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system for acceptance. More than once during the twentieth century, it
was forcefully and sometimes violently demonstrated that people
involved in what amounted to effective revolution (as opposed to its
ineffective form) did not become part of systems, but that they
destroyed systems. The compromised nature of what we sometimes
too casually invoke as the avant-garde means that the case for its
destructive effect is far from convincing. Mann, for instance, has
already made us uneasily but necessarily aware that
[t]he avant-garde is one mechanism of a general organisation
of social forces that operates in large part by means of the
careful distribution of differences, imbalances, oppositions,
and negations, and that regulates them through a variety of
more or less effective discursive agencies in the so-called
public sphere and along the margin itself. (Mann 1991: 113)
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the muddled idealism of the free thinkers that once so irked Lenin. For
the structuralist Marxist, if a radicalism is not a Marxist radicalism, its
direction in the service of the revolution is not necessarily bound to
the destruction of state apparatuses, but rather defaults as anything but
revolutionary, and duly relegates itself to self-indulgence on the part
of the radical protagonist.
How we subsequently invoke the idea of revolution requires a
deliberate revision of readings that have hitherto dominated art
historically, prescriptive (and predictable) readings of Dada, for
instance, which characterise it as anarchic, a nihilist gesture, a
negative act of cultural destruction offering nothing to replace what it
set about destroying (and therefore, strictly speaking, not revolution).
According to the binary schema of revolution that accompanies this
characterisation, the task of instituting a new order in place of what
Dada laid waste, that is to say a new order opposed to the old, fell to
the movements supersedent (in Paris at least), the Surrealist
Revolution of 1924. If, however, we read revolution as committed to
breaking down systems in all their forms, the revolutionary
increasingly assumes the recognisably destructive, anarchic and
nihilist traits previously ascribed to the Dadaist, abandoning binary
schemata and engaging cultural logic itself revolution, therefore,
that does not define itself by preemptive conclusions. Such,
potentially, becomes revolution without a goal, but revolution with
effect; revolution revised practically and theoretically throughout the
twentieth century in reflection upon the sobering aftermath and
ultimate failure of October 1917.
The idea of what amounts to effective revolution despite the
absence of any stated goal productively allows us to begin to
interrogate the operation of the avant-garde/neo-avant-garde in
modern experience. Benjamins concern in his analysis of the latter (in
1936, yes, but still apposite in later contexts) was its neurological
condition, the emotionally neutered and numbed state of daily
repeated shock which, through repetition, ceases to have any real
impact or effect. The redundancy of repeated albeit strategic
deployment of shock became woefully apparent (to Marcel Janco at
least) just weeks into the activities at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in
1916 as Dada was only just beginning to flex its critical muscles,
making shock ineffective if not inadmissible as a mode of critical
cultural engagement for the Dadaists themselves. Repetition has in
turn consistently accrued negative connotations and has been all-too-
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The damage is easily done (but not easily undone), as the authority of
historical Dada condemns its neo-type as compromised and implicitly
decidedly not revolutionary. Repetition, it has been argued, is the
most culturally, socially and politically compromising dimension of
neo-avant-gardism in the 1950s and 60s. Hans Richters swipe,
however, concedes perhaps far more than it ever deliberately intended
with its new characterisation of the neos unconditional adjustment.
From the foregoing, we ought now to relate back to our own
position implicitly as participants (or not, of course, as the case may
be) in avant-garde/neo-avant-garde activity by the very attempt to
situate for ourselves a degree of conceptual orientation. It has been
suggested that under conditions of modern shock the daily shocks
of the modern world response to stimuli without thinking has
become necessary for survival (Buck-Morss 1997: 388) a strategy
of absorbing shock and of coping therefore; heads down and pay the
mortgage. What is intimated is the activity of thought, as it perpetually
falls short of achieving its potential unless it deliberately turns on its
own structured operation, occasioning the suspension of its habitual
operational mode and as it in turn makes its direct address to the
containing structure. When (if) that structure is made visible, we can
begin to think our relation to it, and the cautionary note is that if we
cease to think that relation, the structure will recede again into
invisibility and resume its unchallenged and effectively uninterrupted
repressive exercise. Thinking takes the specific instance to construct a
generalisation, but the general proves of little consequence unless, as
Joseph Dietzgen once cautioned, it is conceived in its relation to its
special [specific] forms (1906: 357). Thus read, thinking is a
contradictory process, necessarily struggling between generalisation
and specialisation, but not necessarily working towards synthesis and
resolution (although Dietzgen does suggest that it is in the nature of
the mind to seek to harmonise the contradictions of the world, to
relativise and equate them) the opposite might indeed be the case, to
capitalise on contradiction and conflict, and actively to counter any
potential synthesis or resolution. It becomes instructive, especially
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And at its best, among the most contradictory characteristics of neoavant-gardism is, arguably, its widely criticised repetition
repetition of earlier historical avant-garde gestures and strategies, to
be sure, but specifically repetition of the form of the object of critique.
Repetition in this latter guise must bring with it certain constraints
upon the formal possibilities available to the avant-garde artist, yet
though conceptually resistant to constraints, in conceding both to their
necessity and their enabling potential, Deleuze duly cautions against
destroying them completely:
You have to keep small supplies of signifiance and
subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems
when the circumstances demand it [] and you have to keep
small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable
you to respond to the dominant reality. (Deleuze and Guattari
1988: 160)
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(fold upon fold) or the leaves of the book (folds of thought). Though it
may be folded, the outside can still be apprehended precisely as
outside, however many times it is folded, in unity that creates being,
a multiplicity that makes for inclusion, a collectivity having become
consistent (Deleuze 1993: 31).
The status of this equivocity bears upon any attempt we might
subsequently make constructively to proceed from Deleuzes
opposition to a philosophy of the subject. We might make use of the
potential of the existence of multiple forms of beings, beings that are
always produced by a disjunctive synthesis [] [and that are
themselves] disjointed and divergent (Deleuze 1990: 179). This
disjointedness and divergence is instanced in Deleuzes notion of the
assemblage or body-assemblage the assemblage that can be
recognised in the manufactured artificial problem which functions
as reflexive, pointing towards a solution that is generated outside
thought and the process of knowledge. Conceptualised as an open
totality, no single component of the body-assemblage can be changed
without affecting and changing the whole, though it remains always
the sum of an infinitely variable and mutable set of relations between
relations. The effect is not closure or completion, but rather the
opening up of the body-assemblage and the subsequent intermingling
of reactions to other body-assemblages, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies, within the context of the event site that
is the territorial or re-territorialised plane against which the bodyassemblage is thought and thinks itself.
As it moves, acts and speaks, the body-assemblage is always
collective even though its form may be that of the singularity, the
One-all as elucidated by Deleuze; what makes its statement
collective, even as it is emitted by the singularity, is that it does not
refer back to a subject and neither does it refer back to a double:
there isnt a subject who emits the statement or a subject about which
the statement would be emitted (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 83). To
this extent, what is proposed is the collective statement that reneges on
the subject category, that in a sense erases the subject, and that is, as
such, a paradoxical entity whose emission shines with a singular
brilliance (Badiou 2000: 37). Badiou concedes this much to the
paradoxical entity:
it is like a line of flight, an evasion, or an errant liberty, by
which one escapes the positivism of legalised beings. In the
sombre opacity of the combinatory ensemble, it is like a
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2003: 267). What quite literally happened left the spectator, the
reader, the listener dazed and confused, the shocked victim reeling at
the sustained intensity of the visual arrays or Tzaras manifesto
writing:
I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things,
and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against
principles [] I am against action; for continuous
contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against
and I do not explain because I hate common sense. [] Order
= disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation = negation: [] I
proclaim bitter destruction with all the weapons of DADAIST
DISGUST. (Tzara 1989: 76-81)
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precedes it: it is precisely the social systems preceding them that give
individual subjects their identities.
The subject, then, comes into being as a signifier active within and
identified by the system, and we are faced with suspension of the
categories object and subject as art dissolves within the
aestheticisation of everyday life and the extreme banality of the
images that saturate it. The circulation of signs under these conditions
of suspension begins, in turn, to describe formally the structural
terrain of their interchangeability. The serial nature of the banks of
screens that provide us with a mapping of the surface delineate one
such landscape, a transfer in which nothing changes place because
one thing is always interchangeable with its correlate, and so enables
that oscillation between surface and suggested depth, the physical and
the aesthetic planes together made coextensive and coordinate (Krauss
1985: 10). We are reminded how the experience of seriality
engendered by the readymade, for instance, factors into this
discourse the issue of [...] the multiple without original (De Duve
1991: 179, 36), or the copy of an original that has long since been lost.
Baudrillards progressive stages in the precession of simulacra
famously charts the severing of the simulacrum and its original
referent through a theoretical, virtual, space, wherein becoming virtual
tends toward the perfect illusion [] [but] it isnt the same creative
illusion as that of the image that is to say, the perfect illusion is
the perfection in reproduction of the illusion, rendering the real (the
illusion) virtual (the perfect reproduction) and in the process so
extinguishing the game of illusion as we witness the extermination of
the real by its double (Baudrillard 1997: 9).
As mass electronic media bear down upon us, the double gains in
the ascendancy and renders the real redundant; implicit in this, for
Baudrillard certainly, is the negativity of such redundancy, but a
redundancy which the neo-avant-gardist can potentially exploit
(inevitably to some extent redressing such redundancy itself). The
proposition is to say that the double, which will potentially ultimately
bear no relation to its original, will consequently become the object of
art that isnt an object any more. . Still, as Baudrillard reminds us, an
object that isnt an object is not nothing (1997: 9), and its imposing
presence is precisely its immanence and immateriality. The object that
isnt an object occupies and the neo-avant-gardist moves in the interstices that remain, the neo-avant-gardist therefore as entre-gardist.5
Conceptually, truth demands a certain integrity of the surface the
very surface that achieved primacy under late modernism, and
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Notes
1
I would suggest that overcoming isnt actually an option in the conventional sense,
and that we delude ourselves if we think that it is; as Habermas argues and as Hal
Foster reminds us, Not only did the [historical] avant-garde fail [but] it was always
already false. (Foster 1994: 17)
Berghaus notes, however, that Paik hardly ever dwelled on the political causes
behind the media structures he condemned, and rarely focused his attention on social
and economic matters unless they impinged directly on the realms of art and media
(2005: 205).
Works Cited
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Badiou, Alain
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2000
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1993a
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Benjamin, Walter
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The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility
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