avant-gardes in Mars & Medak 2019


hese institutions can accommodate that heterogeneity and diminish
their insecurities, helping the society effectively support structural change. They
are a commons in the non-substantive sense that Lauren Berlant (2016)
proposes, a ‘transitional form’ that doesn’t elide social antagonisms and that lets
different social positions loosely converge, in order to become ‘a powerful vehicle
for troubling troubled times’ (Berlant, 2016: 394-395).
The trajectory of radical gestures, discontinuities by re-invention, and creative
destruction of the old have been historically a hallmark of the avant-gardes. In
what follows, we will revisit the history of the avant-gardes, claiming that,
throughout their periodic iterations, the avant-gardes returned and mutated
always in response to the dominant processes and crises of the capitalist
development of their time. While primarily an artistic and intellectual
phenomenon, the avant-gardes emerged from both an adversarial and a coconstitutive relation to the institutions of higher education and knowledge
production. By revisiting three epochal moments along the trajectory of the
avant-gardes – 1917, 1967 and 2017 – we now wish to establish how the
structural context for radical disruption and radical transformation were
historically changing, bringing us to the present conjuncture where the library
and the university can reclaim the legacy of the avant-gardes by seemingly doing
its exact opposite: refusing innovation.

1917 – Industrial modernization,
revolutionary subjectivity

accelerated

temporality

and

In his text on ‘Modernity and Revolution’ Perry Anderson (1984) provides an
unexpected, yet the cogent explanation of the immense explosion of artistic
creativity in the short span of time between the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century that is commonly periodized as modernism (or avant-garde,
which he uses sparsely yet interchangeably). Rather than collapsing these wildly
diverging movements and geographic variations of artistic


ually
severed its links from the boundedness of social reality and made this freedom
into its subject matter. As the markets for literary and fine artworks were
emerging, artists were gaining material independence from feudal patronage, the
institutions of bourgeois art were being established, and ‘[a]estheticism had made
the distance from the praxis of life the content of works’ (Bürger, 1984: 49)
While capitalism was becoming the dominant reality, the freedom of art was
working to suppress the incursion of that reality in art. It was that distance,
between art and life, that historical avant-gardes would undertake to eliminate
when they took aim at bourgeois art. With the ‘pathos of historical
progressiveness on their side’ (Bürger, 1984: 50), the early avant-gardes were
thus out to relate and transform art and life in one go.
Early industrial capitalism unleashed an enormous social transformation
through the formalization and rationalization of processes, the coordination and
homogenization of everyday life, and the introduction of permanent innovation.
Thus emerged modern bureaucracy, mass society and technological revolutions.
Progress became the telos of social development. Productive forces and global
expansion of capitalist relations made the humanity and the world into a new

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horizon of both charitable and profitable endeavors, emancipatory and imperial.
The world became a project (Krajewski, 2014).
The avant-gardes around the turn of the 20th century integrated and critically
inflected these transformations. In the spirit of the October Revolution, its
revolutionary subjectivity approached social reality as eminently transformable.
And yet, a recurrent concern of artists was with the practical challenges and
innovations of accelerated modernization: how to control, coordinate and socially
integrate the immense expansionary forces of early industrialization. This was an
invitation to insert one’s own radical visions into life and create new forms of
standardization and rationality that would bring socie

 

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