied ambiences” of the
56
“[D]épassement de l’art” (Debord 1992: 186).
25
modern city and stresses that “the concept […] is inseparable
from the recognition of effects of psychogeographical nature
and a playful-constructive behaviour which makes it the total
opposite of classical notions of the voyage and the stroll”.57
Debord thus distances the notion of drifting from the figure of
the “flâneur” who walks around the city in order to discern the
mythology of modernity and convey a “sense for the marvels of
the everyday”.58
Whereas “flânerie” aims at projecting new
aesthetic visions of the everyday, “drifting” constitutes a
transgressive social praxis performed within this space. It is
performed by a group of individuals starting off at the same time
and simply letting themselves drift through the urban landscape:
In drifting one or more persons, during a longer or a shorter period of
time, give up their usual motives for moving around and acting, their
work, their own relations and leisure activities, in order to let themselves
be drawn by the stimulations of the terrain and its corresponding
encounters.59
The most important difference compared to the notion of
“flânerie” is the definition of drifting as an aim in itself.
“Drifting” can certainly be related with different kinds of artistic
production, as is impressively documented in the “psycho-
geographic” descriptions and maps of the situationists, yet these
are by-products and not its programmatic aim. By describing
“drifting” as a strategy to undermine the urban structure, Debord
explicitly distances it from the surrealist aesthetics of “flânerie”,
57
“La dérive se présente comme une technique du passage hâtif à travers des
ambiances variées. Le concept de dérive est indissolublement lié à la
reconnaissance d’effets de nature psychogéographique, et à l’affirmation
d’un comportement ludique-constructif, ce qui l’oppose en tous points aux
notions classiques de voyage et de promenade.” (Debord 1997c: 51). 58
“[L]e sentiment du merveilleux quotidien” (Aragon 1953: 16). 59
“Une ou plusieurs personnes se livrant à la dérive renoncent, pour une
durée plus ou moins longue, aux raisons de se déplacer et d’agir qu’elles se
connaissent généralement, aux relations, aux travaux et aux loisirs qui leur
sont propres, pour se laisser aller aux sollicitations du terrain et des
rencontres qui y correspondent.” (Debord 1997c: 51).
26
which he describes as an “obviously depressing”60
method of
wandering doomed to “dismal failure”61
because it raises the
category of chance to an aesthetic principle. “Drifting” does not
aim at opening the way into another dimension by means of
aesthetic illumination, it is a social praxis performed within
everyday space.
In terms of Bürger’s theory, drifting can be interpreted as a
subversive reaction against the institutionalization of the
historical avant-garde. It also seems to fit Bürger’s later
descriptions of the neo-avant-garde, in which he has partially
revised the exclusively negative view presented in Theorie der
Avantgarde and pointed to the critical impetus of its project,
although he seems to connect it almost exclusively with Joseph
Beuys. Whereas Bürger’s critique of the neo-avant-garde has
mostly remained rather uncomprosing,62
he describes Beuys’
aesthetics practices in positive terms, as the attempt to
simultaneously claim “the autonomy of art and continuously
transgress its boundaries toward a project of social
transformation, although he is aware that it can not be
realized”.63
The anti-utopianism of the avant-garde, the con-
sciousness of the inescapable failure of its own project, which
Debord projects onto the historical avant-garde, is described by
Bürger as an ideological shift. He stresses the necessity of
analyzing how the neo-avant-garde responds to changed social
conditions in which avant-garde practices have been integrated
60
“[É]videmment déprimante” (Debord 1997c: 52). 61
“[É]chec morne” (Debord 1997c: 52). 62
In an essay published in Danish, Bürger again persists in his harsh critique
of the neo-avant-garde. Yet, he emphasizes that his critique is primarily
aimed at more recent theories of the neo-avant-garde, most explicitly worked
out in the writings of Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh, which he accuses of
“over-canonizing” the neo-avant-garde, thus degrading the historical avant-
garde to a “mere precursor” of the “real avant-garde” (Bürger 2005). 63
“Dementsprechend nimmt Beuys einerseits die Sonderstellung des
Künstlers, die der Autonomiestatus der Kunst diesem gewährt, für sich in
Anspruch und überschreitet ihn andererseits ständig in Richtung auf ein
gesellschaftsveränderndes Projekt, über dessen Nichtrealisierbarkeit er sich
im klaren ist.” (Bürger 1995: 24).
27
into the institution of art. In Theorie der Avantgarde, Bürger had
claimed that the “false sublation of autonomy” (1984: 54)64
through the aestheticization of the everyday in the culture
industry inevitably made the neo-avant-garde’s “gesture of
protest […] become inauthentic” (1984: 53).65
In his later
writings he has rather stressed the necessity of describing the
methods used by the neo-avant-garde to criticize or negate the
institutional conditions of art in late capitalism. From this
perspective, “drifting” would seem to represent an attempt to
escape the mechanisms of institutionalization that dominate
aesthetic production in late capitalism by systematically with-
drawing the aesthetic product demanded by the culture industry.
An historical approach to Theorie der Avantgarde reveals the
limits of such a harmonizing reinterpretation of the neo-avant-
garde on the basis of Bürger’s later writings. As the reflections
on situationism presented above have shown, the idea of the
failure of the historical avant-garde belongs to the discourse of a
neo-avant-garde for which the inescapable failure of an aesthetic
avant-garde constitutes a programmatic part of its own project.
Bürger’s theory is, in other words, related to a notion of avant-
garde which emerges in the late 1960s and which is epistemo-
logically other to the historical avant-garde. At a closer look, the
conception of avant-garde on which Bürger’s theory is based,
turns out be the product of a discursive shift that can be
described as the emergence of a critical notion of everyday life
and finds its exemplary expression in situationism and the
writings of Henri Lefèbvre. This shift is related with a new
perspective on the historical avant-garde. Its aesthetic ideology
has become transparent and its programm is grasped as the
utopian project of creating visions of a new space in which the
idea of aesthetic autonomy is not dissolved but redefined in
spatial terms. This indicates, that the central function which
social reality and praxis occupies in Bürger’s work can only be
articulated within the aesthetic paradigm of the neo-avant-garde
64
“[F]alsche[] Aufhebung der Autonomie” (Bürger 1974: 73). 65
“[V]erfällt die Protestgeste der Neoavantgarde der Inauthentizität” (Bürger
1974: 71).
28
which his theory rejects. His theory of the epigonality of the
neo-avant-garde is based on the projection of its aesthetic praxis
into the past, where it is used as a model to define the project of
the historical avant-garde. In other words: the reason why
Bürger sees in the aesthetic practices of the neo-avant-garde
mere repetition, is that he defines the neo-avant-garde as the
repetition of itself. Reconstructed in its historical context,
Bürger’s theory is still able to give a significant insight into the
project of the neo-avant-garde. As a theoretical model meant to
describe the project of the historical avant-garde it has become
obsolete. At the beginning of a new century, Bürger’s theory
finally seems to have shared the fate that itself awarded to the
European avant-garde movements in the early 20th
century: It
has become historical.
When the historicity of Bürger’s work is stressed, it should be
noted that his theoretical approach is based on a strong
consciousness of its own historicity, which is often neglected by
his critics. In a postscript to the second edition of Theorie der
Avantgarde Bürger characteristically defends the decision to
republish the text unchanged, by referring to the importance of its
historical context and maintaining that it primarily “reflects a
historical constellation of problems that emerged after the events
of May 1968 and the failure of the student movement in the early
seventies” (1984: 95).66
Where Bürger’s theory has most ob-
viously failed, however, is in its attempt to “see through its own
historicity”,67
which is based on the theoretical premises of
Bürger’s “critical hermeneutics” and its dogmatic belief in the
objectivity of its own analytic method, which is intended to offer
the possibility not only to decipher the authentic intention of the
historical avant-garde but also to distance itself from its own
historical standpoint. A symptomatic example of the persisting
impulse of this hermeneutic flaw in the theoretical discourse on
the avant-garde can be found, somewhat unexpectedly, in Hal
66
“[W]eil es einem historischen Problemhorizont entspricht, wie er sich nach
dem Ende der Mai-Ereignisse von 1968 und dem Scheitern der Studenten-
bewegung Anfang der 70er Jahre abzeichnete.” (Bürger 1974: 134). 67
“[I]hre eigen Geschichtlichkeit durch[zu]schauen” (Bürger 1974: 20).
29
Foster’s writings. In his critique of Bürger’s theory, Foster
stresses the importance of the historical context of the neo-avant-
garde for Bürger’s historical model and claims that “the institu-
tion of art is grasped as such not with the historical avant-garde
but with the neo-avant-garde” (1996: 20). He concludes that the
neo-avant-garde did not “cancel the project of the historical
avant-garde”, as Bürger had maintained, but rather “compre-
hend[s] it for the first time” (1996: 15). By grasping the neo-
avant-garde’s interpretation of the historical avant-garde as the
objective comprehension of its project, Foster’s approach lapses
into the same hermeneutical flaw as Bürger’s. Foster does not
reject the adequacy of Bürger’s description of the historical
avant-garde as a programmatic attack on the institution of art. He
merely determines the deciphering of its project in its authenticity
as the achievement of the neo-avant-garde, thus degrading
Bürger’s theory to its mere repetition. Foster’s approach con-
sequently overlooks that if the neo-avant-garde marks the
emergence of the institution of art as a specific problematic of
aesthetic praxis, then the model of the historical avant-garde as a
cultural agent attacking this institution is an ideological construct
of the neo-avant-garde. Both Foster and Bürger thus remain
trapped within a theoretical paradigm that interprets the
relationship of the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde
exclusively in terms of continuity: Foster by arguing within the
rhetorical framework of a neo-avant-garde legitimizing its own
activities by referring to predecessors in the early 20th
century,
Bürger by defining the neo-avant-garde as mere repetition. The
theoretical position outlined in the discussion above, on the
contrary, stresses the importance of approaching the historical
avant-garde in its historical alterity and writing the history of the
European avant-garde in the 20th
century in terms of its
discontinuities. It emphasizes the necessity of analyzing how the
aesthetic practices of the historical avant-garde have been
redefined and re-functionalized in the course of the 20th century.
It pleads for an extensive description of the discourse of the
historical avant-garde as well as a critical revision of later
aesthetic and theoretical discourses on the avant-garde, in order
30
to locate both in their respective historical context. Finally, it
seeks to remain loyal to the principle formulated in Bürger’s
theory of critical hermeneutics over 30 years ago, by attempting
to reflect its own historical standpoint. Yet, it needs to remain
conscious of the impossibility of this venture. Even when the
historian endeavours to give an accurate description of the
discourse of the historical avant-garde, he can merely fabricate
yet another historical paradigm.
31
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