Mann - Theory-Death of The Avant-Garde

Luigi Russolo. Revolutie. 1911/12. Oil on canvas. 150 x 230cm.
Collection
Haags Gemeentemuseum-The Hague.
The Theory-Death of
the Avant-Garde
PAUL MANN
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bloomington and Indianapolis
-
© 1991 by Paul Mann

All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American
University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only
exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of America·
National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1984.
@)TII
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mann, Paul, date.
The theory-death of the avant-garde / Paul Mann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN 0-253-33672-4
1. Avant-garde (Aesthetics) I. Title.
BH301.A94M36 1991
111 '.85--dc20 90-49768
I 2 3 4 5 95 94 93 92 91
CONTENTS
preliminaryIprocedural/terminal I
'Pataphysics 3
Seven Notes on Discourse 20
Night of the Living Dead 31
styles of recuperation 43
Period 45
Economies 67
Anti 80
The Germ of Consent 92
after III
Crisis 113
Post 121
Afterlife 141
NOTES 147
preliminary
procedural
terminal
'Pataphysics
This overheated and distasteful little book-for me the wrong book in many
ways-addresses matters about which there is, precisely, nothing left to say.
The avant-garde, we kno..w,~ dyad; nothi.Q.gcould appear more exhausted
than its thegr~- it~_h~~J:'.J!..s._¥,:orks. And yet certain guestiQnu.emain:
whether the avant-garde has left anything vital..h@ind; whether there is
something vital about the death itself. Hence it might not be altogether
worthlesstotake this death into account and investigate in more than the
usual journalistic fashion its character, its aetiology, its terminal patholo_gy,
its posthumous effects, the conditions of the estate, the behavior of the heirs.
Though perhaps in the end such an inquiry will prove to have been less than
worthless.
The book's title conflates two words that are common enough in titles of
critical works on the avant-garde but perhaps rarely in so explicit a connec-
tion. There are of course many studies of the 1heory of the avant-gardeand
many claims and counterclaims about its death. Here however these two
concerns are inseparable. The teleQlogy_oiJhe avant-garde can no longer be\ •
_reduced to a thematics of success Qrfajlur~i re_voltor complicity,_ottr.u1l1-o_r
illµsion,-.QL~ll.~fj_ty9r h~?X,.9f exj..§t~l}f~.9.Ln9nexistenc~. The death of the
avant-garde is not its termination but its most productive, voluble, self- :k
conscious, and lucrative stage. That is the first object of this inquiry: to grasp
as~tlie production 9f}Ld.~"@.o.:tli~cir
(tfie.=_:,wapf.:garae , a seemingly ·~ti-
bk dis_c_ourieofeihfillitwn. But we must also explore the possibility that this
development has been J2rought ab~ut at the ~xp~pse_of a certain dialectical
destabilization, perhaps even collapse: JL.theor_y_-.d.eath. To begin then, a
twofold hypothesis: The death of the avant-garde is its theory and the theory~
of the avant-garde is its death.
What follows is i11no respect a new history of the avant-garde; still less
will it pose as yet another revolutionary theory of culture. Most readers likely
to find their way into this text will immediately recognize most of the threads
out of which it has been woven: the usual historical and theoretical para-
digms, a predictable and obligatory list of citations. No breakthroughs, no
inventions: nothing more than the extension to their inevitable if not always
logical and never really terminal conclusions a limited set of analyses, views,
polemics, critiques, agendas, and theoretical laws that are already explicit in
a great many other texts. Perhaps it will only be the manner in which all this
is repeated that will provide this book with an excuse for existence. If the
book is of any use at all, it will be as a reflection of the medium in which all
critical texts are suspended and circulated, as a fractionally more alert and
3
4 / THE THEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
therefore disturbed gli~pse of_the centripetal c~rrents of even the most

marginal and transgressive proJects. Only as a sh~~tly clearer depiction of
the ways in which culture is the arena where oppos1t1on turns against itself-
and which it is the professional obligation of most writers to ignore-will this
book pretend to have been of the slightest interest.
The sta!~§__QfJ_he.oryin....ar..t,of art in cultural discourse; the status of

discourse: preliminary anecdotal evidence:
In another overheated little book, The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe recounts
an epiphany. While reading an article by Hilton Kramer, Wolfe came to a
sudden realization-the result, he believes, of a slip of Kramer's pen, an
accidental breach of critical security-about the relationship between art-
works and art criticism. The talismanic passage by Kramer reads as follows:
Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a
persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works
of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial-the means by
which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the
values they signify.
Wolfe thinks this gives away the game. As it turns out art is not autonomous,
it cannot stand on its own; ~~n_ an_ar1Jh_at..claixns_to de ict reality as such
.f .r1eeqsth~Q[Y_JQsupport it, to make it visible as art. What is worse: not only is
the poor spectator dependent on this theory, so is the artist. The well-lit
f!!&_ureof the _s9litary,intuitiv~_~ero forging ahead into the unknown reaches of
~~!_l':!_~I_!_~Qiri!,jsat .'2e~t~ my~p, another theory, ~nd probagJ.)'.j_ustpart oL
1
the hype that sells pictures. It is, Wolfe gleefully laments, the hype that
matters-, .ihe current inflated idea of art. His disillusioned conclusion: "With-
• _g_u..tJi.th~oIY,Js.fil!1
_see...a.pai[i_~_gg." His negative epiphany: "Modern art has
become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to
illuminate the text." 1
One need hardly say that this is not very precise, perhaps does not even
follow. The literariness of a given painting would not proceed directly from
one's need for a conceptual framework within which to grasp it, [!Qf,.doesany
- ....... -- telos is ~-!~X~.
of this prove that a painting's
~ -· But apparently for Wolfe the use
of language anywhere near a painting taints it with the literary; apparently
the visual is compromised by any commerce with the discursive. (This is at
least an incipient theory.) What Wolfe believes he has discovered is a princi-
ple that entirely falsifies the romantic postures of hard-headed independence
and unmediated sensitivity he finds in modern artists and especially in the
abstract expressionists. Indeed in Wolfe's portrait these painters are so
ignorant of their reliance on theory that they seem perfect embodiments of a
phrase driven into art history by Duchamp: bete comme un peintre.
The artists themselves didn't seem to have the faintest notion of how primary
Theory was becoming. I wonder if the theorists themselves did. All of them,
'Pataphysics I 5
artists and theorists, were talking as if their conscious aim was to create a totally
immediate art, lucid, stripped of all the dreadful baggage of history, an art fully
revealed, honest, as honest as the flat-out integral picture plane. "Aestheticsis.ior
the_artis.ts._as__omithoJQgy_is_for__the_b.irdS..:..s.aid.Barne1L~~~(!lan in a much-
repeated mot. And yet Newman himself happened to be one of the most incessant
theoreticians on Eighth Street, and his work showed it. ... Nobody wasimmune
to theory any longer. Pollock would say things like "Cezanne didn't create
theories. They're after the fact." ... The fact was that theories-Greenberg's-
about Pollock-were beginning to affect Pollock. (60-63)
For Wolfe then the dirty secret of modern art is that it is ancillary to the
theory that describes it, a reversal of what he believes to be normal, healthy
relations. The revelation of this perverse dependency is proof of a great hoax
put over on the public by the "culturati," and this proof compels a revisionist
history of modern art: between 1945and 1975, art was gradually absorbed by
theory, until only theory was left. (His main evidence for this is conceptual
art.) A reductive view of reductive events: obviously more recent events-
the highly-publicized return of easel painting in neo-expressionism, for in-
stance-would disrupt Wolfe's teleology. The fact that such trajectories reg-
ularly extend past the point of teleological exhaustion is vety much to the
point: our first exhibit in the theory-death of the avant-garde.
But Wolfe's secret has been a well-known case for quite some time:
@sconrse pre~des art/ Art is always already bound up in discursive con-
texts. For earlier artists, such contexts were called by various names which
one might translate as tradition. Medieval Christian art would have been
unthinkable without an iconographic and institutionally mandated and medi-
ated discursive space (the church itself, an ideological as well as an architec-
tural site) in which to display it, and this was plain enough to anyone who had
anything to do with this art. In romantic and modern art, however, the
demand for originality obscured the necessity of discursive precedence, and
the avant-garde exhibited a particularly adamant need for such blindness. Let
us also recall that for centuries aesthetic theory was dominated by a mimetic
notion of artistic production, and that mimesis usually involved an awareness
that the imitation of nature was explicitly mediated by cultural models, by
tradition as such. Art's discursive entanglements are at the heart of Plato's
brief against poetry. Whatever shock Wolfe suffers in his epiphany is thus at
best an inflated register of a longstanding and pervasive demystification of
artistic autonomy. But this shock might also bear witness to the peculiar
manner in which certain discursive arrangements can become inverted. The
exposure of the avant-garde's dependence on theory or tradition leads for
some to a complete evacuation of its claims to aesthetic and moral superi-
ority and thence to a sort of critical backlash. Wolfe's gambit, epater l'avant-
garde, is common and replaces-with the strangely productive dissymmetry
characteristic of deconstructive inversions-the old game of epater le bour-
geois. The culturati become the new philistines. Wolfe, a representative of
the mass media, attacking the advanced wing of modern art, is a comic
6 / TuE TuEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
reversal of the legend: now Goliath kills David. (How this comedy is stag d .
largely our subject.) It is much the same absurdity that Robert Hughes et. is
.
to communicate to his own mass au d1ence w hen he d'1sm1sses
. the advers nes
.
. • d • . anal
h
Posture of modernism because, e ms1sts, mo ermsm ts now our offi .
. Cial
culture. 2 (How margins become centers: also our subJect.)
Discourse is prior to the work of art: perhaps an awareness of th.
arrangement does not prove that the avant-garde is a hoax; perhaps it is itse;~
a mode of avant-garde consciousness and one of the avant-garde's most
important contributions to mainstream modernity. For instance: it is often
remarked that Marinetti's first futurist manifesto, published in the French
newspaper Le Figaro in 1909, preceded the existence of any futurist move-
ment; at that moment, the futurists existed nowhere but in Marinetti's prose.
Likewise the first manifesto of futurist painting preceded the production of
any distinctly futurist work. As Marjorie Perloff comments, "Just as
Gertrude Stein began to resemble her painting by Picasso only years after he
had painted it, so the futurist paintings . . . were painted only after the
publication of the manifesto, as if Marinetti's Nietzschean prophecies ...
had to be fulfilled. " 3 The analogy with Picasso's Stein portrait is not quite
accurate and might tend to obscure the real force of the example: for futurism
it is not that life imitates great art but that both art and life imitate polemic
and journalism. Perloff goes on to identify the manifesto as perhaps the
quintessential artistic form of futurism and, by extension, of other move-
ments. Such a notion offends critics and viewers for whom polemics and
aesthetics must remain mutually exclusive, for whom an artwork that is a
pretext for ideological exercises is a lesser work than one that arises directly,
as if unmediated, from the artist's soul. And yet it is becoming increasingly
difficult for criticism to maintain a belief in, let alone a case for, an unmedi-
ated vision that it is itself at constant pains to mediate. More and more
criticism has been forced to conclude that there is no such unmediated
vision, that art is not simply supported by discourse but is itself a fully
discursive phenomenon. Seen in this light the manifesto's claim to priority
might be quite modest.
Jhe avant-gardeJs a~vanguard..oL..thi.s..r~flexive~wareness of the funda-
~ptalJy._9.isE!!~J_ye_~jiar~~LPi.art. But it should be noted here at the outset
that in insisting on the primacy of discourse in the avant~garde, this essay sets
itself at equal removes from (and therefore in equal relation to) those who
define the avant-garde along strictly aesthetic lines, as antitraditional ad-
vanced art, and those who see the avant-garde primarily as a sociological
phenomenon--either an epiphenomenon of bourgeois cultural progress or an
authentic revolutionary mode of opposition. As we shall see, to privilege the
discursive character of the avant-garde is above all to privilege its economic
over either its aesthetic or its ideological aspect. It is by its a.biding concern
with the discur:_siveeconomy within which the avant-garde operates that this
essay is identified. For avant-garde discourse is not only a matter of art
commentaries and manifestos; it is a matter of speculation, in every sense of
'Pataphysics I 7
the word. The avant-garde is completely immersed in a wide range of appar-
ently ancillary phenomena-reviewing, exhibition, appraisal, reproduction,
academic analysis, gossip, retrospection-all conceived within and as an
economy, a system or field of circulation and exchange that is itself a
function of a larger cultural economy. Art exhibits an active relation to the
discursive economy, a will to discourse that is its most general if not its most
basic commitment. Barnett Newman's dismissal of commentary is, as Wolfe
sensed, itself a form of commentary and, as "mot," becomes currency, a
token of exchange passed by Wolfe, by me, etc.; it is a basic element of the
economic medium in which the artwork is circulated and exchanged. The
hypothetical totality of such exchanges, willing or unwilling, voluntary or
conscripted, voiced or even suppressed, would provide a map of the discur-
sive economy within which the avant-garde operates, and which services and
is managed by the wider systems of circulation and exchange that constitute
the culture at large.
The real task of this essay is thus not to produce yet another account of
the avant-garde, although it will be impossible to avoid doing something very
much like it; the task is to take into account how such accounts function
economically. It is the discourse of the avant-garde and the avant-garde as
discourse rather than any particular movement or movements that concern
us here: the avant-garde's being-in-discourse, its maintenance and control by
and as discourse, perhaps its ultimate inability to discover for itself any mode
of existence other than that which can be circulated by, in, and as discourse.
In the avant-garde art manifests itself entirely as discourse, with nothing
residual, nothing left over. Or rather: no visible residuum, for even as one
must insist that the avant-garde is fully discursive-even as one discovers
that the reflection of this discursivity was the theory-life and theory-death of
the avant-garde-in the end one will also find that something is always
missing from discourse, always omitted, denied, concealed, lost, skipped
over, ignored. Perhaps only in this missing residuum is the death of the avant-
garde belied.
It might be useful to start with a survey of the questions most commonly

asked, the centers of interest for most other studies, and position this essay
in relation to them, find out what its own angle of approach should be, what
course to pursue from the customary points of departure; not yet to answer
these questions but only to speculate about what set they constitute and
what answering them might involve. The questions reiterated here are thus
only signposts, points of orientation within the current discourse of the
avant-garde, and themselves necessarily objects for criticism.
WHAT IS THE AVANT-GARDE?
Definition is the first and perhaps main task of traditional studies of the
avant-garde. It is also a matter of some concern to the movements them-
selves. "What is surrealism?" is a question asked again and again by sur-
I
g / THE THEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
. ts as well as by critics. For members of any given movementdefi ..

reaI1s . . d f If.. . . n1tton
.1spartly a matter of pubhc1tyor . propagan . a, o se -Justification
f .. or dee
1ense•
all such definitions are essentiall_ystr~teg1c, me_anso pos1hon_i~g a move~
ment in relatio~ t~ real o_rpotential alhes, e?~m1es, patrons, cntics, etc. In
ostensibly extnnsic studies, however, defimtt0ns seem to take on a m
neutral tone. !Poggiol1/defines the avant-garde larg~ly along sociologicallin:re
11 as an ex ress~O.!l. of alienation frqm_fOQ.fI.~~§_~cial __
and ~u~tur~ondition~
and he elaborates a fourfold typology to descnbe it: ~c,tlv1s_1n, c!ntaonis
Q!filll.§..IJ!,
and ~&Q.QiS!Il- Charles Russell gathers all of Poggioli's cat~~
under the single heading of "aesthetic activism," while /Peter Hurer vali-
dates only one particular form of activism-that directed against the i~stitu-
tion (of) art-and denies authentic avant-garde status to any movementthat l
to
does not demonstrate such opposition.4 There are certain areas of agreement
certain overlappingsin these definitions(alienation, activism, etc.) but as on~
mightexpect, the more taxonomical energy is expended in definingthe avant-
garde, the more difficult it becomes to reduce the various movementsto any
coherent catalogue of common denominators (or rather, as we shall see, the
catalogue begins to cohere around certain key contradictions). The more
definitionsof the avant-garde,the more exceptions proliferate, until one must
consider the productivity of definitionitself. We are therefore also facedwith
a proliferation of questions: Is the avant-garde a singular phenomenon or
must we distinguish among movementswithin~_11&e..of._ay.ant-gardes? What
if anything do all of these movementshold in common? Is the avant-gardea
coherent evolutionary process or are some movements incommensurable
with others? Are various concurrent or succes__~i_ve movements more or less
en avant? Does the avant-garde as such change, mutate, progress, degener-
ate, or maintain a consistent relationship with or distance from the so-called
mainstream? Most importantly, what are the strategic functions of these
various categorical arrangements and of attempts to collect them all within
one encompassing historical form, Jhe Avant-=Garde?
For it is not only the movements themselves that define the avant-garde
for strategic purposes. Whatever the nature and scope of these extrinsic
definitions, whatever agreements or disagreements exist among them, one
must recognize their part in legislating avant-garde discourse and hence
avant-garde activity. We have already admitted that theories of modern art
play an integral role in its production and dissemination. One might even say
that there is no such thing as an extrinsic study of the avant-garde: all studies
operate within a common if manifolddiscursive field' all. share that fieldwith
their subject, and all must therefore represent their own sites within it.
Tacitlyor overtly,every critical text has a stake in the avant-garde,in its force
or restriction, in its survival or death (or both). The relationship between
definitio_nand exception in studies of the avant-garde replicates-is itself a
mechanism of-the dialectical interplay between definition and exception
that characterizes relations between mainstream and margin as such. Sec-
ondary texts on the avant-garde become part of the field that current move-
'Pataphysics I 9
ments try to transgress, the ground out of which later movements.arise. The
avant-garde ~ends to de_fineitself in part by resisting the definitions assigned
to it by mamstrea~ discourse. Or rather, not simply by resisting but by
complex self-regulatmg. procedures of demonstration and concealment , clar-
ification and obfuscation, seduction and rejection. The avant-garde consis-
tently defines itself both in terms of and against definitions imposed upon it;
the imperial agency of definition troubles a margin that wants both to present
itself to the public and to elude the reductive capacity of representations,
both to be understood and to exceed the status quo of understanding. In this
essay, therefore, we will not be concerned with testing the objective, histor-
ical accuracy or inaccuracy of any given taxonomical set so much as with
exploring the complex dialectical relations that obtain between event and
comprehension, movement and definition, action and representation.
WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF THE AVANT-GARDE?
How SHOULD THE AVANT-GARDE BE PERIODIZED?
. As with definition, so with chronicle: to write a history of the avant-garde

is already to contain it: obviously within a narrative structure and thus
inevitably within a certain ideological regime, a certain formation of
(pre)judgments. Every history is to some extent an attempt to determine (to
comprehend and to control) the avant-garde's currency, its demise or its
survival today, and its survival in either a vital, a moribund, or a posthumous
form. Or in all three: Perloff's The Futurist Moment describes the move-
ment's persistent influence but precisely as an object of historical scrutiny, a
living tradition that futurism's abiding antitraditionalism can no longer pre-
tend to exceed. But of course for the avant-garde, survival in a museum or in
any other institutional context is at least problematic and perhaps a contra-
diction in terms.
No neutral histories; in fact a history of resistance to such histories. The
question must therefore call us to interrogate the agency of histories of the
avant-garde and perhaps yet again to question historicism as such. But not
simply as an antihistorical gesture, some melodrama of the end of history in
which the endgame of the avant-garde seems so often to play a part. Neither
the avant-garde's resistances nor its accommodations to history will be
privileged here; instead the contradiction encompassed by resistance and
accommodation will be seen as the avant-garde's most basic structure and
driving force.
WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE AVANT-GARDE
AND MODERNISM?
The question is important because it focuses attention on the problem of

official culture. The problem is often posed in this manner: if the avant-garde
is equated with mainstream modernism-if it is nothing more than modern-
ism the moment before it becomes canonical-then its claims of marginality,
autonomy, and a superior morality of opposition will be discredited. But if on
the other hand a viable distinction can ·be maintained

d
between th
e ava
'
garde and modernism, if the avant-gar d e 1s oppose not only to conv . nt.
. 1· . I . . .
t
ent1on I
artistic styles b~t to ~he very s?c1opo 1t1ca _mst1tut1onof ~ulture, then
Oppositional claims might. be .vahd. The question of. the relation between thls
avant-garde and modernism 1s thus partly a question about the politi _e
1
this connection, a term always used quite loosely) orientation of the ancal(i_n
· -1anty
itself. Studies that focus on the s1m1 · or partners h'1p between modera Ys1s
.
. h . . n1srn
and the avant-garde tend to emphasize aest ehc issues, whereas studies th
argue for the distinction between them tend to emphasize ideology. He at
. h' . I d h
the question might concern the re I~tJ_ve 1stonca a~ t eoretical status of
nee
aesthetics and ideology per se, and 1t 1s along these Imes that this essay will
tend to address it.
ls THE AVANT-GARDE A SUBPHENOMENON
OF BOURGEOIS CULTURE?
Most historians agree to locate the roots of the avant-garde in the Euro-
pean middleclass of the late nineteenth century, but does this negate the
avant-garde's perennial insistence that it is an authentic mode of revolt
against the bourgeoisie and its values (Russell privileges this word), its
institutions (Burger privileges this one), its deceptions and alibis? Should
class origin be conflated with ideological affiliation? Perhaps to be born into a
class is not necessarily to be subsumed by it; perhaps to oppose it is not
precluded by any brute determinism of birth or upbringing. The avant-garde
artist might not be merely the rebellious son of a bourgeois father and the
father to the bourgeois he must inevitably become-an inevitability inevita-
bly written into bourgeois histories of the avant-garde. And yet neither is it
possible any longer to take the avant-garde ideology of revolt at face value,
since the bourgeois historians have so often proven to be right: these revolu-
tionaries usually do turn out to be proper young men going through a phase.
The reduction of avant-garde rhetoric and rebellion to oedipal cant and
adolescent pranks is often quite justified.
But the point here as before is neither to advocate nor to denounce avant-
garde rhetoric or behavior; it is rather to ask how the question ·of class
affiliation is deployed, how closely the ideological poles are pitched, whether
the avant-garde's struggle to find a way to detach itself even momentarily
from the grip of bourgeois principles and priorities is defeated from the
outset or only in analytical hindsight, to what degree revolt is even possible
and how that possibility is controlled, and what any discursive project stands
to gain by advancing or dismissing the avant-garde's claims of autonomy from
or opposition to the bourgeoisie.
The same question could be posed in several other forms. For example:
AGAINST WHAT DOES THE AVANT-GARDE REBEL?
-Only against artistic tradition or against culture more broadly con-

ceived? Can an analysis of the avant-garde proceed by focusing on matters of
'Pataphysics I 11
formal experimentation and innovation, or must the question of th t-
d b b II . I 1· . e avan
gar e _e a ove a soc1a .' po 1ttcal, and the analysis focused primarily on
i~eolo~1cal concerns? It 1s the same question that was raised by the rela-
ttonsh1p_~etween the avant-garde and modernism: again and again aesthetics
and poht1cs are _separated o~ly late~ to collide. Here however we will ap-
proach the_question from a shgh~ly different angle: instead of asking whether
the r~volt 1~at bottom bourgeois-aesthetic or revolutionary-ideological, the
question will be whether to act against bourgeois culture on any level is also
to act in its name. Bourgeois culture is not "one-dimensional" but clearly
two-dimensional, a dialectical system that relies on internal oppositions in
order to sustain and advance itself. Modern culture can only progress by a
kind of internalized violence; it must continually attack itself in order to
survive and prosper. Hence the peculiar duplicity of the avant-garde, of what
is optimistically called late-capitalist culture in general: the avant-garde is
first of all the instrument of an attack on tradition, but an attack mandated by
tradition itself. This essay will join many others in contending that the avant-
garde's assaults on tradition, cultural establishments, and the formal struc-
ture of the work of art tended to place the avant-garde in the service not, as
the surrealist journal claimed, of the revolution, but of its deferral, its dis-
placement. The avant-garde's historical agony is grounded in the brutal
paradox of an opposition that sustains what it opposes precisely by opposing
it. Hence too the difficulty of pinning down any specific movement's real
ideological allegiances. Was futurism revolutionary or fascist? Was dada
affirmative or negative? Was surrealism aesthetic or revolutionary? Does the
avant-garde seek parnassian autonomy or engagement at the barricades?
Commentators continually find themselves forced into and torn between
dichotomies such as these, unable to sort out the pros and cons without
violence to the material. But the violence is inherent in the radically dialec-
tical nature of the material itself. In the twentieth century every explicit form
of cultural opposition contains an implicit alliance and every alliance is also a
confrontation, a break. Beneath the simple alignment of aesthetic and ideo-
logical oppositions there thus lies a much more complex and conflicted
dialectics that is itself perhaps the most characteristic feature of the history
of the avant-garde.
Consequently:
CAN THE AVANT-GARDE BE A VIABLE MODE OF CULTURAL
OPPOSITION?
In its broadest terms this related question asks about the viability of
critical art per se. Historically the avant-garde has been one (though har?IY
the only) laborator for the development of__oJ)pQ_sitional art. The question
here is thus: Under whose sponsorship is this research carri~d o~t? _What
discourse does the opposition serve? If any answer is forthcoming, it will not
be discovered simply by reading check stubs. Allegiance is also a ground of
contradiction.
CAN THE AVANT-GARDE ALIGN ITSELF EFFECTIVELY WITH

OTHER MODES OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL OPPOSITION?
Surrealism provides a reference point. At first the surrealists d • .

. . . . I . . . tsm,ssect
the Russian Revolution as a vague mm1stena cns1s takmg place som
. ewher
to the east (Aragon), but they soon came to be l1eve that the revolutio f e
th
spirit which they sought could only be realized through an alliance :-~h 1
e
· · l t d · h ·
radical socia movement represen e , m t e twenties and thirties b h the
. f r h
exam~le of Mosc~w. Th e h 1story o _surrea 1sm_t en t_urned~nto a dispiritin
' yt e
narrative of abortive atte~pts to ~h_gnsurr~ahsm w1!h soviet ideology an~
party power structures without g1vmg up its commitments to the unco _
scious, hasard objectif, and personal liberty. The story is well-document~
and need hardly be rehearsed here; ultimately the surrealist ranks were
decimated by this tug-of-war, this long tale of seduction and betrayal, this
little diplomatic farce. By the mid-thirties, most of the original group had
either been expelled, in surrealism's grotesque parodies of the stalinist pur-
ges, for backsliding aestheticism; or like Naville and Aragon they had aban-
doned surrealism for what they believed to be the more serious revolutionary
tasks of editing marginal party journals and writing socialist-realist novels.
Similar if less spectacular struggles have occurred regularly since then. In the
new left of the sixties one could hear the same echoing charges and counter-
charges of bourgeois aestheticism and bureaucratic pedestrianism. A rather
desperate and enervated search for a viable critical art, an art of "cultural
resistance," continues in the postmodern presents From time to time there
are also brief alliances between artists and political interest groups for fund-
raising or poster-production, but perhaps only in the women's movement
have such alliances been more than casual, occasional, and uneasy, and there
too the political efficacy of aesthetic experimentation remains a very open
question. 6
This essay will neither support nor reject the call for.political art. Instead,
in its anamorphic fashion, it will attempt to read the discourse of the avant-
garde and in particular the straitened search for viable means of cultural
opposition as aspects of a general project for the control of opposition per se:
neither its liberation nor its elimination but its reproduction, its maintenance,
its self-regulation, its circulation within the discursive economy.
IN WHAT SENSE IS THE AVANT-GARDE MARGINAL?
The question is of course related to the debate over whether the avant-
garde is bourgeois or revolutionary but it also resonates with broader prob-
lems of cultural topography, the mapping of discursive space. What is the
geography of the avant-garde, of a culture designed as a field of centers and
margins? Where can the margin be located? From what vantages can it be
seen? Is the avant-garde a limit and what are the limits of the avant-garde?
To a certain extent the image of discursive space should be taken quite
'Pataphysics I 13
literally, as a matter of ac~ual g_eograp~y: the avant-garde evolved in the
centers of western cultu_re,m maJor cap1~alssuch as Paris, Berlin, and New
York. The avant_-garde 1s firs~ of all an mternal site, a movement of these
centers. But obviously a m~~gmneed be no less a margin for being situated in
a center of power. Inner cities serve as margins in all sorts of concrete and
undeniable ways; there is no mistaking the geographical centrality of the
ghetto or barrio for a?y r~al enfranchisement. It would thus be quite feasible
to propose the ghetto1zatton and therefore the marginalization of avant-garde
activity. The avant-garde's occupation of internal sites could be taken as a
sign not of complicity but of a deeper sort of exclusion and of a readiness to
engage in frontal or guerrilla cultural warfare. The question is once again
whether the avant-garde operates in collusion with or in opposition to power,
whether it is an internal or external margin, and to what degree either
location inhibits the potential of the other.
The language of inside and outside is endemic to any discussion of the
avant-garde, but it is clearly problematic. "The error of the avant-garde ... is
to imagine that the system has an 'outside.' "7 Deconstruction has all but
completely in-folded the margin and made many of the avant-garde's outlaw
claims sound quaint or delusional, while at the same time (in deconstruc-
tion's most sophisticated applications) preserving some of its differential
force. We will not object very much to this deconstructive remapping of what
were once simply interiors and exteriors, but we will also explore the extent
to which this involution of the margin has been one of the chief historical
purposes of the avant-garde. The avant-garde has in fact served, in most cases
quite unwittingly, as an instrument for the incorporation of its own mar-
ginality.The avant-garde is the outside of the inside, the leading edge of the
mainstream, and thus marginal in both senses: excluded and salient. The
doubleness of this site, the existence of so curious and yet typical a phenom-
enon as a centralized margin, an internalized exterior, is another reason for
the difficulty of discerning in the avant-garde a coherent ideological figure.
There are related heuristic questions. In what ways does this doubleness
of the avant-garde problematize a discourse based on a rhetorical geography
of centers, interiors, limits, margins, boundaries, exteriors? Are the criteria
by which the avant-garde is analyzed and judged themselves intrinsic or
extrinsic? And where then does the present essay stand? The concern here is
precisely self-critical: it is first of all a question about the position of this or
any critical text in relation both to the avant-garde and to a culture that
simultaneously contains and excludes it, a discourse that seeks always to
circumscribe what it excludes and hence to render exception moot. ls this
essay for or against the avant-garde? For or against the culture the avant-
garde opposes? There is no simple answer to such questions, indeed no
grounds on which to search for one, for like the avant-garde itself this essay
must occupy a real but constricted multiplicity of discursive sites; it must
move as rapidly as possible among a diminishing range of others and
elsewheres until it too exhausts itself and dies.
'
ls THE AVANT-GARDE DEAD?
Here the goal will be not only to decide whether and how the
ceased to exist but also to determine the uses of this death The avavatnt-garde
• • . · an -garde'
death will be taken not as a simple terminus but as one of its fundame s
purposes. ntal
The following exchange concludes a 1984 interview with Hans Haacke:
[Yve-Alain]Bois: One of the reasons I was always so impressedby what I'

~ailedy~ur eco~omyof ~eans is that your -:vorksimplyprovidesinformation,a~~
mformat10ncant be obhterated. So even 1f the work is recuperatedand tr
formed into a meaninglessobject in a museum, it still carries that informat::s-
This qualityof immediacy,of simplyaddinginformation,is the wayyourwork w~i
alwaysresist complete co-optation.
[Douglas]Crimp: Except insofaras one gets further awayfrom what is referred10
historically.After all, Heartfield can be recuperated now, even thoughhis work
includes real information.
Bois: But Heartfield is recuperated mainly on stylistic grounds, as a dadaist
photomonteur;but I don't think Hans's work could be recuperatedin this way.
➔ Haacke:_Not1!i_(!gesc~pes eventualabsorption.8
The theater of this exchange is exemplary. The critics negotiate for some
open ideological space for an artist who, perhaps more critically disillu-
sioned, i;hyts QQWnthis negotiatiQn_with_ablupt µenial. He does temper the
denial, conceding that "the informational aspect probably makes [the work]
immune," but only "for a while." Indeed, one might say, only for the moment
in which the hope for such immunity is uttered, for even as it is uttered it is
already too late: the "informational aspect" of Haacke's work has already
been absorbed into a discourse staged by and to some extent for this
particular journal, October itself
It will be some time before we have elucidated the principles, the opera-
tions, the dialectical devices exemplified on the stage of this exchange, but
the language in which the actors describe it is of immediate use. The death of
the avant-garde is precisely a matter of recuperation. The word is a piece of
jargon left over from the rationalizations of new left politics-one that, as
Baudrillard notes, might gl.Lu.p__tbymyth of a fall from some ideologica_Le_de.n
that it is difficult now even to pretend to defend. "The term has itself been
'recuperated,' for it presupposes an original purity and delineates the cap-
italist system as a maleficent instance of perversion, revealing yet another
moralizing vision. "9 Let me state quite clearly that nothing in this essay is
meant to invoke such a lost paradise of aesthetic insurrections; everything
here is meant to revoke this very notion. Nonetheless recuperation is a
preferred term because it implies both recovery and expropriation, a dou-
bleness perhaps reminiscent of Derrida's reading of the platonic pharmakon:
both cure and poison: recuperation as the antikiss of death, as crushing
embrace, as rejection by approval. The discourse of the death of the avant-
-
'Pataphysics I 15
rde is the discourse of its recuperation. Recuperation is the syntax of
ga . I .. I
ultural discourse, its e ementary propos1t1onaform. It is the spectacle of
~heinternalizat!on ?f~argins, the revelation of the_effective complicity of
opposition,the msp_trat10n for .the Wolfianpseudo-epiphanythat discoversan
•neluctable discursive stake m even the most vehemently anti-discursive
~rtists. It is the canon of those laws which state that everything new must
becomepasse, that every countertradition must become tradition, that young
turk must with grinding inevitability become old guard. In late avant-garde
discourse recuperation takes on an especially fatalistic tone, as if the absorp-
tion of any given movement were driven by natural forces. It is a fatalism
authored by nearly a century of recuperations, utopian movementscanceled
with depressing,accelerating regularity,new worlds turning old as if with the
flick of a dial. In the current age the fatality of recuperation seems so
pronouncedthat many artists and critics feel they can no longer even imagine
an artistic margin, an authentic opposition. The moment when the present
seems to have caught up with the fatality of recuperation-when recupera-
tion occurs immediately,or even more quickly: under the sign of the toujours
deja-marks the death date of the avant-garde.
But is recuperation natural, or inevitable,or evenlogical?Is it a necessary
(by)productof historical progress? Did all of dada end up in museums? The
recuperationof avant-gardesdoes not after all occur in every modern culture.
The Russian avant-garde of the postrevolutionary period is more or less
omitted from the present study because it was never recuperated, never
turned into officialculture; it was simplyand brutally suppressed. Recupera-
tion is evidentlya special strategy of late-capitalistculture: it is, to adapt a
phrase from Jameson, an "imminent rhythm of capitalism,"10 perhaps of
somethingeven more basic. Other cultures do not bother to recuperate their
margins;theyjust eradicate them or wall them out. But in late capitalism the
marginis not ostracized; it is discursivelyengaged.The fatality of recupera-
tion proceeds not from any laws of nature but from dialectical engagement,
the (never altogether conscious) commitment by any artist or movementto
discursiveexchange. The discourse of the avant-gardeinterests us not be-
cause it is an opportunity to promote or discredit another revolutionary
romancebut because it is the most fully articulated discourse of the tech-
nologyof recuperation.This is to say once again that the death of the avant-
garde will be described here not just as an aesthetic or ideological but
preciselyas a discursive event. And one instance of an epidemic of deaths
whoseend we have not yet witnessed.
. In RogerShattuck's account of the so-calledbelle epoque, AlfredJarry's

hfe and work epitomize a certain spirit or "trait" of the avant-garde: its
att_achmentto dreams.11 In dreams (the story goes) our true desires are given
voiceand the possibilityof a greater (sur)realityis displayed.This dream of
dreamingis taken as a prototype for the project of radical alterity at the core
of all avant-gardeactivity. In Jarry's writing such alterity is pursued most
>
◄
forcefully not by Ubu, the spirit of epatisme-not so much by any need

shock-but by Faustroll the 'Pataphysician. 'Pataphysics, Jarry writes to
'
will study the laws that govern exceptions, and will explain the universe th
supplements ours; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe that may bes at
and perhaps must be seen instead of the traditional one, since the laws that ;:n
have discovered, and that they think to be those of the traditional universe a n
themselves correlations of exceptions, although more frequent ones, and in'a~e
case these laws are correlations of accidental facts that, not being very exce;
tional exceptions, do not even possess the charm of novelty.
DEFINITION: 'Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which
symbolically attributes to lineaments the properties of objects described by their
own virtuality.12
To engage in a close analysis of these sentences, which begin in declarative

simplicity and almost immediately start to unravel, would be only to swallow
Jarry's bait. But one might mark certain words: govern, supplements, tradi-
tional. The universe ordinarily accepted as reality is defined as a tradition, a
set of conventions, an epistemological habit; it is nothing more than a
rationalized constellation of unremarkable exceptions (there is nothing but
exception). Jarry hopes to reveal the exceptional character of the ordinary,
the marginal situation of the center, the (now familiar) difference within
identities: an alienation-effect, a deconstruction, a strategy of defamiliariza-
tion or estrangement, the same "derealization" that Ferdinand Alquie (bor-
rowing, one assumes, from Sartre) locates at the center of surrealist
practice. •3 Not unlike Derrida's, Jarry's supplement opens up the multiplicity
and incompleteness of the universe it appends and counterposes; it reveals
the inherent supplementarity of that universe (to) itself Such subversive
derealization is an ideal of avant-garde critical activity and a common justi-
fication for its excesses. It also suggests something of the anamorphic
method of the present essay. 'Pataphysics is a voluntary perspective that sees
the shape of the wristwatch, in Jarry's image, not as a ci~cle but as a rectangle
or ellipse: "Instead of setting forth the law of the fall of a body toward a
center, why not prefer the law of the ascension of void toward periphery, void
being considered as the unit of nondensity, a hypothesis far less arbitrary
than the choice of water as a concrete unit of positive density?" Precisely the
figure of this analysis: the ascension of void toward periphery, toward margin,
toward the receding salience of cultural progress.
There is doubtless in 'pataphysics a certain passivity, some waiting for the
chance occurrence of exception, an attempt to become the sort of ideally
receptive recording instrument that Breton announced in his first manifesto.
But in another (supplementary) sense 'pataphysics is the science, the dis-
course, of the laws that govern exceptions. 'Pataphysics not only observes
the operation of the laws of exceptionality; it also legislates and enforces
them. It is a radical epistemology that produces by witnessing and governs
by description, that both describes exception and conscripts the exceptions
>
'Pataphysics / 17
it describes. To write or rewrite a theory of the avant-garde is thu .
. , h · h , . . s precise1y
to engage. 1?patap ys1cs: t e pataphys1c1an is the proper figure of the
theorist-cnt1c of the avan~-garde. The theory of the avant-garde is itself a
means not only of analyzmg or even promoting but of governing a t .
· 1· · · . cer am
border, a certam 1m1tor margm, a certam mode of cultural alterity.
It is here that the need for yet another study of the avant-garde begins to
assert itself. There are doubtless many margins, just this side of or beyond
the current limits of 'pata~hysical gover_nanc~,and do~btless also many ways
to regulate them. What 1s addressed m this essay 1s only one limit one 1
sample o~ 'pataph~sical excep~ion, one regulatory system-but not merely

one. The pataphys1cal mechanisms developed for governing the avant-garde
are applied along other margins as well, for the history of the avant-garde is in
substantial part the history of the development of general systems of re-
cuperation. This formula will recur here again and again: the avant-garde is
the avant-garde of recuperation. The discourse of the avant-garde is its agent.
It is no longer a matter of inventing another theory of the avant-garde;

indeed a theory of the avant-garde is redundant, for the avant-garde is already
in effect a theoretical discourse (and implicitly a theory of discourse), already
a theory of late-capitalist culture. As Hughes claims that modernism is our
official culture, so the avant-garde is its critical reflection, its not-so-meta
metalanguage, its own 'pataphysics.
Then in what sense is this text theoretical? If one takes the task of theory
to be the development of conceptual models that can (theoretically) be
proven true or false by testing them against empirical evidence, it would be
difficultto argue that this text is theoretical, that it is anything more than idle
speculation. Although evidence will be conscripted and marshaled here into
various movements of an argument, it is in fact part of the argument that such
evidence can be deployed in any number of ways: the evidence amounts to
nothing. But the classical notion of theory only defines, as it were, its pre-
marxian purpose: to explain the world. After Marx there is increasing pres-
sure to assign to theory, as it is necessary to assign to philosophy, the
responsibility for changing the world: a projective versus a retrospective
analytic. The present essay is not however composed along that track either.
Although it is written in an age of theoretical inflation, when the power of
theory might seem especially great and several influential thinkers can insist
that theory is in its own right a kind of praxis, this essay also exists in an age
of critical disillusionment, when theory must recognize not only its force but
its ineffectuality, its inability to generate radical social change. Or it must
~ec~gnizewhat is far stranger: the unbreakable bond between its force an~
its meffectuality,theory's capacity to render unrealizable the very changes it
represents.
Barthes praises certain theorists on another ground. Sade, Fourier, and
Loyolachanged the world by generating discourse itself They are types of
the logothete, the "founders" of a "language." 14 In the present essay the
effectiveness of a theory is likewise measured not so much by either its

explanatory power or its ideological force as by its ability to generate more
discourse, its economic productivity, its "phynance," as Jarry might have put
it. Poggioli: "criticism in modern art ... functions not as an exterior canon
but as an integral law" (222); Wolfe's law as well. Here that law is precisely
economic, a law of production and circulation. But once one admits the
intrinsic position and productive capacity of the discourse on art, one must
also begin to operate with the awareness of one's own ineluctable stake in
that discourse. Once one claims that the avant-garde is a discursive rather
than a strictly aesthetic or sociological phenomenon, then such reflection
becomes essential; one must see one's own discourse on the avant-garde as
an aspect of that phenomenon. There is nothing unusual about this either:
contemporary art and criticism have become acutely aware of their own
discursive mediations. It is mediation itself that is really at issue. Hence this
essay is a reflection of and on reflection: there is nothing here but reflection,
nothing but a kind of epistemological involution. (Everywhere one looks
cultural revolutions are being superceded by this movement.) Although the
essay never digresses from its study of the avant-garde, it is criticism as such
that is its real subject. To question the critical status of the avant-garde as a
(dead) theory of culture is to question the critical status of the theory of the
avant-garde, and ultimately of critical theory per se.
But to engage in such a reflection of reflection, as if to pretend that simply
by demonstrating this self-critical gesture one had already answered all
objections and settled all accounts, would not yet solve one of the most
fundamental heuristic problems of any study of the avant-garde. Avant-garde
discourse is above all else a polarized field, and virtually without exception
studies align themselves with one or the other of its poles. One either
supports or opposes avant-garde ideology: the avant-garde either is or is not
an authentic mode of cultural opposition, is or is not dead, is or is not the
guiding spirit of this or that current movement: the pros and cons, the pluses
and minuses, the insides and outsides are elicited and aligned with an
overwhelming and dispiriting regularity, to the extent that one must ul-
timately see this dialectical exchange itself as a primary function of so-called
bourgeois culture. How can one avoid being swept into these dichotomies,
occupying one or the other pole without grasping their systemic relation as a
fundamental cultural truth? How can one avoid being nothing more than an
ideological drone of some pro or some con, or what is probably worse, of
some illusion of autonomy from them? There appears to be no way to
extricate oneself from this vortex of alignments, and yet at the same time it
seems necessary to describe how it works, how this dialectic is organized
and sustained, why it is that polarization seems so mechanical and inevitable.
One must s?mehow describe this system of oppositions, and yet the difficulty
of the task 1s th~t one_cannot refrain from occupying one of its poles.
The tangle m which one already finds oneself is an indication of the
st range course this book will have to follow. One must come to see the
p
'Pataphysics I 19
d. course of the avant-garde as such as a dialectical structure to which one

c:~not simply commit oneself but above which one cannot hope to rise. It is
cial here at the outset that one feel the magnetic pull of both pro and con
er U yet wish neither
and · to su b m1t
. to one or t h e ot h er, nor to pretend to be free of
their force. In a sense one goal of theo~y ~ould be to find a way through this
discursive bind. Or perhaps only to resist its pull. There may thus be another
task for theory: no longer the building of descriptive models, nor the pro-
jection of radical new programs, nor even the logothetical invention of
discourses-no positivism at all, but rather a sort of theoretical refusal.
Foucault proposed just such a project: "Maybe the target nowadays is not to
discover but to refuse what we are." 15 But against this rather strapped
idealism of resistance we will always still find the apparently inexorable
counterinsurgency of theoretical discourse itself: every resistance is only
further production-a "new" negation, and hence a pole of the next level of
dialectical exchange. Every theoretical break is only the opening movement
of the next recuperation. A theory-death would thus be the death of the-
oretical resistance as well.
Were one to conceive the discourse of the avant-garde as a field of
unlimited or at least open possibilities, one might attempt, by gathering
together all the threads of the avant-garde, by describing its general condi-
tions and actual effects, to write a prolegomenon to any future 'pataphysics.
But after the death of the avant-garde, or in any case in a discursive field that
can no longer be seen as the site of an unlimited potential, such an ambition
would be ludicrous. Perhaps then this essay is nothing more than a pro-
legomenon to some future 'pataphysics that is always already exhausted.
Given that exhaustion, however, one might imagine yet another final task for
theory, a task announced by Baudrillard, in which theory turns against itself.
"[I]t is a good thing that terms lose their meaning at the limits of a text (they
don't do it often enough)" for "[t]his is what a theory should be at best,
rather than a statement of truth." Theory should be the evacuation of its own
terms, the exhaustion of every supplement, every simulation, every recupera-
tion. It might be that the last task of theory is to exhaust theory itself, to push
its terms until they disintegrate or, as Baudrillard would say, "implode": "my
way is to make ideas appear, but as soon as they appear I try to make them
disappear." But even then "we can bet that a new militant generation will
ri~e over this horizon, brandishing 'new procedures of truth' " 16 -doubtless
remstatements of all the same old methods (historicism, psychologism,
scientism, etc.) and including, one assumes, any antitheory.
Perhaps there is no resistance but a fiction of resistance that tries to
nd
r~ er every truth it touches fictional and ends by consuming itself. Under
t ~ a.egis of 'pataphysics all the imagination's solutions become imaginary
so utrons, until all solutions are dissolved and no more solutions can be
P;oposed. An imaginary solution. In theory: the fatalism and infinite progress
~ ~ecu~eration (which is also the infinite regress of recuperations), and
gamst it nothing but a masocriticism endlessly postulating its own torment.
b
SevenNoteson Discourse
I. And yet to describe avant-garde discourse as 'pataphysical is alread

close ~ts case, ~o.recuperate it_with a recu~e~ated image, to use a qu~i~o
rhetonc to seal 1tmto literary history, to cast 1tma comedy in whichit m· ht
not yet entirely wish to perform. Precisely the problem at hand: for non~g~
0
the analytical instruments available for comprehending the avant-gardec
avoid rendering it in effect already settled and past. an
Perhaps, even if doing so solves nothing, it would be more accurateto
describe this discourse, this plenary field of recuperations, quite literallyas
an economy, operating according t~ substantive, det~rminablelaws.Nothing
could be more (or less) real than this economy,nothmg more essentialto the
very existence of modern art; nor has anything in cultural discourse been
more crucial than this economy's concealment behind a guise of autonomy
from these very conditions. But neither will it be possible to dismiss the
claims of aesthetic autonomy altogether,for this guise also veils a complexof
truths.
Of course: art is a system based on exchange-value;a work's value is
determined more than most would care to admit by market conditions.Put
crudely: a commodity economy. The problem for vanguard or critical art is
that at the same time it is bound to the notion, deeply engrained in cultural
discourse, that art should attack the very values on which the commodity
economy is based; art must separate itself critically from the commodity
even as it occupies the commodity form. As Brian O'Doherty notes, "The
avant-gardeartist's relation to his or her social world is made up of contradic-
tions because visual art has a tin can tied to its tail. It makes thin s . ...
[L]ocating moral energy in a saleable-ob}ecifii.iikes~ilingi~dulgenc~s,and
we know what reforms that provoked."1 Nor are literature, music and per-
formance any less tied to this tin can, even in their most extreme and
unprofitableformulations.It is thus hardly surprisingthat some advancedart
(dada, pop) has concerned itself directly with the dilemmaof art's commodity
form and been at times deeply critical of the critical power of the art object.
The avant-garde's struggle to resolve(llie aradox of tfie· ant1-commo1Y·
(fommocf1t ·s one of its driving forces. ·-
In this conception of cultural economics art-discourse fulfillsa secondary
function, as advertising, in the broadest sense. It is a means of descriptive
and evaluativesupport for the art-commodity;it provides crucial mediations
between art-production and art-consumption. This way lies a familiarso-
ciology of art.
But obviously the work of art cannot be reduced altogether to this sort of
20
Seven Notes on Discourse I 21
bru te exchange-value,
· · b
a value fallen from some eden of use 'T' • k h
· .10 mvo et e
ience of economics 1s Y no means to suggest that it would be sufifi . t
sC .al . f c1en to
expose the financ1 commitments o even the most advanced and con-
tentious art,·n1
to show how even the avant-garde relies on institutional su
. 1· d . f ·
rt
ppo ·
Art is certa1 y imp_1cate ID systems o matenal production and exchange
but a proper analysis of the av~nt-garde cannot rely solely on the classical
language of means of. pr~d~ctlon ~nd monetary exchange-value. A much
more complex economics 1s ID play m cultural discourse. Even education can
be described in economic terms:
The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledgethey

supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form
already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the
commoditiesthey produce and consume-that is, the formof value.Knowledgeis
and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be
valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge
ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its "use-value." 2
The commodity is not just a salable object, nor can it be decoded only for
evidence of the social apparatus of production or alienated labor. As the most
elementary reading of Marx should make clear, the commodity is also the
model and vehicle of modes of cultural activity that often consider them-
selves above the crass exchange of trinkets and gadgets, and that must
therefore confront their own stake in the same systems of exchange. The
commodity is a dense encystation of needs, desires, fantasies; it is the matrix
of all forms of social regulation, the ground of an elaborate seduction and the
dominant means by which the citizen is woven into the fabric of society; it is
the chief instrument through which social relations are communicated.
Baudrillard writes of "the passage from economic exchange value to sign
exchange value" (Critique 123), though doubtless the transformation is
nothing new: as Baudrillard himself observes, this articulate object speaks in
a much older voice than that of anything invented in the steel or textile mill.
"The original sense of 'production' is not in fact that of material manufacture;
rather, it means to render visible, to cause to appear and be made to appear,"
albeit in ideologically distorted forms. "Ours is a culture of 'monstration' and
demonstration, of 'productive' monstruousity" (Forget Foucault 21-22). Or,
in Arthur Kroker's paraphrase of Baudrillard, now "everything is coming up
signs, not commodities. "3
Hence at a more fundamental level than that of material production the
economy is already a discourse. It is based not only on manufacturing salable
(aesthetic) objects but on the commodity's reproduction by and as discourse,
on the continual circulation of discourse-objects. In effect the work of art is
an occasion for enforcing larger patterns of discursive-econo~ic relati~n.
Indeed the art object as such need not be exchanged, or even exist; only its
representation needs to circulate. A description will often suffice: that is one
lesson of conceptual art. The circulation of cultural signs is not a sort of
--
superstructural allegory of basic economic processes; it is a vital ec .

. · h · l · 0 n°tn1
f l
function The teleology o art 1es m t e art1cu ation and exchange of . c
. signs.
2 . The historical ground of this economy can be located in the aren h
Habermas termed the public sphere. David Held summarizes Habe a t at
. rtnas's
thesis:
Public discussions,Habermas argues, grewout of a specificphase of the dev 1

ment of bourgeoissociety;a particular constellationof interests lay at the roit op.
.
this type of mterc hange. A large number of " pnva · d'lVlduals"
. te m · (merchastof
etc.), excludedfrom the (the~) dominant~?liticalinstitut~ons,b~cameconce~esd
about the governmentof society because the reproductionof life in the wakeof
the developingmarket economy had grownbeyond the bounds of privatedomes-
tic authority." These individuals promoted and shaped the public sphere by
amongother things, maintainingas many newspapersand journals as possiblei~
order to further debate about the nature of authority.As a result, "newspapers
changed from mere institutions for the publication of news into bearers and
leaders of public opinion-weapons of party politics." Until the establishmentof
a more open and accountable authority structure, large numbers of papers and
journals joined the strugglefor freedom, public opinion and the principleof the
public sphere.4
For present purposes it is necessary to underscore three points in the

complex notion of the public sphere. First: from the outset the public sphere
wasan arena of contention, debate, party alignments, and ideological opposi-
tions. Second: it developed as an apparatus of the bourgeois marketplace; in
other words this free zone of contentions was already contained within and
determined by market conditions. Third: while the eighteenth-century public
sphere might have represented itself as a counterdiscourse in opposition to
the aristocracy and clergy, it was also the discourse out of which the modem
state began to articulate itself. In short the contentions generated within the
public sphere were highly-regulated subphenomena of the modern mar-
ketplace and the developing project of its state. If cultural discourse was at
..: one time an effective mode of opposition, it retains the forms of this opposi-
tion only within the context of its general enfranchisement by the linked
powers of the state and capital. Adorno makes an analogous point:
Just as culture sprangup in the marketplace,in the trafficof trade, in communica-

tion and negotiation, as something distinct from the immediate strugglefor
individualself-preservation,just as it was closely tied to trade in the era of mature
capitalism,just as its representativeswere among the class of "third persons"
who supportedthemselvesin life as middlemen so culture considered "socially
" . . , '
~ecess~r~ accordmgto classicalrules, in the sense of reproducingitselfeconom-
ically,1sm the end reduced to that as which it began, communication.5
Bo~rgeois culture a_rosefrom and returns to communication, but a communi-

cation that must still be seen as the circulation and exchange of discourse·
·t·es the continual flow of quasi-ideological goods through
mod 1 1 , t' 'th' a net-
corn of shifting relays op~ra mg w1 m _a more or less coherent system of
work ement. Contentions acted out m the public sphere are thus f d
lf rnanag . . h un a-
- y modes of commumcatron:
se ntal . t e free market
. . exchange of resista nces,
m: 1 .
transformation. of contention mto competition. Contention is circum-
th . d by economic consent.
scrrbe
In current critical discou~se thes~ relations are usually conceived in
3· f ideology: an artwork 1s a vehicle of what Jameson calls an "ide-
O
terms....,e ·
" "the smallest mte 11·
1g1'bl e umt· of t h e essentially
· antagonistic col-
ologe ... ' f · I
f1ve discourses o soc1a c asses. I " 6 Th k
e wor represents ideology in
lee . us ways: m · nove Is, tior ms . 1·
. t ance, b y d.rrec t a d vocacy, imp . Iy m
1c1t . the
vano · 1· · l · ·
biases of its characters, or even more imp 1c1ty m narrative structures. There
1. a tendency to assume that some sort of counterrepresentation could
:bvert the hegemonic ideological formation, but the argument from ide-
~logy seldom or inadequately addresses the nature of circulation as such. At
a fundamental level works of art are determined neither by aesthetic nor by
strictly ideological rules, but rather by their ability to move through and
hence maintain the discursive apparatus. The work's value is defined above
all by its power to generate discourse about it; within this economy a certain
evaluative indifference is inherent in the very act of evaluation. The real value
is circulation itself: "capital must circulate; the chain of investments and
reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every
direction. This is the form which the current realization of value takes"
(Baudrillard, Forget Foucault 25). None of this is to deny the significance,
within limits, of aesthetic and ideological determinations, but rather to place
both under another, largely operational sign. Obviously the economy will
prefer some ideological formations to others but it does not operate by any
simple mechanism of conformity and suppression. On the contrary the econ-
omy depends on contentions, on ideological oppositions. Within discourse
nearly any ideology can be exchanged, and as a result ideology today takes
on at best a quasi-ideological tone. Exchange is its own ideology.
4. Clyfford Still to his dealer, Betty Parsons:
Please-and this is important, show [my paintings] only to those who may have
some insight into the values involved, and allow no one to write about them. NO
ONE. My contempt for the intelligence of the scribblers I have read is so
~omplete ~hat I cannot tolerate their imbecilities, particularly when they attempt
0
~eat with my canvases. Men like Soby, Greenberg, Barr ... are to be cate-
goncally rejected. And I no longer want [my paintings] to be shown to the public
at targe, eit· her singly
• or in a group. 7
Still's
d intense revu l s1on
· against scribblers even those one m1g
· h t h ave cons1·d -
~re sympathetic to his work would ha~dly seem to represent the sort of
Umb collusion with theory ;hat Wolfe sees everywhere in the artworld.
There is mo~e~er~ than the usual conte~pt !or

the stupidity of critics (a her
comme un ecr,vam to answer Duchamp s bete comme un peintre); mor e
. I . b h .. e loo
than so~e _sloek romantic comp amt a out t e spmt versus the letter, the
contammallon of art by language. More even than a proscription aga·
10st
critics: Still insists that the work be shown only to selected individuals (n
of them presumably writers) and never in the public exhibition space of~~e
gallery or museum. But what could Parsons have thought of his demand ~
Did she try patiently to explain (as if to a child? but such role-playingwou~d
only reinforce the stereotype of artists as naive and unworldly) that th
presence of even single buyers depended to some degree on promotion, 0 ~
the very sorts of mediation that Still wanted to prohibit? Did she point out
that even if she were able to protect his work in this manner nothing was to
prevent its later exhibition under normal gallery-(re)viewing conditions by
those who bought it from her; that nothing could keep subsequent pur-
chasers from loaning his paintings to museums for tax write-offs or any other
purpose; that anyway his livelihood depended on the very discursive appara-
tus for which he expressed such loathing?
Absurd demands, especially since Still relied on a dealer to carry them
out. Hence it is hardly surprising to find other artists trying to control access
or resist criticism through the work itself Perhaps by a kind of blankness, as
in Frank Stella's famous refusal:
I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in
painting-the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin
them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the
paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen
there is there. It really is an object. ... All I want anyone to get out of my
paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea
without any confusion .... What you see is what you see. 8
The remark might seem quite as naive in its way as StiU's, but Stella must
have realized that by these very words he was already articulating more than
painting in his painting, already situating it in art history, already making
critical claims. The rejection of painting's traditional role as an allegory of
humanist values inscribes the painting with antihumanist values.9 The argu-
ment for abstraction or radical formalism often turns on this paradox: it
wishes to be a critical statement outside the realm of critical statements:
against interpretation, criticism above criticism, an end to criticism. As
Serge Guilbaut observes, "The trap that the modern American artist wanted
to avoid ... was the image, the 'statement.' Distrusting the traditional idiom,
he wanted to warp the trace of what he wanted to express, consciously
attempt to erase, to void the readable, to censure himself. In a certain way he
wanted to write about the impossibility of description." 10 Abstraction was in
part an attempt to subvert not just the narrative and iconographic elements
of traditional painting, but the production of meaning as such. Nor is this
attempt to warp the trace and void the readable restricted to painting; it is of
►

course an element of numerous radical exper_im~ntsin writing as well (Mal-
Jarme, Guyotat, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, ecnture feminine). Then the
becomes the next trace to read.
war~yesonly, and certain(~ checkbooks, bu_t.no notebooks, no essays, no
reviews.But t?e problem 1s not one of w~1tmgper se. Still's paranoia is
wn up against a system that reduces his work to what he believes are
thrO . . d .
nartistic values, categories, JU gments, appraisals; a system that at one
nod the same time sustains and subjugates him, that produces viewers (or at
~:astbuyers) who might tacitly share his sense of "the values involved," but
that also subordinates him to an oppressive regime of explanations, commen-
taries, interpretations, analyses. Thus his outrageous desire for silent ap-
proval, purchase without discus~ion, without text. His demands evoke a
sense of the loss of any operatmg space beyond the reach of discursive
mediation; a fear, perhaps, that his project can no longer be seen at face
value, in fact no longer has a face value; that he has been immediately and
effortlessly assimilated into the generality of exchange. But what is finally
most significantabout Still's list of prohibitions is manifested in its own ironic
fate: it becomes a quotation, part of the canonical discourse on his work and
on abstract expressionism in general, a standard figure in the very discourse
he dreamed of resisting. Indeed it is probably cited most often now by those
who want thereby to mark their alliance with the painter and their difference
from false allies like Greenberg and Barr. The passage of this private ut-
terance into public discourse (e.g., the present essay), its virtual transforma-
tion into a canonical index, signals a truth it could not itself witness and that
cancels its every intention.
5. If art sometimes operates through tacit collusion with discourse

(Wolfe'sepiphany) and sometimes through futile resistance (Still's paranoia),
sometimes it also pursues a kind of resistance by collusion, a seizure of the
means of discourse production. Many artists now accept the inevitability of
representation and try to use it as a proper medium. A Duchamp readymade
is not only an object, it is an idea projected quite purposefully into art
discourse, and one that functions even sight-unseen, in commentaries, as a
represented gesture. In 1958Yves Klein exhibited an empty gallery and that
vacant space continues to fill discursive passages thirty years later. Edward
Lucie-Smithargues that "Klein is an example of an artist who was important
for what he did-the symbolic value of his actions-rather than for what he
made."11 But for many artists and critics this tendency toward the gesture
remains problematic. Christopher Butler believes that the dependence of
John Cage's4'33 (four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence performed
11
at the piano) on descriptive reiteration is "defeating":
~ntil you know what 4'33 is as a piece of music, you could really be let down by
11
it. Now that everyone knows, I suppose that the piece also exists as a piece of
verbaldescription. It did, once, startle its audience into considering the notion of
Ill
performance.Whatwasthe pointat whichtheyrealizedth .

just waitingto perform,but actuallyperforming?It made~: the_~•anistWas
oncethat pointhas beenmade,littleof any valuemayre . 5 cnttcatPoint~ot
main.12 · out
In this logic a point can only be made once. Or can it? Ob •

· made the pomt
Just · agam:· Cages' piece· has lost none· of itviously
. Butter has
pomt. 1t
. can be sa1'd to have) ; th at pomt· 1s
· simply
· reiterateds point
. .(whatever
terargument. ButIer 1s · argumg · tior (and therefore already within d' .a coun.
1
·
pnmacy of perfiormance, as Sh·11m1 ·1·
1tatedfor the primacy ofme th ating)the
that is, unmediated aesthetic experience-in statements that h e canvas.._
part of the apparatus through which we see his work. A work sua~e become
seems to function purposely both within and beyond the strict: as Cage's
.
tiormance-1mme d'1acy: representation
. 1s . already implicit in its preres of Per
. ·
· d' . sentation•
the work aIso perfiorms m 1scourse.Its pomt about the nature of ..c '
·1 • .
ance or about sound and s1ence survives m Butler's mediumevenas B ,·
Peuorm
text is (on) Cage's medium. ut1ers
Consciousness o~ the volubilit~of ev~n s? mut~ a text as Cage'sleads
many conceptual artists to work directly m d1scurs1vemedia. Commenta
?ecomes pa~ ?f the work a~d at ~imesstan?s in ~orit altogether:no objed,
Just a descnpt1on of the obJect, hke Borgess reviewsof nonexistentbooks·
no performance,just instructions. Perhaps artists who surround their work
with discourse, or constitute it entirely as discourse, are not all that far
removedfrom the abstract expressionistwho insists on the pure immanence
of painting: the same "loathing for the middleman,"the same resistanceto
preemption by the text that leads on the one hand to abstraction and the
warped trace, leads on the other to a text that preemptsits preemptors.13 One
could devise a microgenealogyfor this instance,a capsule historydescribing
a sort of double spiral of recuperations: even as advanced art found itself
more and more severely circumscribed by discourse it staged a counter-
recuperation of discourse. When it appeared that no content, however
obscure or inflammatory,was too extreme for the economy,attentionshifted
to form; when it became clear that no form, howeverabstract or grotesque,
was irreducible to some discursive formulation, attention shifted to the
discursivestatus of the object itself, and artists began to substitutetheirown
insightsand imbecilitiesfor those of professionalscribblers.The artworkwas
no longer offered up to the critical apparatus for mediation,it was either
dissolvedinto the artist's own discourse (JosephKosuth,Art & Language)or
reduced to a theory-loadedobject like Daniel Buren's site-stripes.Compare
Buren'smanifesto("Beware!")to Still'splea: "so many precautionsmustbe
taken insteadof merelyputting one's work out in the normalfashion,leavi?g
commentto the critics and other professionalgossip columnists"if the arttst
(nowmetamorphosedinto a theorist, a scientist, a militant)hopes to effecta
"complete rupture with art." 14 Though of course that project has not suc-
ceededeither: witness this text.
write discourse in the singular? Is it not the case th t th
6· Why
d·scourses, some domman· t and some suppressed but no gea ere
I c
are
onlY 1 ' nera 1orm
discourse,no macro, no mo1ar, no global no universal t '
no super . d d) . ' , no ranscen-
I no totahty (all ea : everywhere the immanent the frag t h
dent~'atthe micro, the molecular, the plural? And yet underlyingth~ent' t .e
nomtn , . . . h' . 1su op1a
or dystopia of d1fferentiat1on,
. . t 1s anarchic
. . or democratic
. or oppress1ve.
of content10us part1cu1ars, there 1s mcreasmgly visible a spect
worId . f d' d . ra1
systemof assents, a 1og1co coor mate _partials,a n~tworkof synchronous
(but never totally synchr~nous) mechamsms: the white form of Discourse.
Thenotoriousfragmentatio? o~m?de~nknowledge,resultingin such severe
specializ~ti?nthat academ1~mst1tutio~s must now ~evelop (specialized)
interdisciphnaryme_thodolog1es to m~d1atebetween discourses, masks the
systemicand material accord of a!l ~•scourse_s.~igh and low, sublimeand
vulgar,sacred and profane, ~umamstic and scientific,bourgeoisand revolu-
tionary,critical and affirmative,engaged and autonomous-the overarching
economythat sustains and is sustained by such distinctions asserts itself
more and more. In the end there is only one discourse and its law is
economic.
In a discussion of Althusser's essay on ideological state apparatuses
DianeMacdonellinsists
that there really is no ideology-in-generaland that what exists are ideologiesset
up throughtheir antagonisms with each other. It may be the case, as Althusserhas
since argued, that a "minimum of nonexistent generality" is needed to perceive
and understand what does exist. ... [But the] notion of a single mechanismcan
makeus blind to what, even in the setting up of ideologies,is, I wouldargue, most
material:contradiction, and thereby struggle. That notion risks taking us out of
historyand making change and revolt unthinkable.1s
Todayth~ p_r~vailingattitude is that discourses are local inst~nc.es_,of.a_po:wef-.

•
hatinheresjn_a11<Lcannot be abstracted from.themand that one can allow,as
Althusserclaims to do, only enough generality to justify discourse about
them.(If they were completelyimmanent you could not write on them, only
in them.)It is after all very much in the character of modem critiques to
condemnthe transcendental in their predecessors and try to eliminateit in
themselves.But the next discursive generation will also discover the tran-
scendentalin its predecessor; the transcendental always appears, always
reemergesand reasserts itself. For Macdonell the transcendental is class
strug~Ie.But her notion of class struggle is drawn in a circle: it is both
premiseand conclusion: discourses are determined by class struggleso that
ad ·11contmue
they. w_i · to give rise to class struggle; no other coneIus10n . 1s .
_mrssible. Macdonell'smove to eliminate the transcendental even as she
rernstall~it under another name is entirely typical: we are all helpless to
Preventits persistence in our own writing. It is the phantom limb of every
Postmoderntext. Poststructuralismdeconstructs structuralist universalsand
-
◄
promotes the immanence of writing and the impossibility of the text's closu
around any cohetent self-identity, but this tends, despite Derrida's ingeniore
unhinging of his own texts, to make ~he Text _(the minimum nonexiste~~
"general text") at least an operational _umversal. 16 The history of
postmodernism is in substantial part the history of a general attack on
generalities under the guise of which the general will always already have
reasserted itself.
Perhaps Althusser's nonexistent generality is the sign of a desire to have it
both ways. The concrete historical situation of any discourse cannot be fully
explained by accounting for its ideological content. There is always at the
very least some operational common ground on which contending discourses
must agree, or they would not be able to come into contention at all. Then
what is the historical mode of this commonality? Discursive practices are
marked by their ideological specificity and concrete material conditions, but
in the historical course of their interaction they also begin to manifest a
generalized system (even a style) of relation and begin therefore to be related
to a metasystem as well as to each other. The meta might very well arise and
assert itself within particular institutions and works, but it hooks them to a
systemic function that their specificity or immanence can no longer entirely
exceed. It becomes increasingly apparent that distinct and contending discur-
sive practices tend to function according to a coordinated economic mecha-
nism and that eventually the mechanism rises to the surface and must itself
become the object of discourse. In time and precisely by means of conten-
tion, discourses begin to demonstrate and communicate on the level of the
device that structures their contentions. They begin to manifest themselves
not only at the level of their ideology but also at the level of their economy. If
nonexistent generality is generally necessary for understanding, then it must
come to assert itself as such and make itself known.
The point here is not to promote a return to structuralist methodology,
although one might see the structuralist enterprise itself as a historical
symptom of the manifestation of a certain device, a. generalized economic
structuration. But neither can the concerns raised by structuralism be dis-
missed by Always Historicizing. The general apparition of the device is itself
a historical "event." That is how recuperation works: not just through
reappropriation but through the expanding phenomenalization of re-
cuperative technology. The dominance of a general economic structure is not
given as a kind of a priori but advances incrementally through the experience
of its recuperation of the particular and the incidental. The more we see
critical artworks and texts recuperated within the discursive economy, the
more we must attend to the process of economization itself. The specificity of
ideological or discursive practices is not completely negated but their struc-
tural homologies begin to rise to the level of discourse, to be articulated as
such, which is also to say that discourse begins to threaten the very dif-
ferences on which it is based. In a sense then neither structuralist-synchronic
nor marxist-diachronic analysis is adequate. At one and the same time
discourse is historically immanent and that immanence tends to generalize
itself historically. Arguments like Macdonell's for the immanence of ide-
ologies and discourses, for the political rejection of transcendentals and
therefore of any apolitical, metaphysical notion of power, suppress the com-
monality of the device, the verging of discourses toward the condition of the
apparatus that maintains them and the eventual manifestation of this appara-
tus in discourse itself. That is the process we witness in the spiral of
recuperations that leads to Still's paranoia and Buren's hyperacute awareness
of the absorptive power of the discursive economy. The gradual visibility of
the discursive economy is the real history of the avant-garde and ultimately
leads to a whiting out of discursive differences. In the postmodern era the
economy is not only visible, it becomes transparent: no more hypostatiza-
tions of origin, autonomy, opposition, margin, institution, etc.: all fixed
positions dissolve into circulation. We begin to hear more and more a
language of relays and flows, of nomadism, total access, pastiche and inter-
textuality. Reflection on the apparatus accelerates the process whereby every
other merges with the one. For us this means that after the avant-garde
theory becomes one of the means by which the economization of culture is
completed: it cannot fail to describe the real discursive assimilation of the
individual into the integer, the integer into the network, and the network into
the pure economy of exchange.
7. "Intellectual currents can generate a sufficient head of water for the

critic to install his power station on them," Walter Benjamin once wrote. 1 1
So runs the dynamo that drives the culture industries. Every time the avant-
garde abandons one of the critical terms by which it is bound into this
service, the critic endorses this refusal and hence recuperates it on another
level. What an analysis such as the present one further indicates is that
eventually yet another movement will come along to expose this mechanism,
this failure, this guilty complicity, to reveal that the attacks on advertising and
exegesis were forms of advertising and exegesis in the first place, that the war
between art and criticism was all along only the cover for a more intimate
alliance. Criticism endorses aesthetic liberation only so that it can possess it,
after which criticism rushes to refute it, to prove that it was false all along.
The freedoms represented in avant-garde discourse can as convenience dic-
tates be attacked as too radical or dismissed as vacuous; thus discourse
works to control the very idea of freedom. The academy approves a space in
which the avant-garde can be described as free, then turns around and insists
that after all any freedom endorsed by the academy cannot be taken seri-
ously. (Resistance to the academic is of course a standard academic trope; it
twists this essay into some of its most characteristic contortions.) The cun-
ning and normalizing power of such a discourse is impressive. It projects an
0 !her, a margin, a beyond, only in order to open more fields into which
discursive agencies can expand and establish control. The artwork that says
to the critic nothing for you to possess is a seduction, marking precisely the
...
space where the critic will (re)produce something that can be

every case the proh'tierat10n
. of escapes, resistances,
. revolts etcpossessed
. . · In
· teehnolog1es.
the proliferation of recuperative ' ·' is 11nkectto
· We have entered
where meamng · can no longer be defined mtrms1cally-as
· · · a matte anf aren
. a
· f h
form or content-nor m terms o t e customary extrinsic form r r O eith
er
sociopolitical analyses (the work as a repository of ideologicalforma 10
t~s of
Meaning must now be defined as c1rcu • 1ation
• wit . h'm the discursiveeca tons)·
.
It is this economy that finaIIy wntes t e meanmg, and discourse willonomy
h . al ·
. The meanmg
find a meaning to wnte. . 1s. the exchange. ways
One is hardly surprised to find_crit_icisminstalling its power stationon the
current of some movement, but 1t might be strange to discover that pow
stations can be installed on a corpse. Perhaps autopsies generate their :;
0
power.
Nightof the LivingDead
The avant-garde was named into existence early in the nineteenth century; 1
by 1970reports of its demise were widespread. These obituaries were hardly
unprecedented. Throughout the history of the avant-garde, guardians of
tradition, ideologues of various parties, and a host of parasites, promoters,
and dreamers have been ready with news of the passing of this or that once-
innovative movement or style; modern culture isJ_yQifi~~.P.J'._.§..uchdeath~, by
the death of painting, the death of the novel, the death of the author+Jhe death
of x or y movement, even the death of the new. For the most part these claims
have been matters of polemic, attempts by conservative forces to discredit an
opposition that might still exert some influence, or by one equally ephemeral
faction or style to usurp the dominance of another. But the obituaries of
recent years have had a somewhat different character: not just polemics
(though they are certainly polemical), not just preludes to the manifestos of
other movements, not just uneasy dismissals by bourgeois or stalinist (the
instability or even vacuity of such facilely polarized epithets is endemic to the
history we are exploring), but a kind of consensus . a generalization of the
idea of this death across the ideological spectrum. There are doubtless few if
any other issues over which one could discover any agreement between
writers ordinarily as divergent as Robert Hughes, Hilton Kramer, Clement
Greenberg, Douglas Davis, Peter Burger and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.
Today, as Hughes puts it, the "death of the avant-garde has ... become such
a commonplace that the very word has an embarrassing aura. " 2
A closed case b~onetheiess a of
staple· criticism~ for-whatever the
condition of the avant-garde, the obituaries thrive and show no signs of
abating. The death of the avant-garde has established itself for the moment as
a central theme of cultural criticism. This could suggest that the death throes
of the avant-garde have been indecently prolonged. Or that reports of its
passing have been greatly exaggerated. Or that the avant-garde has begun to
live out its death for discourse: that the death of the avant-garde is alive and
well.
Is it strange that these obituaries have not been accompanied by any

appreciable decrease in activity along this ostensible margin? An advocate of
the avant-garde could just as easily describe the current scene as charac-
terized not by a cessation but by a virtual explosion of new (the force of this
word has yet to be assessed) writing, painting, photography, performance,
music, video, film, installations: work that is not only hitherto unseen but
perhaps advanced in more substantive and critical ways, some of it by people
31
who have been working along these margins, apparently u d

deaths, for quite some time. In the United States alone· Vi~O ~erred by the·
Antin Robert Ashley,Steve Benson, Charles Bernstein. GI cBconci, Dav,·'dr
' · G I H H
Burden, D1amanda a as, ans aacke, Jenny Holzer Ly H .. _ca,Chris ' enn ran
son Mac Low, Linda Montano, Meredith Monk, Na~ Jun peJ~ntan, Jack.
. y R .
Peppe, Richard Prmce, vonne amer, 1mRollins, Martha R ' vuchae1
r· ne a1k "
1 ....
Schneemann, Carl Stone, Survival Research Laboratory H os1er, Carolee

Hannah W1 'Jke, John Zom ... and at th'1swntmg · · John Cage' is annah
t'll We· tner,
1
list like this could be extended indefinitely.One might choosest at Work.A.
one or more of the entries and a critic like Greenberg wouldobarg _ueWith
· . h . 1· . . I b · e 11kelyt0
d1sm1sst e entire 1st as tnv1a , ut m some arrangement th' b'
is ar ttra
sample would probably su~ply several figureswho satisfy Poggioli'sfou ry
typology of avant-gardetraits or any other set of viable criteria.Nor. rfih~ld
matter of m · d'1v1 'dual artists · alone. E ven as these obituaries were peak· is t is a
around 1975,when the most was being said about howlittle wasleftto s mg-
. ay-a
network of so-called language-centeredwriters was emerging,largelyin th
San Francis~o Bay. Area and ~ew Y~rk. Experimental, deeply critical0~
current poetic practice ~nd the ~~eolog1cal char~cterof ordinaryand literary
language, often theoretically m1htantabout their nonreferentialand writer-
oriented poetics, with their own presses, distribution systems, reviewing
apparatus, and public forums, they seem in every respect exactlythe sort of
group that would once have been considered avant-gardewithout question.
And yet it is indeed difficultto apply this label to the languagepoets, for the
cultural model it denotes seems awkward,outmoded,exhausted.
0ILQO.e...band_ in1erm~b!~.obitua!ie~;on the ~_ther__unintyJI.U_p_!ed_Q!'Q
.!!£!!:..)Y!H!L~.~-9-9µnt~_fQt: Jhiu~rn_g_ox? l~Jt.!~~atthe avant-gardereallyis dead
even though~f~~dhe.,ren.ts_ -- - __..,
remain ignorant of th~ fl!c.tand continue
_______ • ,, ....... ,, .. •,..,;•"I .. -• ..... ,.--- ··•··~-
absurdly to produce from within cultural paradigmsthat no longerhavethe

slightest relevance? So runs one argument: the persistenceof avant-gardism
in the seventies and eighties is nothing more than a farce in whichit is no
longer even the case that the emperor wears no clothes: now accordingto
Hughes "beneath the raiment, there is no emperor."3. Or is it that influential
critics continue to prove themselves blind to the best and brightestcurrent
art? Or are we witness to somethingmuch stranger than the folly of a few
artists and critics:.!h.e_passiQ& of a lon_gstandjQg orde_r__qf_di.s.~J.1..I§.iY~.r.el
.~Jradi.!i.Q!!~lA@t~~~~.£~.l.~£9Jl.QQ1 ..Y,1__~.nJli:i.al
Y.ti_c;,.,1J
.P.!!rn£ljgq1.,.Jk~µ.ltui:al
system,
l_perbaQ§._an epj_s.temological.hor.izon? Baudrillardreminds us of the Borges
tale wherein a map becomes so large and detailed that eventuallyit covers
and in effect supercedes its territory.4 But let us imagine here insteada
situation in which what is transformed is not the map (it is not merely
outdated)nor the territory (it has not merelyexpanded)but somefunda~en-
tal and unarticulatedrelation betweenthem. This is the possibilitythat anses
here: the death of the avant-gardeis not just an artistic nor evenprecis~lya
criti~alphenomenonbut J!:.-~I!.~l~ ..i~_d_l!~ed _b_y_(h~ .._gjs_rt1pJjQn
_0J_Q12eratwll:r
JelahQ!ls and differences
-- --- .•. --..
between
-·- .. --····---··--
them t
the absorption of each by the 0th
-
Night of the Living Dead I 33
and of both by the economy that once maintained them. Perhaps if anything
has changed it is the very nature of cultural optics, the physics of the
relationship between commentary and its object, the conditions of represen-
tation itself. Perhaps what lies behind this death-and its remains, its
legacy-is a state of discursive supersaturation in which advanced art comes
to exist only in a kind of suspended animation, in a condition that is no longer
either life or death, revolt or defeat; indeed in no critical situation what-
soever, but lost in hypnotic fixation on images of its own containment.
Can we review a few of these obituaries without indulging in either relish

or revulsion, but also without claiming any but the most fictive and opera-
tional critical distance from them, without pretending that this essay is not in
its own way and even against its will just another obituary? The task is not to
produce a comprehensive survey-a stupefying and pointless archival
labor-merely a sample that will allow us to observe and assess the nature
and purposes of the death-notice.
In "The Death of Avant-Garde Literature" (1964) Leslie Fiedler attacked
the academicism of what he saw as the high-modernist avant-garde, an attack
staged on behalf of a popular American literature that he believed to be far
more vital. Fiedler's essay must be seen in the context of the longstanding
debate between high and low art, perhaps as a typical expression of what was
for him a native American distaste for European culture: redskins vs. pale-
faces. But to put the matter thus is also to cast the debate as a conflict
between the old (world) and the new; hence Fiedler's attack on avant-garde
literature is carried out in the name of a new avant-garde, as a strategy of
supercession rather than as an actual obituary.s The avant-garde is dead, long
live the avant-garde. This is a persistent feature of the obituary: the avant-
garde never just expires, it maintains a spectral afterlife; its memory lives on,
it is succeeded by heirs, it leaves a substantial estate (though perhaps only to
those who leave the estate behind).
For (lliiton Krainer·too the ~11<!.J?L ~y_ant-g_a.rdeaJLis..ma~~9_Qy_jts
___
~.1r.allc_~JltQ_J?_Qfil!.ll!LC.Ylt!lre,
though Kramer is hardly an advocate of this
development The__ ".age of the av~nt-:gar.de.'..'.
..e~t.~9,q~d..O.Q~Y.
j_qto _the.J95os,
"when .Abstract_Expr~sionism, the last of the 'unpopular' art movements,
began to enjoy a widespread prosperity and prestige." Kramer epitomizes a
view common .among_American.art.critics, essentially the view of Clement
Gr~~.nb.erg;_Jh~Jast..tr~e..Jl,V .9..~
9J1J:-g~r_~~.J~J9.,fQun<l.amq.Qg.P.0JI9-ck, Newman,
De Kooning, Still, Rothko, David Smith et al.; ~-Y~r.YtbjJJ,g __
after.ward is mere
In Kramer's account the avant-garde is finished "not because the
r~I!~!!!!.9..~-
willto innovation has abated its course-[in 1973]it has, if anything, acceler-
ated its pace and grown more desperate-but because it no longer has any
radical functions to perform." His conclusion:
the "normal condition" of our culture has become one in which the ideology of
the avant-garde wields a pervasive and often cynical authority over the public it
►
...
effe~t~ to despise .. That it does so by means of a profi_tablealliance with the

trad1t1onal antagonists of the avant-garde-the mass media, the universities a d
the marketplace-only underscores the paradoxical nature of the situati~n ~
which we find ourselves. 6 In
Death by compromise: we will witness this judgment again and again.

rn@itn Russi_~irschner7 whose study gathers together many of these
sources, believes ihat the avant-garc!_~xperienced its "Jast flo_urish"around_
1968 with the spectacular upheavals and almost immediate collapse of the
new left as a mass movement, the..appearance.of.postst[ucturalist critiques of
stan9ip.&J)Qti..QilS....Of
representation, and the incipient postmodernism of six-
ties "dematerializations" of the art object and attacks on art institutions. She
remiqds us that 1968 was also the date of the Museum of Modern Art
exhibition "Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage"; to her this show demon-
strates the way success is_fata.LtQ_gy_c!:nt-gardes:
the approval of an institution
like MOMA proves that these movements have been neutralized. Nonethe-
less she believes that the avant-garde was not terminated but sublated, that
what is essential about the avant-garde resurfaces in later (postmodern)
artistic and critical projects. Hence for Kirschner the avant-garde's putative
death was a necessary ritual of purification, a way to purge everything
spurious that had attached itself to advanced art; and she suggests that if
more work were done to historicize the avant-garde, it would indicate further
ways for critical art to become genuinely effective.1
For Jonathan Miller, writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1964,
the avant-garde is simply "old hat": it "has vanished, done itself a disservice
and disappeared up its own backside .... We no longer seem able to imagine
an experimental front, way up from the main body of art, beyond the reach of
current understanding. . . . [T]he categories of any forthcoming novelty are
well established, and all that we can expect . . . is consolidation in and
around these expectant categories." In Douglas Davis's estimation the "truth
is simply that the avant-garde is devoid of fresh ideas, still yoked, in its core
premise, to a position announced by Duchamp fifty years ago." Richard
Gilman thinks that the avant-garde has been completely absorbed or "sur-
rounded" by the mass media. James Ackerman indicts not the media but the
educational system, the increasing professional specialization of artists as
well as critics, and the institution of the museum. Suzi Gablik claims that
artists are being infected by the values of the marketplace: the avant-garde's
moral authority and in particular its "critical intransigence ... [are] evap-
orating before our eyes"; "art cannot survive along the capitalist 'faultline'
except by being compromised." Nicos Hadjinicolaou also describes the
avant-garde's absorption into the capitalist marketplace and in particular into
its need for innovation; ultimately avant-garde ideology becomes "the prin-
cipal ideology" of the post-World War II art market. Thomas Crow's avant-
garde is subsidiary to conservative modernism, serving as the chief means by
which mass culture is domesticated for high art uses. For Harold Rosenberg
-
"art today is not avant-garde, but neither has it been absorbed into the
system of mass culture .... The present art world is, rather, a demilitarized
zone, flanked by avant-garde gh~ts on one side and a changing mass culture
on the other." As early as 1956\goland B_art~ii}denounced the "complemen-
tarism" between the politically conservative bourgeoisie and the avant-
garde, a relationship in which the bourgeoisie uses the avant-garde to "con-
centrate the irregularity, the better to purge it from society as a whole." Even
as the avant-garde proclaims the death of bourgeois culture it marks its own:
The avant-garde is always a way of celebrating the death of the bourgeoisie, for its
own death still belongs to the bourgeoisie; but further than this the avant-garde
cannot go; it cannot conceive the funerary term it expresses as a moment of
germination, as the transition from a closed society to an open one; it is impotent
by nature to infuse its protest with the hope of a new assent to the world: it wants
to die, to say so, and it wants everything to die with it. The often fascinating
liberation it imposes on language is actually a sentence without appeal: all
sociability is abhorrent to it, and rightly so, since it refuses to perceive sociability
on any but the bourgeois model.
Barthes concludes: "As the parasite and property of the bourgeoisie, the
avant-garde must follow its evolution: today, apparently, we are watching its
slow death," either through recuperation by the bourgeoisie or through the
renunciation of the avant-garde's "pure ethical protest" for "a new realism."
For Charles Newman, however, the avant-garde is "compromised not so
much by bourgeois acceptance as by absorption into the intelligentsia," and
anyway "no avant-garde can exist when the establishment is not coherent
enough to attack." Peter Burger's radical historical avant-gardes give way to
a mere "neo-avant-garde" that increasingly accommodates itself to the prin-
ciples and priorities of high art aesthetics and capitalist market-economics.
For Andreas Huyssen, as for Burger and others, "conformism has all but
obliterated the original iconoclastic and subversive threat of the historical
avant-garde," a conformism "manifest in the vast depoliticization of post-
World War II art and its institutionalization as administered culture." (As
Hans Magnus Enzensberger bitterly observes, the afterlife of the avant-garde
is the culture industry. Perhaps then the culture industry is nothing more than
the avant-garde pruned of all its ideological pretensions.) And Rosalind
Krauss proposes that recent deconstructions of the discourse of originality
vitiate most avant-garde claims and render the avant-garde useful only as an
art-historical concept. 8
Perhaps the most vehement obituarist is Robert Hughes. As art critic for
Time and author of the popular book and television series The Shock of the
New, Hughes, like Kramer, approaches the avant-garde from a double stand-
point: a high-art ideology promoted through mass-media forms that it would
once have affected to despise, and over whose marriage, one could argue, the
avant-garde itself presided. Typical passages:
◄
Art is in bad shape. Advanced art, that is. The diagnosis: condition feeble. The
prognosis: poor. The avant-garde has finally run out of steam, whether in Mu .
. ntch
or Los Angeles, Pans or New York: the turnover of styles and theories that
the 1960s their racketing ebullience (Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism g~ve
Pop, and so on) has been followed by a sluggish descent into entropy. And ~he~~
seems no escape from that spiral. ...
To be ahead of the gam~ now seems pointle~s, for the ga_me-under its present
rules-is not worth playrng. . . . [F]aced with the choice between amateu
therapy and finicky, arid footnotes to Duchamp, the mind recoils. In fact, the ter~
avant-garde has outlived its usefulness.9
And why according to Hughes did the avant-garde die? "The idea of the
avant-garde was predicated on the belief that artists, as social outsiders
could see further than insiders; that radical change in [art] could accompany'.
and even help cause, similar changes in life" ("Decline" 190). But "our
culture lost ... the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and
above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could
find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be
explained to its inhabitants" (Shock 9). Eventually the avant-garde de-
scended into mere "newness for its own sake" ("Decline" 191) and sacrificed
whatever authenticity it might once have claimed.
We can sift this obituary discourse to discover a few of its patterns:

1. The death of the avant-garde is articulated more or less explicitly as a
kind of cuJ.tural feedbac.k..oLbacklash, the revenge of the mainstream after a
hundred years of reading its own obituaries in manifesto after manifesto.
Dada announced the death of bourgeois culture in 1917 and mainstream
criticism announced the death of the avant-garde in 1971: the symmetry is
predictable. In the same way that the death of culture was a precondition for
dada's antithetical utopia, so the death of the avant-garde is the expression of
another desire, another cultural dream, one in which our perennial accusers
will finally be exposed as charlatans. On either side par(isans never fail to find
evidence of the death they need; in this tradition critics always make liars of
artists and artists always make fools of critics. But the death of the avant-
garde marks a critical inversion: at the very moment of its success, at the
moment when it merges with the dominant modes of cultural production, at
that moment its death becomes mandatory. Some other margin will rise to
replace it (the recuperation of feminism is already under way), or we will hear
more obituaries for mainstream culture (it cannot survive without a van-
guard). The death of the avant-garde would function here as a reinvestment, a
productive imbalance of payments. Discourse lives off the interest on such
deaths.
2. The .antitraditional avant-garde inevit~11.ly_acqv.ir.e.s. traditiOP(it
it.S..O,WD
could not have re~necftorever· ai year-zero), proof, it is assumed, of a fatal
inconsistency. The negations espoused in avant-garde rhetoric become
cultural dogma; disciples of the cult of youth grow grey beards and become
e

respected elders, or at least sages for a day; experimental techniques become
codified, their results predictable; madness reveals its methods and the
methods are distributed as aesthetic gadgets for general use; anarchists find
their work installed in museums and themselves in university chairs. New
becomes old: perhaps nothing more than time eroding and replacing the
monuments of culture. As always in history. But the historicization of a
movement pitted against this very history is seen as an invalidation of the
movement itself The avant-garde cannot stand to be a monument: when all
its futures become pasts it must cease to exist. It is trapped by the very
historical logic it sought to undermine.
3. A number of obituaries ground themselves in_Q_fg~.rrif.,Ql~illQfl.Q.rs, in a
romantic allegory of the life-cycle of the artwork and of cultural phenomena
in general. Here the death of the avant-garde is seeded in its birth; nothing
could be more natural. Perhaps the avant-garde's attack on the traditional
ethos of the masterpiece, that transcendental image which places the work
under the sign of eternity, is itself a factor in the development of this fatalistic
metaphor and one of many points at which the avant-garde's strategies come
back to haunt it.
4. The avant-garde was defeated by the changing conditions in which it
had to operate. Huyssen contends that the avant-garde was ~.e.c.kill~~-9.ff
by repressive __poli.t~.aLr.~jmes_~9_t~i~§.Q.l_y_~g,i!). J~IJ.Y..irnnments.like
~µlt_1.m~l. the
United Sta~es where its __ _.6.P.4
diaJ~_C!!~.J:~Q1:!h1 ..J!Q.J?_µx_~hase.In dozens of
accounts the latter is described as a process of cynically selling out, or being
forced out in what financial journalism would call a hostile takeover, some
voluntary or involuntary collusion with art markets and hegemonic systems
of representation that belies the avant-garde's revolutionary pretensions.
Organic metaphors are transla~jnto .the .economic ..t~.r.m.s_ Q[ theJiscalyear ·
and planned obsolescence; life-cycle gives way to shelf-life. The economic
equation can of course also be used retroactively to discredit the avant-garde
all the way back to its point of inception: now the avant-garde was never
anything more than a way to generate new commodities or develop a more
striking sales pitch. This critique is usually attached to analyses of the so-
called culture industry. In the west this death-by-devaluation is also a by-
product of the perception that the revolutionary movements with which the
avant-garde has historically been linked tend inevitably to end not in utopias
but in totalitarianism.
5. Among the conditions that change is the rate of change itself. The
existence of the avant-garde depended on its ability to maintain its rate of
advance before the main march of cultural progress. As Les Levine remarks,
"The alchemy of the avant-garde was 'lead-time.' The assumption that a
favored individual or group would have access to information or sensibilities
not readily available to anyone else. Higher technology and mass production
have made it possible for everyone to know and sense as much as everyone
10
else." The diffusion of the avant-garde's tasks and privileges as saliences of
cultural progress suggests that the mainstream has accelerated through the
D
gap that once seemed to separate it from its avant-gard~. Lead-time shrinks
in a global village myth of total access and th_eculture mdustry becomes its
avant-garde. Another mode of recuperation: the reversal of vanguards
~::ome accounts the avant-garde falls so far behind the culture industry tha~
it is incapable of anything but self-pa~ody, perhaps the rueful ~ubtext of the
situationist slogan: to be avant-garde 1s to keep abreast of reahty. Hence the
current obituaries could no longer be refuted on the grounds of criticism's
traditional blindness to what is most valid in contemporary avant-garde
practice, the notion that "the silliest looking avant-garde movement may turn
out in twenty or fifty years' time to have been an instinctive anticipation
which the historians will pounce on." 11 It might no longer be enough to
gesture toward any given movement's stake in the future, since the consensus
on the avant-garde's death indicates a pervasive cultural situation, a change
in the fundamental dynamics of the avant-garde's relation to the culture, a
fatal warp in the rate of recuperation and not just a question about x or y
movement. The death of the avant-garde is precisely the thesis that all such
futures have been closed off.
6. Failure is cumulative and the tolerance for failure is limited. The failure
of a long series of movements to destroy bourgeois culture, to unite art and
life, to realize a creative utopia, or even to participate in more than a marginal
way in revolutionary political events casts a shadow over the development of
future movements. Failure becomes probable, then inevitable, then predict-
able from the outset, then fatal in utero. Today failure is the precondition of
the avant-garde; belief in even the possibility of avant-garde opposition is
evacuated in advance.
7. The avant-garde has no political effect; every one of its revolutionary
claims must be invalidated. What is more, political opposition cannot be
carried out in works of art because it never has been; the project was
ludicrous in the first place. When this absurdity is finally revealed, when the
symbiosis of avant-garde parasite and cultural host is exposed, the avant-
garde dies: from shame or embarrassment, from the force of its own logic.
8. But perhaps the avant-garde needs its death in order to go on living.
Poggioli writes that ~nt:.gai:de.al.way_s_s.eems...to~suryjy_e its own funeral
pyxe...and..!Q be reborn frnmits_<!§hes Jll!Oenix.::.Hke" (93); we have already
seen that some sort of recurrence is endemic to the obituaries; indeed
obituaries and claims for survival often amount to the same thing.
In Les Pas perdus Andre Breton describes the funeral of dada: "The
cortege, scanty as it was, followed those of cubism and futurism, which the
Bea~x-Arts students drowned in effigy in the Seine." 12 Breton was of course
anxious to bury dada so that the world could move on to surrealism, but we
should note that almost from the outset dada saw its own death as inevitable
an~
~-
~r 13
no means a sign of defeat. ".Da.ruuY.ill
As Huelsenbeck predicted in En Avant Dada:
c~as·og_JO-
~l.lrY.iv~....QO]y_bY.
~ad~foresee~ its end and laughs. Death is a thoroughly dadaist business, in that it'
s
•gm es noth mg at all. Dada has the right to dissolve itself and will exert this right
-
when the time comes. With a businesslike gesture, freshly pressed pants . a shave
and a haircut, it will go down into the grave. '
In a sense ,!he avant-garde is ~LS..Q f~__g_!LJl...J:.ant

as at the moment of death
the moment wh~n it c~e_s_up_with.amt~ag£_ejs it~_ill1/n fuiu~e~
For Huelsen~
·beck dada's death is an affirmation of its negative spirit, an ar{ti-aestheticism
so rigorous that it must destroy itself before it becomes an institution; but by
the same token it is also a form of suicide necessitated by the poisonous
approval of the bourgeoisie with which, in 1920, Huelsenbeck was already
becoming acquainted:
The time is not far distant. We have very sensitive fingertips and a larynx of glazed
paper. The mediocrities and the gentry in search of "something mad" are begin-
ning to conquer dada. At every corner of our dear German fatherland, literary
cliques, with dada as a background, are endeavoring to assume a heroic posture.
Only by a kind of sepukku can the negative purity of dada survive; only by
turning against itself can dada escape the inevitable recuperation. But dada
will not simply vanish: it will have its own phoenix-resurrection: dada "will
someday appear on another planet with rattles and kettledrums, pot covers
and simultaneist poems, and remind the old God that there are still people
who are completely aware of the complete idiocy of the world." 14 Death here
is a shift into another existential or ideological zone. In this light the death of
the avant-garde would be dada self-destruction enacted on a grand scale, an
end endemic to all vanguard movements and therefore to the vanguard as
such, and the prelude to some manner of postness that we have perhaps not
yet begun to witness, that is still inaudible to the ear of discourse.
These eight fatalities could be assimilated into two even more general
funerary themes: 1) Devolution: The death of any given movement is the end
of a historical process in which dialectical tensions between mainstream and
margin are gradually eroded; the movement's aesthetic or ideological integ-
rity is undermined either by institutional culture (museums, the academy,
normative criticism, the mass media) or by forces of disintegration along the
margin itself. What one might call the species-death of the avant-garde comes
about when this devolutionary pattern takes on a certain generally recog-
nized inevitability, when devolution is a publicly acknowledged fact, when it
comes to be expressed as a discourse of laws. This devolution ends in a bleak
and suitably postmodern parody of the hegelian dialectic, an entropic abso-
lute. 2) Evacuation: The death of the avant-garde is a product of the con-
comitant logical evacuation of its founding terms and especially of its social
mission. It occurs at the moment when devolutionary inevitability is read
backward through the history of avant-garde discourse. The language of
advance or opposition, of rebellion and originality, is voided all the way back
to the avant-garde's founding documents. Death is an ideological necessity:
according to such and such a set of circumstances the avant-garde can no
longer justify its existence, ergo it should have died, ergo it is dead. Any signs
of survival fall outside the bounds of the ideo-logic and are inad • .
further proof of its death. mtsSible,onJy
This is the way these scenarios will play themselves out here·
The death of the avant-garde is the n-state of the recupe; f .
10
critical potential by a narrative of failure. The obituaries are : ~ of Its
reports but performatives, sites on which death occurs; the diagni. ~erely
~1ata1·
1ty,an d , wh at 1s
· more, t h'1s ts
· th e d.1agnos1s
· the patient always sSISIS
h the
death-by-discourse (as coroners diagnose death-by-misadventure~~g ~-A
course-death (as physicists describe heat-deaths): the discourse of th; a is-
. . d h .d . d h . . avant-
g~rde 1s its eat ~n m eat 1t co_ntmu~s to reproduce itself as a death-
d1scourse. De~th 1s a thoroughly d1sc~rs1ve.business. It makes little dif-
ference that evidence of the avant-garde s survival can stiH be found in this or
!hat cu1:ent wor~: the avan~-garde's death is_carried out in texts that arguefor
its survival and 1t endures m spectral form m texts that argue for its demise.
The avant-garde dies in discourse, as discourse, perhaps all discourse on the
avant-garde is its death; it was never distinct from its death, indeed death was
always its most abiding force; it sought death in order to reflect it better, to
become the reflection of a reflection, to conclude nothing but to go on
articulating its exhaustion. What we witness today is not a terminus, since
advanced art appears in ever greater profusion, but the becom-
ing-(death-)discourse of the avant-garde within an economy in which nothing
is more vital than death.
In the obituary the avant-garde is completely historicized. It was con-
demned to death by its own idea of progress. The perceived deadness of
traditional culture gave birth to the avant-garde and when the avant-garde
entered the historical record it was subject to the same fate. The triumph of
death-theory occurs when it can trace the aetiology of the avant-garde's
fatality back to the very fact of its origin, when it can write the whole history
of the avant-garde as a death. But to become historical, as the avant-garde
learned, is by no means to be left behind, it is to · be remembered and
reiterated precisely as history, as story, narrative, lesson, text-to be_~.!fillled
~ft behind. Today the avant-garde is completely circumscribed by the
allegory of its own historicity and rendered posterior to itself. It is no longe~
an artist, a collaboration, a movement, a manifesto, a set of works, a ~~e
table, an evening's disruption, and what is more it (now) never was: now it is
the refracted image of an artist, a movement, etc.; it is a quotation (it was
always already a quotation), a battle of books: positions named "Hegel" and
"Adorno," "Greenberg" and "Burger," "Duchamp" and "Warhol" arranged
and rearranged like chesspieces in endless strategic balances and counter-
balances in an increasingly_straitened and homogeni~e? discursive space.de
Nevertheless even as discourse absorbs and anmhtlates th~ ava~t-gar
precisely by historicizing it-in either a positive or negative hght, it bare1Y
matters so long as the representation is circulated-something like the avant-
garde continues to be produced and defended. Ghostly apparitions keep
earing; as on Huelsenbeck's dada-elysian planet, the energy that once
apP d . . b.
am•mated the avant-gar
. e persists
. m an o hque . form, distorted by its very
1
. i'bility, enduring as mutation, no onger qmte there. What is left of what
viss once the avant-gar d e is . loc k e d m . a d ouble-bmd,
. a persistent and mutu-
wa . d . 0
ally exclusive exclusion a~ pe~sistence. n one hand theory-dea11Lis what
..dJ~_s.~red.,Jt.S
the avant:gwde ~lWfil'.'...S. ..Rmp.eLtclos. On the other hand and at the
~e-indeed o~~n m ___ the_ same text=:jWnaf clies is not the need o
itJesireto-produdnl.ew, acfvanced, adversarial work but the discursi_ve space 1
(i!!which t~~!jm.P..!!!§.~ ~~ ...P~!.1Pit~~~--~QQ ..P.~~1!1J!~.itself...!Q..2P.~1lte~omething
like advanced art always arises but within paradigms that no longer support
it. The death of the avant-garde is the recuperation of its very possibility; at
the same time possibility survives as a kind of dialectical necessity, but
without a surviving discourse of the possible. Hence the strange failure of
failure, the curious double triumph and stalemate of recuperation, the way its
arms clamp shut and are broken open even as they close, because they close,
as a condition of their closure.
-·-etheory..::aeatli of the ·avant-garcte''"iiius gives· rise· fc,a'"strange-de-- ~
stabilization of cultural discourse. Advanced art no longer conforms to the)
dialectical IllQ~ULba§ ___ Qgsy~g Jim!.s_uppqrt.~gJQLPY.~r~J1_µ_n~ ..r;~d_
yt:aefToe
persistence of what would once have been called avant-garde artists demon-
strates the simultaneous possibility, impossibility, necessity and incon-
ceivability of the avant-garde's antithetical project. Even as the avant-garde
dies into discourse, discourse lo'ses track of that alterity which the avant-
garde always embodied, some still-to-be-named function still at work along
the im/possibility of the margin. It is in this sense too that the death-theory
marks a theory-death. A. new_p~radig_I!l _IµU.§1.b~_g~vdqp_e.d ..fQue..cuperating
"other,s'.~..t.h~tgj~tp9sJ_~µm~u-~!yt9 th~ avant :g~_u:_qe. The construction of this
paradigm is ,und.e.r way throughout the economy.
styles
of recuperation
Period
Why are we subjected to so many histories of th

e avant-garde? I ·t
because, for reasons of temperament or the economics of ac d .· s I on1Y
few of us cannot help but look backward and c t ka em1~careers, a
. . h' k , anno eep silent about
whatever 1t 1s wet m we see? Are these histories onl · ·
d Y a v1canous double of
the avant-gar e? (So a great many artists would claim prete d' th h
.c. • • l · , n mg at t ey
stan d apar t 1rom _aparas1hca discourse on which they completely depend.) If
the avant-garde 1s truly dead, why all these excursions to th l d f h
? Th bl 'f e an o t e
sh ad e~. e no est I not the fullest answers would claim that the histories
are wntten to ma~e th~se bones speak-critically; but perhaps this is also in
a strang~ ~ay to identify th~ critical with death, to say that the avant-garde
had to diem order to speak its truth. Perhaps then we are mourners driven to
elegy by the corpses before us, but an elegy whose meaning we cannot grasp
because we too are dead and do not realize that we have indeed long since
fallen silent.
Is the avant-garde advanced or traditional? Revolutionary or reactionary?

Does it promote cultural progress or bring it to a close? Or both: are its
negations real but bound into the service of some other affirmation? To
engage in a study of the avant-garde is to be suspended between just such
irreconcilables as these, to be caught up in a discourse in which every
proposition immediately announces its negation. Within the discourse of the
avant-garde these contradictions cannot finally be resolved, for a certain
ambiguity is essential to the discourse's proper functioning. The avant-garde
is separate from and opposed to the main cultural body; the avant-garde is
the advancing salience of the main cultural body: these positions do not
simply cancel each other; rather they articulate a productive conflict which it
has been crucial not to settle. If the apparent convergence of these appar-
ently divergent positions, the way they seem simultaneously to support and
negate one another, gives rise to misapprehensions and distortions, the
confusion is strategic: it is one of the chief means by which avant-garde
discourse sustains itself.
The very term "avant-garde" is a cause and product of this confusion: th_e
fundamental contradictions of the avant-garde were there from the moment it
was named. It is customary to note-to do so is itself a strategy of c~n-
tainment-that ~itary'~_trJ.1.diJiQ__nalJe~ic.o.nJ.fw-:aYJlllt~arde is _an el;; ,t
.illJ.Jl~~e_ndable__s,g9c,~ _t~_atj;~-
..JJ.Q.Q1l;it ,,!ii_tl~9-~~-~!tl!-:~-Y~h
..mten._sJtY e
g~_~t[qy_s __itself ,QJl..the.eo.em.y~s,.lanw......s~rvm.s. ~:~:~~-~;
.~IJ.~--~n~g
__..... -Jl
~rmy_JJJ~tfollows_it. But in modern usage the enemy agamSt which culture
45
sends out its avant-garde is itself. The avant-garde is the vanguard of th

army it attacks. It is bound to a circular track, caught in a strange ideologica~
crossfire that on one hand represents nothing more than the normal degener-
ation of terminology into cliche, but on the other charts the avant-garde's
history exactly. What is more: the first, almost casual naming of the avant-
7
' garde by n!®.te~h:e.e.nt~Y-.J.J~~~a_n~so~p taked out a cultural s"iiace
e ened by romariticisiii-an·a left gapmg throughout the century, a space that

ould only be occupied,....b.}U:J.n
~ of ~<?.~Letfor~y__er(
art so subv.er§jye that ·t would chan e
A century later t~t space stil_lgapes..open, claimed
today by discourses ~rought together under phrases hke ~er. class,.filld
~JJmicity; the notion that this territory could be held by anything resembling
the historical avant-gardes is now treated as naive or dangerous. But if the
avant-garde's failure to change life and the world (Breton's conflation of the
revolutionary calls of Rimbaud and Marx) now looks inevitable, that inev-
itability must be grasped in the light of the particular discursive agencies to
which the avant-garde has consistently been bound, and to which even the
radical discourses of race, class, and gender might not be immune. If the
revolutionary dream of avant-garde art in the west could not have turned out
otherwise, it turned out this way by very specific means. In the naming of the
avant-garde we can already see _tj}~_QIQ_tQ~Y,.P.~ _o!,~_cl,!J!l:!raL~stemthat could
fil!_c:!U~Y. mode_.ofa.Jl~rity)p_tQ!..~- .IJI~S.1!!.!!~Y.._<?!E~.¥~§,
that could yoke
radical change to the very institutions and ideals it sought to supercede: a
system for instrumentalizing contradiction that has taken more than a cen-
tury to make itself plain.
The contradiction is played out both in relations between cultural move-
ments or zones-the avant-garde engaged in warfare with bourgeois values
and institutions while simultaneously employed in the bourgeois cultural
factory-and at the molecular level where the contradiction is introjected
into and projected from the avant-garde work itself, a work that is at one and
the same time at odds with tradition and able to satisfy traditional demands.
At every level the avant-garde must oppose the status _quoand still serve its
needs: to be avant-garde is to be torn apart and emptied by this dilemma.
Avant-garde discourse is the means by which the very possibility of cultural
difference can be captured and cancelled by such double binds. And one can
see this double-bondage at work in the very beginnings of the avant-garde-
or rather, to be more precise, in the way its history is told.
Poggioli's account of the early avant-garde might serve as one example of

the sort of historical narrative we are generally given to read. ~s-p@
suggestions by utopian socialists like Saint-Simon. and Olindes Rodrigues,
y /throughout much of the nineteenth century the term "avant-garde" was
rarely applied to advanced artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs; it was used
chiefly to identify the political left and usually its anarchist fringe. Poggioli
notes, for instance, that to Baudelaire the phrase "litterateurs d'avant-garde
meant only radical writers," and that Bakunin used the phrase for the title of
s
Period I 47
a "periodical of ~olitical agit~ti?n" which he pu~lished in Switzerland in
1878 (9). Accord1~g to Pogg10l~the term was v1rtually unheard outside
olitical circles unttl after the twm debacles of the Franco-Prussian War and
ihe Paris Commune.
In reality, only a few years after 1870, when the French spirit seemed to overcome,
without forgetting, the national and social crisis represented by the disaster of the
Prussian War, by the revolt and repression of the Commune, did the image of the
avant-garde again emerge to take on, along with the first [association with radical
politics] a different, secondary meaning. Only then did it begin to designate
separately the cultural-artistic avant-garde while still designating, in a wider and
more distinct context, the sociopolitical avant-garde. This was made possible
because for an instant the two avant-gardes appeared to march allied or united,
thus renewing the romantic precedent and the tradition established in the course
of the generation enclosed by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. (IO)
The availability in Paris of a political discourse rooted in anarchism and the

revolutionary upheavals of the mid-century provided an artistic bohemia
radicalized by the experience of the Commune with a language in which to
synthesize its utopian ideals with historical events. (Analogous events-
those of May 1968-stand at the close of the avant-garde's era.) The use of
the military-vanguard metaphor by the nineteenth-century radical left al-
ready bears within it the contradictions inherent in the notion of ,an ad\'.er- E--
~ading..tbe_.army it Qpppse_s.The cultural vanguard adopted the
metaphor and its contradictions without critical revaluation. (Poggioli goes
on to show that this "alliance of political and artistic radicalism ... survived
in France down to the first of the modern literary little magazines, signifi-
cantly entitled La Revue independante" in 1880; journals are the primary
and often the exclusive sites of ideological alignments like these.) After about
1880"what might be called the divorce.of the two~Vfll!t:-AAJ:Cks took place"
(11) and t e term became the virtualf.y_undisputed prqperty oCth~
vanguard. Poggioli exemplifies a £Q.ill...mon_.~~lief that the true alliance be-
tween the political and artistic vanguards lasted only a few years in the
remote past (in this case the decade following the Commune), followed by a
break and what Hadjinicolaou describes as futile efforts to reestablish this
mythic alliance up to the present day (Kirschner 82).
What we are given here is a tale of diplomatic relations between two
bohemian states, Aesthetika and Politika, with the former annexing and
establishing its dominion over the discursive territory of the avant-garde in
the 1870sand 1880s. The process by which the cultural avant-garde adopted
the name is part of a long history of recuperations and of advances in
recuperative technology. This process took a characteristically double form.
On. one hand it was the recuperation of bohemian and romantic ar:t by
sociopolitical forces; no longer merely marginal, aesthetes and decadents
~ad to occupy the barricades alongside anarchists and workers. On the other
and the eventual appropriation of the title and territory of the avant-garde
b
by the artistic wing of this social ~?.~-l!'!~~t. wa~~.~~~O~£~nied_b art's

attempt to reify political oppo~it~qn._~ContraBenjamin: the politicization of ,
ancf
aesthetics the ·aestheticization of pol~tics are not distinct movementsi~ I
opposition to _on~--~n~t_!ie~ ..Qf_H1~
but t.\1/~Ju_n~h0.!1§ .s~m.~-~~uper~~v~ s~
tem.s--·-·-····-·· .,
..___..We can observe this process in greater detail. It has become fashionable
to dismiss impressionism as at best proto-avant-garde, not yet revolutionary.
Impressionism is seen as the quintessential bourgeois artform, an art of vapid
middle-class pleasures, a "retinal" art (Duchamp) without the slightest crit-
ical challenge. But some historians of impressionism would disagree. In
Poggioli's version, "impressionism, for all its placidly serene inspiration and
the quiet integrity of its work, must be considered a genuinely avant-garde
movement, perhaps the first coherent, organic, and consciously avant-garde
movement in the history of modem art" (132). The support of other historians
is explicitly ideo-political. 1\vo major exhibitions of the 1980s may mark the
poles of this debate. In 1984's "A Day in the Country," the retinal and leisure-
time (the day spent in the country is obviously Sunday), the pretty-pictures
quotient of the movement, were privileged over any other content. To spend
an afternoon strolling through museum galleries gazing at these landscapes
was to mirror the strollers in the paintings, to experience something of their
reveries; a timeless moment of reflected pleasures embraced both paintings
and spectators. But in the 1986 exhibition, "The New Painting," the social
context of impressionism was emphasized. The show was organized to repre-
sent in miniature the eight original impressionist exhibitions of 1874-86, and
both the catalogue and the exhibition notes highlighted the social-historical
background and critical milieu. Presented in this manner the paintings were
difficult to dismiss as merely retinal. 1
One must keep in mind that impressionism arose in the years immediately
before and after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. Plans for an
1869 exhibition of the non-Salon painters who would later become known as
impressionists were in fact dropped because of the war (New Painting 17).
When an exhibition was finally mounted in 1874, the paintings were appar-
ently seen neither as vapidly middle-class nor as revolutionary in a strictly
formalist, aesthetic sense; they were seen precisely within the context of
social upheaval. Mallarme 's article of that year on Manet and the impres-
sionists connects their work with what Stephen Eisenman calls "working-
class vision an_dideology," a sort of Wordsworthian real visual language of
men. For Mallarme the new painting marked "the transition from the old
imaginative artist and dreamer to the energetic modem worker" (New Paint-
ing 33, 53). Emile Duranty's famous appraisal of the same year, in an article
whose title provided the name for the 1986 exhibition, makes this connection
even more explicitly and in a way that typifies the movement of avant-gardes.
Duranty argues that the painters' escape from the traditional studio and into
the plein air is a deliberate move out of the musty darkness of the past, the
Period / 49
. uxJ·eu,and into the real conditions of modern life. The celebr t d 1. h
vie . . . . h &: • • a e 1g t of
·mpressiomst picture 1s t ere1ore hardly Just retinal. it is a .
the l . . 'd . . , , s one 1s no
er permitted to ignore, 1 eo 1og1cal as well. This same shift was en t d .
IoOg . . . 't If th f ac e m
the 1g74 ex~1b1t10nI se : .e movement rom studio to banlieu and thereby
~ om artificial to natural hght paralleled a movement outward fro th
. . I enc Iosures of t he offic1al
ir ressive inst1tutiona · Salon into the more m e
0 Pp f th t' t S oczete
·, , anonyme. The Societe saw 0
pen,
·odependent
1
space o e ar 1s -run I•t
exhibitions qmte exp 1c1tY as w at t e I 970s would call an alternative-spaces
• 1· . I h h
movement in oppositio~ ~o the official exhibition system. Contemporary
critics agreed. Although 1t 1s often assumed that the impressionist movement
was universally reviled-according to the paradigm, great new art must be
despised-historians writing in the New Painting catalogue demonstrate that
whatever negative reviews the paintings at first received, there was none-
theless broad approval of the impressionists' work as a healthy alternative
to the largely moribund offerings and repressive management of the Salon.
For Duranty the aesthetic movement into open-air painting and the move-
ment into the open air of the unjuried Societe exhibitions converge in
what he describes, in a rather Baudelairean image, as a voyage to the
"Hesperides of art. "
Here a mode of opposition is also a mode of legitimation, indeed the
standard avant-garde mode of legitimation by opposition. As Paul Tucker
argues in the New Painting catalogue, the general critical and public approvaJ
of the early impressionist exhibitions-an approval doubtless only valorized
by attacks from certain conservative quarters-was also a sign of the con-
tinued vitality of French culture, a sign sorely needed in the atmosphere of
national humiliation resulting from military defeat, the destruction of Paris
and the strict terms of the armistice (93ff.).The public sphere itself tended to
see the Salon as anachronistic and turned to the antitraditionalism of the
Societe for proof that French culture still mattered; at the same time the more
extreme elements of impressionism could be taken as signs that the spirit of
the Commune had not been entirely crushed. And all of this was played out
within a developing gallery economy. The exhibitions were purposely staged
in bourgeois neighborhoods and attracted a primarily bourgeois clientele:
open-air painting circulated in the open air of free-market competition.
Impressionism bolstered the Paris art market of the 1870s and 1880s; as
Martha Ward observes in her article on the eighth exhibition, by· 1886 the
impressionists were no longer in competition only with the Salon but also
with a dispersed gallery system that their own enterprise had done much to
~oster.Aesthetic or formal developments were integrated with developments
10 the cultural marketplace. At first intended by many of the artists as a way
to promote reputations blocked by rejection at the Salon, and therefore as a

back-door into the Salon-in later years impressionists often exhibited at
both Salon and Societe-the impressionist exhibitions contributed to the
growthof a less-centralized gallery system more appropriate to the needs of
◄
modem capital. Both the radical rhetoric and the conservative denunciatio
that often surrounded the exhibitions only served to increase speculation ~s
both senses of the word, on the work of art. ' in
Impressionism thus epitomizes many of the key contradictions of the
historical avant-gardes: an art grounded in working-class or populist ideology
that nonetheless appeals largely to the bourgeoisie; a marginal style played
out in and for the centers of culture; ah alternative discourse that provides
the terms and mechanisms for the next stage of conventional discursive
exchange. These contradictions are not cause for dismissing impressionism
as a false avant-garde; on the contrary they mark the very dialectic of the
avant-garde. And in the case of impressionism they operate even in the
history of its name.
Stephen Eisenman tells this story in his New Painting article, "How the
Impressionists Got Their Name." According to most histories impressionism
was so called by journalists appropriating the title of a Monet painting,
Impression, soleil Levant, hung at the Societe exhibition at Nadar's old
studios in April 1874. "Louis Leroy was apparently the first to speak of a
school of 'Impressionists' in his now famous satirical dialogue published in
Le Charivari on 25 April" (51). The Societe adopted the name for its own
purposes by the time of the third exhibition in 1877. (One might note here the
avant-garde's ability to recuperate as well as to be recuperated: impres-
sionism lifted its name from an attack on it. Another instance of this sort of
translation followed Louis Vauxcelles's derogatory remark about Braque's
little cubes.) But between 1874 and 1877 the more common name among the
public was /es Intransigeants, a name taken from a group of contemporary
Spanish anarchists. That allusion worried at least one reviewer writing anon-
ymously in Moniteur universe/: "The intransigents in art holding hands with
the intransigents in politics, nothing could be more natural"--or further from
historical fact. If Les intransigeants represented for many contemporary
observers a real commensurability between radical political and radical
aesthetic revolts, the connection was mostly rhetorical. There was little if any
overtly partisan and certainly no anarchist content in. the pictures hung in
Nadar's studios, and among the painters only Pissarro could be considered
even remotely sympathetic to radical causes. The artists seem in fact to have
taken "deliberate steps to cultivate a zone of aesthetic autonomy that could
remain free from the political polarizations disfiguring the art of the previous
decades" by choosing for their name in the 1874 exhibition "the neutral
Societe anonyme" (Eisenman, New Painting 55).2
Eisenman's account suggests that early relations between the radical and
aesthetic avant-gardes identified by Poggioli were formulated at the discur-
sive level of reviewing before or even instead of any practical alliances; that
the "intransigent" painters remained uneasy about even this rhetorical asso-
ciation; and that in the end they adopted a name that would distance them
from anarchists and communards. But how finally should one assess the
relation between the aesthetic and the political in the movement's earliest
Period / 51
·ons? When Eisenman tries to determine "whether th
ifestati · . f; . . e new art,
rnan 1874and 1877, ~as m ac_t1mpress1omstor Intransigent th t .
betwee~ and individualist,or radical and democratic," he concl 'd athts,
affirrnauve d b th " u es at
''it wasneitheran o .
Theessenee of the new art was itsh insistentindeterminacy

.. • or, put another way,its
.
·ned position between t ose po 1ant1es Impressionist/IntransigentA
determl b d d . . . s
such,the newart must e u~ er~ltoo alsa s1hgn~l mstanceof modernistdialectics.
Ononehand,works_that pnman Yexp or~ t eir ownphysicaloriginsor constitu-
ents... are Intransigentrebukhestdoa society~~atseeks to tailorall cultureto its
interests. On the other an , the apoht1calself-regardof modernistart
owntes an environmentfavorableto the eventualindustrialappropriationof the
orks. The "free space"d'db
crea esire Y modermsm .. 1s also valuableto a culture
:dustry that relies for its vitalityupon the publicgenerationof newdesires.(55)
One could object ~o the notion _that either resistance to instrumentalist

aestheticsor formalistself-absorptionposes much of a rebuke,but for a short
timeimpressionismdoes seem to have representeda subversiveas wellas a
legitimatingforce. It was not_~olitical nai'v~teor s~m~sort of ?ad faith that
resultedin unresolvedopposition between 1mpress1omsm and mtransigence
in the contemporarycriticism; "even those critics who worked hardest to
claimimpressionismfor the moderate Republicwere strangelycompelledto
callattentionto its intransigentalter-ego"(55).Whatis crucial here, in other
words,is not some ultimatepoliticaltruth of the movement-a truth in which
impressionism's complicitywith the bourgeoismarketplacewouldproveit in
nowayintransigentbut the very model of accommodation;what is crucialis
preciselythe confusion of political and discursiveeffects that constellated
aroundthe movement.Hence the curious futilityof discriminatingtrue from
falserevoltsat the level of this discourse: discourse tends to valorize all
representationsof revolt, as representations, whether it denouncesthem or
advocatesthem or both. The conflationof these two names is more funda-
mentaland productivethan their incommensurability. Theirdifferencesfunc-
tiononlyin relation,only within the discursivefield.
Eisenman'sconclusionsounds rueful:
Theautonomyof 1874 became by 1882 [when Manet accepted the Legionof
Honor,an eventseen by many of his contemporariesas his artisticepitaph]the
~estheticism that affirmed... [the] status quo. The pattern of this transforma-
tion-from autonomyto affirmation-is by now a familiarpart of twentieth-
centuryart history,but its originsmay be traced to the burialof the intransigent
an<lthe birthof the impressionist.(55)
~at beginsin at least the potential for revolutionends in complicity:as

d~enmansays, a familiarstory. But what if we were to read this sad story
erently,by means of a sort of thin anamorphic overlay?The aesthetic
revolt.of the impressionists
· might be seen from the outset as a po1· · I
1t1ca
expedient ·
N0 th'mg could have been more fortuitous after the d'1sastrous
Commune than this supplement, this simulation of revolt on the surface f

canvas. To call the movement intransigent and then to jettison the name
a few years; to pose this tiny group of painters as a threat to the cultu e~
;ta
order, indeed to reaso~ itself, and th~n to show how easy it was to neutrali::
and even profit from this threat: nothmg could have been more advantageou
The history of impressionism might therefore mark, among all its oth:;
lessons and exempt~, a vital step toward th~t. do~ble mov~~ent of a pol-
iticization of aesthetics bound to an aesthet1c1zat1on of politics that is the
avant-garde. In this account the confusion of names described by Eisenman
would be above all strategic, not only as a form of publicity (a means of
devising for the painters a spectacular, heroic aura), not only because of the
contemporary need to create an ethical rationale for painting, but also in light
of a society badly wanting to develop ways to preempt any repetition of the
Commune. Nor would one need to invoke the specter of any totalitarianism
administered from above to provide a moral for this story: the recuperative
process is immanent, a process not only of manipulation but of self-manage-
ment. And a process that continues into the present, in the near simultaneity
of two exhibitions-"A Day in the Country" and "The New Painting"-two
ideologically counterposed but mutually legitimating exhibitions that con-
verge in a single discursive space and between them keep impressionist and
intransigent alive and dead.
A similar process animates Italian futurism. Conventional wisdom sees

the movement as fascist. Benjamin, for instance, denounces it in his repro-
duction essay, holding it up as an epitome of fascist apologetics and the
aestheticization of politics.3 Poggioli takes futurist relations with Mussolini's
party as an example of the generally pernicious influence of political organi-
zations on avant-garde art (94). Marianne W. Martin divides the movement
into pre- and post-war periods, the first characterized by better art and a
I political stance that, if wildly unorthodox, was at least not compromised by
J alliance with the fascist party (which in any case did not yet exist); the
second, post-1915 period "tainted" by this association-a taint that Martin
believes harmed the movement's artistic (i.e. proper) reputation even in
respect to its pre-war efforts. "[T]he fact that its most original phase had
virtually ended by 1915 has not prevented numerous ... writers from giving
biased accounts of the movement in terms of later events and regarding it
primarily as a political manifestation." These later events included Mari-
netti's support of Mussolini, his campaign for office on the fascist pa~y
ticket, and his exile with Mussolini and the remnants of the party at Salo 10
1944.4
There are, however, grounds for constructing a more complex account.
No one can deny the postwar connection between futurism and fascism, but
! I
for a while futurism also tried to forge an alliance with the left. The attem_pt
was rather one-sided-generally a matter of manifestos claiming futun5t
support for revolutionary causes-but on occasion the support was mutual,
Period / 53
. Antonio Gramsci's oddly persistent defense of Man·nett· d h'
as 10 . h t t b . I an is col-
leagues. Witness dt. es~ wdothe;ts _YGramsc1, the first from a letter to
kv who had 1sm1sse e 1utunsts as bourgeois bohem· h
Trots ,, t· •
1 1ans, t e second
froma famous ar 1c e.
Before the ·war, futurism was

·
very popular with the workers At th .
· h · e time of the
many futunst dem_onstrat~ons hmt e theaters of Italy's largest cities, the workers
defendedthe futunsts agamst t_e young people-semiaristocrats and bourgeois-
who attackeftdhthef":1· Toedreview Lacherba,whose circulation reached lO,ooo,
foundfour-fl s o its rea ers among t e workers.
The unheard-of, outrageous, colossal thing happened, divulgation of wh· h
. II h .
threatens to wipe out a t e prestige and credit of the CommunistInternational·
IC
in Moscow,during his speech to t~e Italian delegation... ComradeLunacharsk;

(Ministerof Culture) stated that m Italy there is only one intellectualrevolution-
ary and that he is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The philistines of the workers'
movementare completely scandalized, and it's clear that to the old list of insults:
/ "Bergsonian,voluntarist, pragmatist, spiritualist" will be added a new and blood-
ier one: Futurist! Marinettist!s
Tisdall and Bozzolla remind us that Gramsci wrote this article in 1921, when
Marinetti's involvement with the fascists was already common knowledge.
The language of the second passage is at least ironic and quite likely per-
verse-Lunacharsky's endorsement was probably no less outrageous to
Gramsci than to anyone else: if Marinetti was the only revolutionary intellec-
tual in Italy then what was Gramsci himself?-but Tisdall and Bozzolla argue
that Gramsci really was supporting the futurists' attack on the hegemony of
bourgeois culture. Gramsci could well have taken Lunacharsky's speech as a
proper rebuke to the Italian communists; in the context of Gramsci's own
work it might stand as a reminder that the party cannot devote all its energy
to action against the capitalist base and none to the superstructure-Mari-
netti 's and Gramsci's shared zone of interest. Nonetheless the support
evinced in this passage is hardly the rule. For the most part the party turned
its back on the futurists; it rarely recognized attacks on bourgeois art per se
as anything but bourgeois, and Marinetti's explicitly political positions-not
to mention his upper-class origin and bizarre public antics-seemed even
worse. As Giovanni Lista describes it, "Marinetti's political ideology had
been opposed by the whole of the Italian left: the anarchists and socialists
alike had stigmatized his nationalism, anarcho-individualism and war-
mongering on numerous occasions. " 6 This despite the fact that Marinetti
tried for years to form alliances with revolutionary trade unions, helped fund
the extremist review La Demolizione, gave talks at union centers in Naples
~nd Parma and at the socialist club in Milan, and published his own man-
ifest~s calling for joint action between "the cultural proletari~t and the
~?rkmg-class proletariat" against "clericalism, political racketeermg, moral-
izmg, academicism, pedantry, pacificism and mediocrity" (Lista i3). .
For Marinetti as for Breton after •him, the revolution of the proletariat
against the ruling class and the revolution of the imagination a .

· · an d en1·
ruling powers of tradition · 1·
1ghtenmen t rationa 1ty were interdgainst the
projects. The history of futunsm· th us anticipates
· · the reiterativeepende
f. nt
surrealism's own futiJe and debilitating attempts to establish a viable ~~~e of
with the French communist party. But the resistance met by Marinett~ ian~e
different ways by Breton came not on Iy tirom outs1'de the1r . movemeI and
t In
from inside as well. Lista points out that Boccioni, Severini, Balla Rn s but
.
and Carra-the chief pamters . d wit. h ear Iy tiutunsm-usual)y
associate . ' ussolo
t. ,
M · ·• a . . ned
to dissociate themselves from . annett_i s e~!orts _a~a poht1cal agitator.
8
1913 the painters had begun to sign Marmett1 s pohtical . manifestos, but even Y
then Boccioni feJt compelled to remark that he was uninterested in work'1
with anarchists a~d. sociali~ts ~~ca~se they "were unf~il_ingl~opposed to ;~
revolutionary artistic p~actices. (Lista 21), _Ifthe poht1cal ideology of the
official left was revolut10nary, its aesthetic ideology was worse than bou _
geois. The left's attacks on tiutunst. art " were a 1ways based on profoundly r
reactionary aesthetic positions: inspired by Tolstoy and Nordau, the so-
cialists rejected the avant-garde's formal experimentation, advocating a re-
turn to 'the pure sources of popular art,' i.e. didactic realism and the habitual
procession of working-class martyrs" (62). The movement had no better luck
gaining support from the other end of the ideological spectrum. In the 19208
the fascists tended to find Marinetti 's rhetoric and the experimentalism of the
artists too extreme, so that far from becoming the official art of fascist Italy
futurism was frustrated by increasing marginalization and censorship (58,
85). Hence at various points in its history futurism attempted rapprochement
with both the radical left and the radical right, whichever party it currently
believed likeliest to revolutionize Italy, and on either side it found itself
rebuffed as a kind of bourgeois aberration, either too revolutionary or not
nearly revolutionary enough, whichever charge was most convenient to keep
it at a safe distance. With virtually no ideological reorientation the movement
shifted toward the official left and the most reactionary right and was rejected
by each as too much of the other. This absurd situation is partly the result of
conditions endemic to Italy in the early twentieth century, when interna-
tionalist revolution and Italian nationalism did not seem to be mutually
exclusive projects. Mussolini himself began his political career as an anar-
chist translating Sorel and Kropotkin into Italian (Tisdall 202), and the
futurists were joined by trade-union anarchists in endorsing Mussolini's first
platform in 1919 (Lista 58). But if one can explain something of the futurist
paradox by referring to these special conditions, the ideological conflict we
witness in futurism is typical of the historical avant-gardes. In such a dis-
course words like "revolutionary" and "reactionary" are so unstable that
they seem futile. That futility might be the true telos of futurism.
It is tempting to try to resolve these contradictions to decide whether in
~oint of his~orical fact futurism or any other avant-gard~ was of the left or the
nght, ~arxist or_~ourgeois, revolutionary or fascist, politically aesthetic or
ae sth etically poht1caJ. But in point of fact a half-century of revisions and
Period / 55
·sions has produced no such resolution, and it is unli"kel th
terrev1 . • -11 1 Y at one
coun
• &, thcom1
·ng· Any determmatlon
. . w1 a ways be. contradicted p
• er h aps th en
is iorontradictions are not m error' perhaps thetr very persistence is vital to
the c . ·cal discourse of the avant-garde. And clearly the conf . f
histon . fl h . us1on o
the . , political alignments re ects t e expenence of the futun· t th
&, wnsm s L' k .. s s em-
1U
I the 192 os, as 1sta remar s, a long period of uncerta· t
selves.d nring which · t h e conso lid a t·10n of t h e &.1asc1st
• •
nse to power ledm Yrt• ·. ·
began, u . h' . ce am
. t to choose exile, anarc 1st stances, or even silence: only toward th
futunsthe s twenties d1'd severa l of t h ese artists. resign . themselves to a compr e_
end of . . ,, (6 )- . o
. with the fascist regime 7 a compromise after all largely in their
misenu'ndsand one that hardly solved for them the dilemma of occupying an
own dh .
avant-garde site . at one an t e same time . completely absorbed and com-
pletelymarginah_zedby state ~ower. Surely 1t '_Va~ the frustrating, exhausting
experienceof b~mg caught up m these co~trad1cttons as m~ch as any a priori
bourgeois allegiance that led to what Lista calls, not qmte accurately, the
"depoliticizing of the movement" (58). In the end futurism was eroded by
these ideological tides, but the indeterminacy of its alignments (fascist?
anarchist?-socialist? bourgeois? apolitical?) remains discourse-productive.
Discourse thrives on negations, revisions, resyntheses and resublimations:
more texts can be produced, more claims and counterclaims, more theses
and antitheses; vast researches and polemics sponsored by just such con-
fusionsas these. But not forever: this indeterminate movement of alignments
and misalignments, the uncertainty of both left and right about the proper
and plausible role of art, is acted out in the avant-garde until it is only theater,
onlya representation, and hence absorbed by the problematics of representa-
tion as such. If, as Lista claims, futurism's "primary aim [was] its own social
integration," its actual historical function, as it turned out, was to render that
integration at one and the same time infinitely articulable and impossible to
realize: integration through recuperation.
Another indeterminate set: avant-garde and modern. As before, the ques-

tion of the relation between these terms cannot simply be answered, for the
question is itself a mechanism of the ongoing project of foreclosing the
P~ss_ibilityof an adversary aesthetics and instrumentalizing opposition
withmthe economy. Every permutation of this question-is the avant-garde
the enemy or the agent of mainstream culture? a resistance to modernism or
one of its chief functions?-is an exercise in discursive control. But if one
rnust see the question in this light to do so does not release one from the
compulsionto ask it. '
1 th
an ~ ge~eral !he teril_l~."avant-gant~_:.An..L.rood.em"_are noJ~_pplied_wi
0 st
. nsi <wcy: they merge and blur absorb each other's sahences, con-
tammate · IIY -sal-
vaged a? d subvert one another, and' must therefore be contmua
. ' purified, refocused redefined redeployed-but never finally deter-
rnIned
appar · M0 dermsm · ' art in advance
is either ' of official culture or a cu Itu~aI
atus by means of which advanced art has been installed as official
56 I THE THEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
culture; the avant-garde is either a force that fuels this installation or a fi

·
of resistance ·
agamst 1t. · un der con t rac t t o th·ts ct·
· Arttsts orce
1scourse are cau h
between these conflicting notions, judged on one hand by the intensit/ ~
their opposition to mai~stream culture and on t_heo_the~by their conformi~
to its standards of quahty; on one h~nd b_y_ the tr reJectton of the cult of th~
masterpiece and on the other by thetr ab1hty to produce masterpieces. F
their part crit~cs and historians tend ei~her ~o conflate quasi-official a;~
quasi-adversanal art, only to find them d1vergmg on some other ground 0
try to separate them only to find them reconverging. Poggioli would see~
typify the critic for whom avant-garde and modern are "parallel concepts
ti
whose identity or coinciding" (15)-a peculiar and perhaps exemplary syntax
of the-same-and-not-the-same-must be asserted. On the other hand he is
forced to multiply his modernisms: he merges the avant-garde with a "mo-
dernity" of which he approves but separates it from a "modernism" that he
associates with an "external and vulgar" modern culture, a degenerated mass
modernity (216-20). (For Huyssen the avant-garde is distinguished from
modernism by its transgression of this high-low dichotomy.) Or again: Pog-
gioli denies the death of the avant-garde by claiming that it has completely
pervaded modern culture; from another angle this very assimilation would be
taken as a fatal sign. Since he locates the origin of the avant-garde "in the
relations between nineteenth-century political and artistic vanguards and
centers its twentieth-century phase on high-modernist artists like Eliot and
Klee, this history is also the history of a certain deradicalization which for
others- Burger for notable instance-sounds the avant-garde's death-knell.
The standard trajectory from the periphery to the center of canonical mod-
ernism can also be used to describe the careers of individual artists: the
avant-garde becomes a stridently political, rigorously negative, idealist or
nihilist (two versions of the same) phase out of which the serious artist
(Picasso, Eluard) must grow in order to produce mature (i.e. modernist)
work; in other accounts this maturation is only an excuse for selling out.
Whereas Russell would draw a careful line between the avant-gardism of
Tzara and Eliot (Russell 5-7), for Poggioli they belong to the same pantheon,
sharing such putatively avant-garde qualities as "agonism" or "alienation" in
ways that, for other critics, would blur crucial differences. These indeter-
minacies are played out everywhere in the discourse; every critic tries to
master them to his or her advantage and no one finally succeeds. When
Kramer links dada's antihistoricism with Eliot's revision of the idea of tradi-
tion, he could be said to have canceled all of dada's attempts to oppose the
high-modernist culture Eliot labored to promote or, conversely, to have
associated Eliot with a nihilism he would have rejected out of hand. Kramer's
apparent goal is both to underwrite an idea of the avant-garde as the guardian
of high modernism and to recuperate its extremist wing: if Eliot epitomizes
the avant-garde then the notion of the avant-garde as the best of official
culture is easier to argue; more radical manifestations will be merely aber-
rant. The negative impulses expressed by dada are tempered and put to
-
Period I 57
better use by more mainstream artists: in Joyce or Henry Moore we get not
only negation but also quality; ergo Joyce and Moore are more avant-garde
than Artaud or Heartfield. In response to this sort of recuperation other
critics attempt a counterrecuperation, a radical-revisionist history in which
only the most extreme or politicized vanguards, only those vanguards ex-
plicitly opposed to high modernism, can claim the name. And so on, and
on.... 7
It might be helpful to examine the deployment of avant-garde and modern
in more detail, in the work of two exemplary critics: Clement Greenberg and
Peter Burger. The dispute between them turns primarily on the issue of
(aesthefic -¥iforiomy.lIn his 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Greenberg
postulated ~n avant-garde that ~as cultur~~§J~~J.J2~~1J)Qp.~Jo.cconsen:ingjts
most fundamental values and styles agci~n_stth~..~!~!~g_Jiq~_Q{J2J~.fh, the
vulgari~~tion~~[~rl 'and the aestheticization~Q(polWc~ not only by fascism
but by stalinism and advanced capitalism as well.8 Through its intense
preoccupation with its own aesthetic resources, avant-garde art could sustain
itself as a kind of monkish last bastion of high cultural and therefore essential
human values in the encroaching feudal gloom of the mid-century. It is easy
today to mock this melodrama, even allowing for the fact that the essay was
written on the eve of the second World War, when the darkness seemed very
real; Greenberg's desperate romance of the avant-garde's battle against the
forces of vulgar art now seems itself a vulgarization of cultural history, a pulp
mythology of good vs. evil brought down to the level of stylistics, and at a
moment when a great deal of actual blood was about to be shed. But
Greenberg's essay is neither the first nor the last to seek aesthetic solutions
to political catastrophes, nor is he alone in evacuating both the aesthetic and
the political.
In Greenberg's account, as in Poggioli's, the nineteenth-century avant-
garde had no interest in politics until the development in Europe of "scien-
tific revolutionary thought" gave advanced artists critical tools by which to
separate themselves ideologically from the bourgeoisie. Greenberg believes
this separation led to autonomy from the social realm, for "once the avant-
garde had succeeded in 'detaching' itself from society, it proceeded to repudi-
ate revolutionary as well as bourgeois politics." Revolutionary engagement
was only a means to the end of total disengagement from "that welter of
ideological struggle which art and poetry find so unpropitious as soon as it
begins to involve those 'precious' axiomatic beliefs upon which culture has
thus far had to rest." Finally able to withdraw to a contemplative distance,
the avant-garde can pursue its true mission: to experiment with formal
methods in order "to find a path along which it would be possible to keep
culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence." The
~vant-garde must then devote itself to a "search for the b.s.o.lule" grounded
~nthe abandonment of subject matter (i.e., abstraction) and total immersion
m the creative process. Unfortunately only a hardy few possess the courage
and critical acuity necessary to mount such a project; moreover aesthetic
..
..I
I ◄
I 58 / TuE TuEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
self-absorption and th~ public ~ppetite for ~itsc~ le~d inevitably to the
economic marginalization of senous art, a situation m the face of Wh'
many advanced · ·
artists . 'd an d conc1·1·
beco!11.et1m1 1atory. H ence since "the
l<;h
avant-garde forms the only hvmg culture we now have, the survival in th
near future of culture in general is threatened" (8). e
Although many critics_believe th~t Greenb~r~ reduces th_eavant-garde to
a pure (modernist) form~l~sm,what 1s most s~nkmg about h1~account is not
its separation of the political and the aesthetic but the way 1t merges them
Greenberg's avant-garde is neither quite autonomous nor quite committed
but a curious and increasingly familiar sublation of each in the other. Here
,A' »olitical commitmenLdepen.ds_precisely on disengagement: in the face of
ideological confusion the artist can only fulfill his social responsibility by
withdrawal into a spiritual-aesthetic discipline. The only_p_oliticalarLwillbe
Qne that pw:ge..sJts.cl[of th.e___politi~l,
withdraws to an autonomy that remains
so embattled by social forces that it cannot truly be said to exist. Avant-garde
ideology becomes a tool for distancing oneself from ideological struggle:
surely a strange claim for an avowed socialist and doubtless one reason for
his essay's rather desperately ambiguous tone. In the end he implies that the
avant-garde is only a transitional phase, a survival mechanism for perilous
times-a lifeboat, a fallout shelter, a yeatsian tower; in the new socialist
culture to come this defensive and self-absorbed monastic order will no
longer be needed.
It is often claimed that with the end of the war and the success of abstract
expressionism-the progress from critical margin to economic mainstream of
the contemporary art Greenberg had especially championed-whatever po-
litical commitments his writing had once exercised evaporated and his for-
malism became even more pronounced. In a 1971 essay, "Counter-Avant-
Garde," the avant-garde's chief enemy is not the politics of mass culture but
an avant-gardism that is itself a kind of kitsch. The critical adversary here is
Duchamp, or at least an idea of Duchamp-one that might well have amused
him-as a vicious and cynical anarchist who wished. to destroy all art by
making it possible for anything to be art. This "anything," whether or not it
is Duchamp who opened the way for it, and whether or not it is even
conceivable, is a recurrent nightmare for Greenberg, Kramer, and a great
many others. If anything can be art (the logic goes) then nothing is; Green-
berg's whole project depends on his ability to distinguish high from low.
(Modernist fears of contamination by mass culture are nicely diagnosed by
Huyssen.) Avant-gardism (pop art looms largest in Greenberg's mind) thus
poses nearly as great a threat to genuine avant-garde culture as fascism and
stalinism did thirty years before. The reversion to arguments for good taste
and the desire to purge the avant-garde of its most radical ij.nd negative
elements seem to confirm what Serge Guilbaut describes as Greenberg's (and
abstract expressionism's) de-marxification ("New Adventures" 62). But to
trace this trajectory in Greenberg's critical career is also in effect to cast him
as a character in the historical drama he himself scripted in 1939: like the
►
Period I 59
avant-garde Greenberg_ merely transected the left, politicizing himself only
temporarily and only m order to purge himself of certain bourgeois ide-
ologies while en route t~ an aesthet_icabsolute. Greenberg's avant-garde was
always the avatar of h1gh-modem1st standards of quality. AU that really
changes between these essays is the character of the enemy: the threat to the
avant-garde now comes not from the kitsch of the ideological state appara-
tuses of both the east and the west but from within, from avant-kitsch as well.
Which might be even worse: avant-gardism erodes advanced art's very de-
fenses, its internal autonomic systems. In the end Greenberg's avant-garde
occupies an indefensible position, under attack from left and right, from
within and without, and from below as well. It is at war with ideological
forces with which Greenberg must constantly negotiate in order to maintain
his loosening grip on a fiction of autonomy, an autonomy that moreover was
never very radical but at most an attempt to collapse the aesthetic and the
ideological into a force for cultural conservatism. For Greenberg, in short,
avant-garde and modem are terms for mutual recuperation. Only by exclud-
ing the avant-garde's lowest and most deviant impulses can he maintain his
high-art goals; only by injecting modernism with avant-garde adversarial
energy can he keep his drive toward autonomy from disengaging itself
entirely from its historical rationale. The task of avant-garde discourse--
Greenberg's own project-is to hold these forces in balance, as if the avant-
garde and modernism were symbiotic. Even so Greenberg's pessimism sug-
gests that this symbiosis might be fatal. Like a transplanted organ the avant-
garde will only keep the body of modern culture alive for so long; eventually
the modernist body has to reject it. The ideality of their union cannot
withstand the force of its own inner contradictions .
.fgr_Poggioli avant-g_ai:.cje__and
moder!}J~reidentical;_nothing critical dis- •
tinguishes them. For Greenberg they constitute a peculiarly constricted
dialectic whereby modernism recuperates adversarial art for its own con-
servative purposes; in this account radical nineteenth-century ideology
served art not as a ground for revolutionary action but primarily as a bridge
toward aesthetic autonomy. But Burger reverses this current, proposes a kind
of return of the ideological repressed. Drawing on Marcuse's notion of the
affirmative character of bourgeois culture, he interrogates modem art's du-
plicity: on one hand protest against a reality that has no place for the
"forgotten truths" of human fulfillment that art expresses, on the other a
mere semblance of truth, and one that ultimately prohibits its fulfillment in
the social world. Aesthetic satisfaction is a false substitute for social praxis-
very much the sort of imaginary satisfaction implicit in Greenberg's theory;
as a result autonomous art only reinforces the reality against which it pro-
tests. Still following Marcuse, Burger argues that
the autonomy of art is a category of bourgeois society. It permits the description

of art's detachment from the context of practical life as a historical development-
that among the members of those classes which, at least at times, are free from
the pressures of the need for survival, a sensuousness could evolve that w
part of any means-end relationships. Here we find the moment of truth in thas ~ft
of the autonomous work of ~- What this c~tegory ca?not lay hold of is tha~thi~
detachment o~ _art from practical _contexts 1s a hzstoncal process, i.e., that it is
socially cond1t1oned. A~d here li~s the truth of the category, the element of
distortion that charactenzes every ideology.... The category "autonomy" do
not permit the understanding of its referent as one that developed historically. r::s
relative dissociation of the work of art from the praxis of life in bourgeois socie;
thus becomes transformed into the (erroneous) idea that the work of art is totally
independent of society. In the strict meaning of the term, "autonomy" is thus an
ideological category that joins an element of truth (the apartness of art from the
praxis of life) and an element of untruth (the hypostatization of this fact, which is
a result of historical development as the "essence" of art). (46)
The very experience of autonomous art's political impotence, its inability to

realize its revolutionary ambitions, finally radicalizes the avant-garde. Art
now turns its critique against itself, exposing its complicity with the bour-
geois social sphere it pretended to oppose and the institutions that mandate
and maintain it.
The European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of

art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but
art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men. When the
avant-gardistes demand that art become practical once again, they do not mean
that the contents of works of art should be socially significant. The demand is not
raised at the level of individual works. Rather, it directs itself to the way art
functions in society, a process that does as much to determine the effect that
works have as their particular content. (49)
If for Greenberg political awareness is a prelude to a defensive and finally

indefensible autonomy, for Burger autonomy is only a prelude to its critique.
Art no longer merely reflects its general dissatisfaction with social conditions
and projects imaginary solutions; it begins to address the material conditions
of this very reflection, to see reflection as a sociohistorical problem. The
category of autonomy is not eliminated but grasped historically.
The totality of the developmental process of art becomes clear only in the stage of
self-criticism. Only after art has in fact wholly detached itself from everything that
is the praxis of life can two things be seen to make up the development of art in
bourgeois society: the progressive detachment of art from real life contexts, and
the correlative crystallization of a distinctive sphere of experience, i.e., the
aesthetic. (22-23)
The avant-garde investigates the historicity of an aesthetic mode that forever

tries to conceal its historical stake. This is also to say that the avant-garde can
only really begin when it distinguishes itself critically from high modernism;
only at that moment can the institutionality of art, long veiled by the auton-
omy myth, be attacked. By separating the avant-garde from modernism and
-
Period I 61
returning them both to their proper historical frameworks, Bilrger hopes to

restore the avant-garde's critical force.
There is no denying that the critique Bilrger identifies was indeed a
function of dada and surrealism, nor that it has often been obscured by
histories that emphasize the aesthetic or merge the avant-garde with modern-
ism. But what Burger gives with one hand he takes away with the other: in a
curious way his historical avant-gardes only oppose the institution of art in
history. Releasing the critical force of the avant-garde is first of all a way to
refocus art history. This might be a useful project but it renders the historical
avant-gardes entirely historical: not finished and complete, precisely, but
circumscribed by historical narrativity; their critical force can now be repre-
sented only in retrospect. They are still "assigned to confinement in an ideal
sphere" (50) but now that ideal sphere is not some timeless present of
aesthetic autonomy; it is the past of the avant-garde as such. It will of course
be argued that such critical-historical reformulations are not just retrospec-
tive, that they are brought to bear dialectically, as points of departure, for
current practice. But in practice this dialectic serves above all to legitimate
historicist discourse itself. In effect the avant-garde is no longer an attack by
artists on the institution of art. It is a representation of an attack, something
always only retold, not in art but in theory. Now theory alone is qualified to
carry out the attack on the institution of art.
But not on the institution of theory? Whatever lessons Burger learns from
the avant-garde critique of autonomy are not applied at the level of his own
project. He both opens and closes a critical opportunity, supplements and
eclipses the historical movements he endorses and whose termination he
writes at every level of his text. Far from liberating the force of the historical
avant-gardes, he digs it up only to bury it again in discourse. As En-
zensberger reflects, "the law of increasing reflection is inexorable" ("Ap-
orias" 40). (It is a law from which no one should assume that the present
essay claims the slightest exemption.) The reflective capacity that Adorno
assigned to advanced art as its real and perhaps sole critical power is
mirrored in Burger's own reflection on the passing of any possibility for
"reintegrating" art with the "life praxis of men," a possibility that his
discourse always already refracts, diffuses, and obliterates even as it is
inscribed.
For in the end Burger's theory too is a death-theory. In his account too
the past is a failure and the present cannot measure up to it. The historical
avant-gardes are finished; they did not destroy bourgeois cultural institu-
tions; indeed the attack on the institution of art eventually became art itself:
[T]he neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus negates

genuinely avant-garde intentions. This is true independently of the consciousness
artists have of their activity, a consciousness that may perfectly well be avant-
gardiste. It is the status of their products, not the consciousness artists have of
their activity, that defines the social effect of works. Neo-avant-gardiste art is
autonomous art in the full sense of the term, which means that it negates the
avant-gardiste intention of returning to the praxis of life. And the efforts to sublat
art become artistic manifestations that, despite their producers' intentions, tak:
on the character of works. (58)
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh objects to this characterization, stating that it

"shows no awareness whatever of those art practices of the late 1960sand
early 1970s ... that radically opposed the 'institutionalization of the avant-
garde as art,' for example, the work of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren
and Hans Haacke. "9 It is common enough for a critical investment in one'
movement or generation of artists to blind a critic to the validity of suc-
cessive movements, but Burger's analysis points to something more sinister
at work in cultural politics. His probable response to Buchloh may be elicited
from the following: "Although the neo-avant-gardes proclaim the same goals
as the representatives of the historic avant-garde movements to some extent,
the demand that art can be reintegrated in the praxis of life within existing
society can no longer be seriously made after the failure of avant-gardiste
intentions" (109, n.4). Even if Burger were aware of Broodthaers, Buren, and
Haacke, it would make no difference. The good intentions and individual
accomplishments of neo-avant-garde artists will not protect their work from
being institutional. For the attack on the institution of art made the attack
itself a work of art susceptible to commodification, circulation, exchange; the
attack on the institution of art became an institutional mode. "Since now the
protest of the historical avant-garde against art as institution is accepted as
art, the gesture of protest of the neo-avant-garde becomes inauthentic. Hav-
ing been shown to be irredeemable, the claim to protest can no longer be
maintained" (53). But if avant-garde artists cannot resist recuperation, if their
negation of art becomes art whether they wish it to be or not, if their protest
inevitably turns into a productive mode of the very institution it opposes,
why would the case be any different for theory? Why would the critical
reflection of the attack be any less recuperable than an attack in art? Does
not criticism too become an arena for false satisfactions? Does not the
critique of autonomy finally constitute yet another· pseudo-autonomous
zone? ·
Burger is often invoked by critics who dismiss autonomy altogether and
assert art's purely social character. Recall however that Burger himself never
exactly rejects autonomy: for him it is its revolutionary efficacy that must be
challenged, not its historical existence. That is what makes his method
historical rather than idealist. But many of his supporters are idealists: they
think that art and art-theory must eradicate the category of autonomy en-
tirely. Nothing could be further from Burger's argument. Even if autonomy is
false it still functions. In fact it is a precondition of critical art. The question
for Burger is not whether it exists but whether its critique can separate from
it. His actual practice suggests that it cannot, that the critical force of the
avant-garde is finally recuperated-not by the Aesthetic, certainly, but by a
strangely autonomic discursive economy. Autonomy persists through its
Period I 63
very critique: the attack on the notion_~f total autonomy, of immunity to all
ocial influences, produces a sort of cntical suspension within the social, the
~storical, the political. _Whi~eBurger's intention is to salvage what is left of
the criticality of the h1stoncal avant-gardes by reflecting it in discourse,
discourse has other purposes. Whether or not the historian intends it, histo-
ries are written in order to arrive at an end beyond which there is only
discourse, only reflection: that is the affirmative character of theory. As
Enzensberger laments: everything winds up for sale in the consciousness
industry. In this case a false dialectic employs the avant-garde to imagine a
false synthesis of art and life, only in order to abandon it for the false
satisfactions of criticism. In the end the historical avant-garde is granted but
two purposes: to generate new analytical categories for art history and to
promote a new level of reification. And in either case it dies.
Only the historical avant-gardes can stake any claim to critical viability
but their chapter is closed; now we are witness to mere semblances of
opposition, the flimsiest alibis for business as usual or no alibi at all. But
perhaps one can apply Burger's historical logic to his own vision of history.
Just as the shift around 1916from autonomous art to anti-art was primarily a
retrospective exposure of the hitherto invisible institutionality of art, so the
neo-avant-garde's putative institutionalization of avant-garde art might not be
a change in substance so much as in perspective: the avant-garde's perpetual
institutionality has simply manifested itself at a later date. The postmodern,
neo-avant-garde period would thus be marked by the realization-not always
fully articulated-of a certain truth about the historical avant-gardes to
which they had to remain blind in order to function. As the historical avant-
gardes negated, in theory, the aesthetic autonomy of art, so the current death-
era of the avant-garde exposes the complicity underlying the critical auton-
omy of advanced art. Hence in our own cultural histories the avant-garde
might come to serve chiefly as a means of illuminating in retrospect the fact
that the historical project of abolishing the bourgeois institution of art was
itself nothing more than a phase of that institution's development, and specifi-
cally its means of recuperating, virtually in advance, the whole force of anti-
art. Perhaps of the anti- as such.
Despite Burger's attempt to discriminate avant-garde and modern, his

project operates within a discursive economy in which it is the dialectical
collusion and often confusion of terms like these that has always taken
precedence, serving at one and the same time to rejuvenate accommodated
art and to recuperate critical art. As in Eisenman's "insistent indeterminacy"
of intransigent and impressionist, an insistent indeterminacy regulates avant-
garde and modern, autonomous and engaged. The ongoing refinement of
these categories tends at once to sustain and destabilize cultural alignments,
and this process is discourse-productive. The obscure seam where avant-
garde and modern meet is a site of constant struggle and development, where
the avant-garde recruits the mediators it needs to maintain its dialectical
◄
links with the so-called public sphere; where modernism usurps avant-gad
negation in order to mamtam · progress-mo dies; where the whole mechre
· · its
ics of cultural advance can be. ~ontinu~y invented and reified. Far
trying to establish some defirutive pos1tlon on how the avant-garde and
fr~:
modernism are historically situated, one must recognize the necessaril
unresolved and unr~sol~ble char~ter of the _avan~-garde'_s relationship t~
mainstream moderrusm, mdeed to its own vanous 1deological formulations
as well; and one must ascertain in one's own project the force of this systemic
process of productive indetermination which overrides the truth or falsity of
any position. The death of the avant-garde is precisely this recognition that
the difference between avant-garde and modem, between opposition and
accommodation, is a matter of indifference.
Histories keep this death alive. Hence one might observe that Burger's
insistent historicism fails to consider in the avant-garde a certain resistance
to history as such. Not just a resistance to tradition, not the timeless present
of some modernist autonomy, and certainly not any posthistorical utopia: the
avant-garde's war against the institution of art involves an attack on those
very encystations of power-knowledge, those inevitably reductive historical
narratives in which it perpetually finds itself originating in error and on its
way to termination. Dada in particular demonstrates an antihistorical energy
that is difficult to confine within any historical account. But in the histories
the avant-garde's most anarchic impulses are restricted to closed sets, oscil-
late within narrowly indeterminate spaces. In every case history is a matter of
'pataphysical governance. What Biirger expresses is not simply a necessary
historicization but an equally necessary, discourse-mandated overhistoriciz-
ing of the avant-garde's counterhistorical force, a force pitched against its
conscription by this or that masterplot. But what if some avant-garde was an
alert student rather than a mere victim of these histories at whose con-
clusions it always finds itself deceased? Might it not be expected, even in the
most behaviorist of paradigms, to learn at least a few ways to avoid engage-
ments that cast it in so suicidal a role? What if some avant-garde were able to
refocus its counterhistoricism, not surely to escape from history, but to
conceal itself within it, to sink from sight? What if for once an avant-garde
refused to repeat these futile patterns of complicity and mutated in such a
way that its most fundamental paradigms of autonomy and engagement were
altered?
Let me propose then, only as a sort of preliminary sketch, as a prelude to
later speculations and perhaps not altogether seriously, yet another frac-
tionally alternative history of the avant-garde. This little chronicle falls into
five periods:
1. Nouveau esprit: the widely-documented epoch of curiosity, experi-
ment, play, cultural optimism. A period in which the term "avant-garde"
made the most literal sense, when art movements really conceived of them-
selves as the saliences of progress-models of cultural history. Utopian, en
avant the New World of electronics, telecommunications, etc. The impres-
Period I 65
sionist "science:• of percept ionMan~lig?t; the futurist technolatry of speed.
A Uinaire,cubism, the ear 1y armett1. ...
p~. Anti-art: the destructive frenz~ of Jarry and futu~ism translated into
h (anti-)programs of dada and certam modes of surreahsm. The heroic era
t / Burger's historical avant-gardes: experimental, collaborative, disin-
o rative, posed against bourgeois institutions, putatively ideological,
::s-)allied with organized political opposition, at times idealistic and at
(mes nihilistic (the same thmg). Tzara, Hausmann, Heartfield, Grosz, Du-
1hamp,Picabia, Breton, Aragon, Ernst, Peret. ...
c One should also take care to allow for anachronisms; indeed the impor-
tance of the anachronism in histories of the avant-garde can hardly be
overestimated. These first two periods correspond more or less to familiar
chronological boundaries-say roughly 1870-1916 and 1916-1939-but they
also represent currents that cannot be contained by any chronological map-
ping. Jarry, for instance, embodied both of these phases and anticipated
several later tendencies. Elements of each phase tum up in every other:
patterns of repetition and intersublation that tend to expand and accelerate in
later eras.
We are thus far on well-mapped terrain. But here the route might become
a bit less familiar:
3. Consolidation and recuperation of the mode of anti-art. The attack on
the institution of art becomes (or is revealed as) thoroughly institutional, an
intramural dialectic. The diffusion of shock and its evacuation as a critical
standard; the so-called Americanization of the avant-garde (cf. Guilbaut).
The period of "acceptance" of high-modernist art, when "avant-gardism
[avant-modernism?] has become the second nature of all art" (Poggioli 230).
For what is left of the historical avant-gardes, however, a much more compli-
cated set of adjustments: above, increasing accommodation, increasing con-
formity to the discursive and market economy, to the model, to the code;
below,increasing decategorization, ideological evacuation, suspension of the
code. The continuous mutual interference of these two levels is the ground of
avant-garde discourse at this stage.
4. The supersaturation and therefore the crisis of recuperation. The death
of the avant-garde, played out as the logically inevitable (but never total)
collapse of a dialectic so overburdened by the labor of recuperating too many
lines of opposition around too few centers that its discursive machinery
begins to break down. A sort of white economy in which traditional dif-
~erencesare erased. Later this will be described as a delegitimation crisis: the
mabilityof the dialectic, on certain key sites, to generate sufficient negation
to sustain itself. One manifestation of the death of the avant-garde. Another:
5. Atomization, decentering, and hence both a reorganization effort and a
fewstrange disappearances. In the face of the inevitability of recuperation the
avant-garde abandons its traditional dialectic and rhetoric and seeks other
~odes. Dispersion of arts districts, proliferation of undergrounds, of mar-
gms, of microdiscourses, carried out sometimes in public but sometimes too
►
as a marginalization without display. The visible surface (we will be forced to

imagine others) of this stage is called postmodernism and defined as pluralist
decentered, eclectic, deconstructive [sic], self-consciously ideological, non~
or hypersubjective (the same thing), and largely indifferent to charges that it
has abandoned the tasks historically assigned to the avant-garde. Around this
postmodemism: an economy frantically struggling to retool discursive tech-
nology in order to recuperate it. Beneath it: an unprecedented refusal.
The last three stages are not fixed spans of time but simultaneous,
overlapping features of the post-1945 period, localizable to some extent but
more fundamentally describing expanding, recurring, and interfering spirals.
These curves converge in and spin out from every inscription of the death of
the avant-garde.
.
Economies
Like so much else in history the death of the avant-garde never took place;
nonetheless this nonevent really occurred and continues to cast a shadow
over its heirs. It occurred because it must have occurred, because a certain
logic demanded it. The fact that any current practice might seem to contra-
dict it has not prevented it from reproducing itself in discourse and art. The
death of the avant-garde is the reflection and reproduction of the theoretical
exhaustion of autonomy, progress, opposition, innovation. Any local per-
sistence of these modes does not disprove the death; for the most part it
merely indicates zones of ongoing adjustment, places where the evidence has
yet to conform to the model. (Some do not yet realize they are dead; others
have learned to play dead-as good as dead as far as theory is concerned; still
others are both dead and alive.) But the fact that the death of the avant-garde
is not fully reflected in every cultural practice, that something of the avant-
garde persists, also indicates the opening-without the slightest privilege-
of a breach between the mechanisms of cultural description and various
features of cultural practice, a breach marked by an increase in theoretical
activity and productive exchanges between art and theory. What one must
grasp here is both the totalizing effect of theory and its inability to totalize its
totality: the death of the avant-garde is real, absolute, demonstrable (logic
can be asserted, evidence marshaled) but it cannot be uniformly applied, it
cannot make itself conclusive. As if to say: the death of the avant-garde is
true but its truth is not completely true.
Nowhere is this strange situation more apparent than in the condition of
the new, that accelerating treadmill of receding futures, that inflated dis-
course of inflation (cf. Newman's Post-Modern Aura), that public wheel on
which the avant-garde is broken and displayed to the gleeful ridicule of nearly
every critical party; nowhere can we better witness the manner in which art
binds itself to a discourse that both sustains and cancels it in a continuous
cycle of reflections. The terms and standards change but the figure of the new
is central to every commentary, every obituary; indeed the death of the
avant-garde is often cast as the direct result of the death of the new. Adorno:
"The new is intimately related to death." 1 Sometimes they are identical.
By now the question of novelty is so old that it might seem pointless to
pose it again (precisely the point), but its deeply symptomatic status in the
fatal ~areer of the avant-garde requires at least a cursory review. Not that
anythmg new can be added to this discourse-not even this: that it has been
one_of ~he main projects of avant-garde discourse to destroy the new; to
ProJect it into the future only the better to bury it in the past; to grind it up in
67
b
◄
the machinery of history; to gear it into a commodity aesthetic that n

tralizes all its challenges; never to eli~inate it ?~t to_empt~ it, to render it neu~i
and void, to erase it completely and still keep 1t m view. I_t1sa death achieved
by pursuing two arguments, two modes of representation: that the new is
bound into the very traditions and institutions it is designed to supercede and
that the logic of the new is self-consuming.
Originally, one might say-that is, wherever one marks the beginning of
modernism-the new was already traditional; by the time Swift's modem and
ancient books did battle in St. James's Library the problematic of the new
had long since been established. The new is precisely a historical condition.
There can be no tradition without constant influxes of new work. But in the
modem era the status of newness is elevated and newness becomes a value in
itself: the New. Novelty is no longer subordinated to other values (beauty,
sublimity, verisimilitude), no longer a byproduct of aesthetic development:
with the advent of modernism, it would appear, newness becomes a primary
value.
But not a strictly aesthetic one. In the early modem era a variety of
utopian dreams (capitalist, technocratic, marxist) were conflated in the rhet-
oric surrounding the work of art; to produce new art was to participate in a
vast renewal of the human condition. Historians tell us that the optimism of
the belle epoque converged with ideas of scientific progress (the spirit of the
1889 Paris Exposition) and often with anarchist and socialist ideology. In the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when electric lights, radios,
and aeroplanes appeared to signal the transformation of western civilization,
the saint-simonian ideal of an alliance of avant-gardes looked eminently
realizable. Innovation was no longer merely a mode of dialectical relations
within tradition; it became a matter of rejecting tradition per se. One had
only to cast off the alexandrine and write poems imitating the experience of
driving in motorcars to participate in the coming revolution. This is the realm
of futurist rhetoric where, as Greenberg describes it, "innovation and advan-
cedness began to look more and more like given, categorical means to artistic
significance apart from the question of aesthetic quality" ("Counter-Avant-
Garde" 16). What is of course crucial here is not only the growing power of
the idea of novelty but that, historically, it was conscripted by and deployed in
a certain economy, in the culture of capitalism. Capitalism depends upon its
ability to replace old commodities with new ones, to generate greater and
greater demand for more and more products. Novelty itself would therefore
seem to be a properly bourgeois value; hence to be avant-garde is already to
be bourgeois precisely by one's commitment to innovation.2 In the early
avant-gardes aesthetic development is thus grounded in both revolutionary
ideology and capitalist economics. Modernist caJJsfor innovation can be read
as threats to cultural order on one Jevel and as attempts to consolidate that
order on another. This double~bind-the logic of the intransigent-impres-
sionist dyad-is, as we have seen, characteristic of the avant-garde. Its
apparent incoherence can also be used to discredit the avant-garde al-
p
Economies / 69
together. The equati~n of new a_rtand new world is traced back to capitalism
and hence filed as evidence agamst any new art. What is more: the historical
avant-gardes ca~ now be seen-t?ey ar~ often seen thus in the present
essay-as agencies by means of which capital adapted the idea of the new for
its own ends: the by-now-stereotypical figure of the avant-garde as a research
and development bureau of the capitalist factory, a site where the new is both
instrumentaljzed and evacuated.
Hence relations between avant-garde and capitalist impulses toward inno-
vation are totalized in cultural discourse. This poses severe problems for new
art. In the first place novelty as such is reduced to a term of marketing;
anything radically new in the avant-garde project is compromised the mo-
ment innovation reveals its stake in capitalist social production. The
fetishization of novelty now demands that work for sale go to enormous
lengths to justify any claim to critical distance, and it cannot finally defend
itselfagainst charges of complicity. Se.cond: the logic of the new gears art
into the commodity economy's apparatus of what is called planned or built-in
obsolescence, the way products are made to break down faster than neces-
sary in order to force the consumer to buy more, and more often. Or worse:
fashion, the rapid succession of styles, speeds up the cycle of production and
consumption until the commodity is rendered obsolete whether or not it has
any residual value. Production and obsolescence become arcs of a tighter
and tighter cycle. The demand for innovation escalates even as the credibility
of innovation disappears. Third: while the ideology of innovation, with its
accelerated succession of styles and schools, undermines art's traditional
need to represent, in some fashion, the eternal, the immutable, etc., these
ideals remain important for validating the work. On one hand innovation is
essential to the very notion of culture, on the other innovation as such is
deeply implicated in the systems and values that culture must try to super-
cede. The new becomes both a necessity and a fatal flaw.
The same paradoxical logic operates in Burger's debate with Adorno. For
Adorno the new represented in the (modernist) avant-garde is first of all a
break with tradition, but modernism also employs mechanisms of novelty
endemic to capitalism.
The phenomenon of novelty is a historical product. In its original economic

setting, novelty is that characteristic of consumer goods through which they are
supposed to set themselves off from the self-same aggregate supply, stimulating
consumer decisions subject to the needs of capital. As soon as capital does not
expand, or, in the language of circulation, as soon as capital stops offering
something new, it is going to lose ground in the competitive struggle. Art has
appropriated this economic category. The new in art is the aesthetic counterpart
to the expanding reproduction of capital in society. Both hold out the promise of
undiminished plenitude. (Aesthetic Theory 31)
In what Adorno would consider genuine avant-garde art (Kafka, Schoenberg)

these categories are reflected critically in a paradoxical mode of resistance to
th e very categories that control the work. Art embodies the alienation
symbolized in consumer goods but also sets itself apart from them through a
kind of protest. It embraces the new precisely in order to dramatize its crisis.
Burger disagrees. In his view, as we have seen, the avant-garde break with
tradition is based solely on an attack on the institution of art, and the new is
the least significant category of this attack:
in the commodity society, the category of the new is not a substantive but merely
an apparent one. For far from referring to the nature of the commodities, it is their
artificially imposed appearance that is involved here. (What is new about the
commodities is their packaging.) (61)
Aesthetic novelty remains locked into commodity aesthetics; it never

achieves any critical distance. The category of newness is too broad, vague,
insufficiently historicized, and compromised by capital to serve as a proper
term in avant-garde discourse.
Burger tries to separate the avant-garde from one of its most traditional
terms and thereby to recuperate its critical force. Since the category of the
new always binds the avant-garde to commodity aesthetics, a critical avant-
garde must be protected from this category. But Burger's strategy too repre-
sents a "failure to historicize accurately the category of the new." For the
new is so deeply imbedded in avant-garde discourse that one can only will it
away at the level of a theory that at least in this respect is far removed from
the sort of realkulturpolitik Burger tries to practice. Adorno is after all quite
right to locate the logic of the new, for better or worse, at the heart of the
avant-garde work, simply because it is there, written there by history, by
nearly every manifesto, every review, every theoretical reflection before
Burger. The new is ineradicable from the discursive economy within which
the avant-garde has always operated. The debate between Adorno and Burger
further epitomizes the double-binding of the avant-garde: each analysis tries
to recuperate it for a critique that undermines it. And each privileges some
avant-garde quality at the expense of another that would demonstrate the
avant-garde's historical enmity with itself. The history of the avant-garde is
unthinkable without such couples, one proffering the new and the other
taking it away, one inscribing it and the other erasing it. The avant-garde is
bound to both commodity aesthetics and its supercession, and the very
means by which it attempts this supercession only drives it deeper into the
logic of the commodity. (
We must also set the problf atic of the new and its relation to the death
of the ava_nt-gardewit_hinthe c text of another crisis: the myth-discourse of
progress itself. The nmeteenth century avant-garde was committed to a no-
tion of social and cultural progress that has virtuaJJy reversed its value. Today
a critical discourse of the social and environmental effects of unlimited
industr~al growth ca~ts all grpwt~ ~?dels into question. Imagery of pioneers
expandmg the frontiers of lhe c1v1hzed world and of scientific researchers
expanding the limits of knowledge are supplanted by the image of cancers
spreading through the social as well as the biological organism. Optimism
Economies I 71
b0 ut progress has degenerated; now one must concern oneself with the
a liferation of those lesions, tumors, congenital defects, and terminal states
~;°toxic saturatio? that are t~e byproducts of pro~ress. Hence cultural
. ourse shows signs of revertmg to an almost medieval distrust of muta-
disc · tior e d emc
· pe rfiection
· t h an as a terrified
bilitY,but less as nosta 1gia · premoni-
f n that every new advance marks yet another step toward annihilation.
~~ubtless the rhetoric of the new in which the avant-garde is so deeply
implicated has also been polluted by this progress.
These quasi-political analyses of .!_!leeconomy of the new are often sub-

sumed by another in which the avant-garde's death is the end result of a self-
consuming logic. The logic proceeds in this manner: if the new was once an
index of cultural progress, the accelerating cycle of advance and recupera-
tion finally exhausts innovation as such. The overproduction and overcon-
sumption of new works, new styles, and new movements generates an ever
more frenzied search for the next style, the next wave, for whatever has not
yet been recuperated. Every other aesthetic or moral concern is reduced to
this scramble for a moment of novelty: the search for a new world gives way
to the rapid development of new fashions, then fashion usurps the rhetoric of
utopia. The new empties every standard of aesthetic quality or value it once
served and is itself thereby emptied. The process is familiar, but what we
witness here is not just the fact that the new is commercialized: it is the
accelerating pace of its recuperation, the speed at which the category of
newness as such is evacuated. The new is destroyed by its own velocity.
Rosenberg: "As the information media have grown more sophisticated re-
garding the role of culture in public life, the period required for 'fashionabiliz-
ing' an avant-garde has become shorter and shorter, until today the duration
of a vanguard qua vanguard is about equal to the length of time it takes for it
to form itself, that is, an interval approaching zero. "J The alchemy that Les
Levine identified as lead-time dwindles to nothing. The vanguard finds itself
in the absurd position of trying to catch up to the army it was supposed to be
leading, only to discover again and again that nothing it produces is as
surrealistic-now a vague advertising term, a mere synonym for strange-
ness-as any mass-media representation of political or interpersonal reality.
(This example is itself a stock discursive commodity.) Even the most ad-
vanced artists can fall so far behind that the discursive apparatus has to move
them along. One of Rosenberg's exemplary scenarios: "In Germany the art-
historian directors of the Documenta 5 exhibition, held in Kassel, took the
significant step of collecting objects and images outside of art in order to
pus.h the art situation a notch 'forward' without help from art or artists. "4
~lhmately, in the climax of this argument, the accelerated progression of
mnovations in art and literature founds a "new academy of innovation"
(Kramer), a "tradition of the new" (Rosenberg) whose oxymoronic existence
proves t~e incoherence and hence the death by logic of the avant-garde.
In this devolutionary, entropic progress-model, the new comes to be
recuperated virtually in advance. The assimilation of the new accelerat

through the zero point: lead-time is inverted to lag-time and recuperati;s
becomes precuperation. New art is now impossible because the category 0~
the new no longer exists. Not just new works or movements but the very
potential for the new, the cultural and conceptual space any new art might
have occupied, is preempted. The new is no longer theorizable and therefore
no longer possible. The death of the avant-garde marks the simultaneous
apotheosis of the new and its consignment to the past, its decline into nothing
more than a historical footnote. Or not even that: for not only is the category
of the new recuperated, that recuperation is also read backward through its
entire history: recuperation is now experienced under the sign of the always-
already, the retrospective exposure of the a priori evacuation of the new. The
history of the avant-garde can now be written as a trajectory that arcs upward
from, for instance, Baudelaire's praise of Manet's "supreme originality" ("he
seems to ignore all that has been done in art by others, and draws from his
own inner consciousness all his effects of simplification, the whole revealed
by effects of light incontestably novel" [New Painting 31-32]), to the futurist
insistence on destroying tradition and replacing it with total innovation, back
down to Rosalind Krauss's attempt to prove that originality was erroneous-
"mythical"-in the first place. Not only is the new dead; it never existed.
But to recognize something as a myth is not to prove that it never existed,
only to mark its mode of existence. Nowhere does Krauss show that this
myth failed to work. Nonetheless the theoretical emptiness of the concept is
usually inflected in just this way: innovation is caught up in repetition, ergo
no new ever. This confusion of modes of existence, of the true and the
mythical, haunts all avant-garde discourse. Furthermore: Krauss's project
too must be historicized, seen within the context of a postmodernism that
often characterizes itself as the demystification of all myths of origin, but a
demystification that, whatever its truth, operates within the economy as the
newest form of critique. When Krauss uses Sherrie Levine's notorious repro-
ductions of the work of Walker Evans and Edward Weston to deconstruct the
myth of the original artist, the unwritten and doubtless involuntary subtext of
her essay is the functional novelty of Levine. Theory-death is never a con-
clusion: the new remains a necessary operational category even after its
theoretical exhaustion. The death of the new is a new wave of discourse-
production.
Now imagine artists and writers who work in this situation. Not those
who continue cynically concocting artmarket gimmicks; not those for whom
the quest for the masterpiece remains a pure personal romance; not those
content to repeat some exhausted oppositional rhetoric under the delusion
that it really is new; not even those now working under the aegis of some
postmodernist alibi on the next stage of accommodation (a whole new
generation of aesthetic commodities suffused with the sleek aura of critical
theory). Imagine instead those left in a real and conscious dilemma by the
theory-death of the avant-garde, drained by the depletion of the new but still
--
Economies I 73
driven to produce substantively new and different work. The theoretical
evacuation of the new does not release them from the critical necessity of
producing new work. The death of the new totalizes the context and crushes
the instance. It makes change critically impossible and still demands that
change occur. Avant-garde discourse employs death-theory to terrorize art-
ists and writers who must find some way to work despite these endlessly
reflected deaths and resurrections, this ever-tightening cycle of differentia-
tion and recuperation; who must produce new work in a climate where the
new is simultaneously mandated and proscribed, where everything must
always be new and nothing can ever be new again. Whatever the death-theory
concludes, there will continue to be artists and writers struggling to produce
new work, to differentiate themselves from an economy they cannot abide;
the figure of such an artist is irreducible, the possibility of such work cannot
finally be foreclosed. The road grows narrower and its aporias wilder and
more torturous but it does not vanish. At the level of discourse the gener-
alization of theory-death and the superfluity of differences, of works; at the
level of work the superfluity of theory-death and the permanence-but no
longer the theoretical privilege-of possibility.
None of this is to romanticize the solitary artist still struggling heroically
to invent the future. That romance is no longer persuasive and in any case
(precisely the point) theory (this text) cannot propose, administer, contain
the pure immanence of possibility-and cannot help but try to do so. This
essay is therefore little more than an attempt to mark, to discriminate in itself,
a certain "crisis." In the death-era of the avant-garde we are suspended
between conflicting accounts of cultural change: its simultaneous inflation
(change supplanted by exchange) and devaluation within the commodity
economy; its simultaneous reproduction and exhaustion as an essential func-
tion of cultural discourse; its simultaneous persistence as a critical term and
corruption by a whole new critique of progress-models of culture and tech- ·1
nology. The death of the new is a real discursive event, and one that re-
produces itself through discourse in every work. And yet this death can never
be total. Change, progress, the new, etc., persist as necessary if empty terms
of discourse, of the economy, of the logic of the artwork itself. Now it is the
very discourse of the new against which the artist or writer must labor to
reinvent the new. The old new replaced by a new new that can no longer call
itself new-has it really gotten so absurd?
A marginal note, largely in preparation for later concerns. If, according to

Greenberg, the futurists discovered "newness as an end in itself" and con-
structed a program around it, it was "left to Duchamp to create what I call
avant-gardism":
With avant-gardism, the shocking, scandalizing, startling, the mystifying and

confounding,became embraced as ends in themselves and no longer regretted as
initial side-effects of artistic newness that would wear off with familiarity.Now
these side-effects were to be built in.... All along the avant-garde had b
accused of seeking originality for its own sake. And all along this had bee:en
meaningle·ss charge. As if genuine originality could be envisaged in advance, an:
could ever be a!t~ined b~ di~t of mere willin~. A~ if origi?ali~ had not always
surprised the ongmal artist himself by exceedmg his conscious mtentions. It's as
though Duchamp and avant-gardism set out, however, deliberately to confirm this
accusation. ("Counter-Avant-Garde" 16)
A familiar cycle of recuperations: that inflated sense of the new which

Greenberg terms avant-gardism "begins" as a misapprehension in discourse
that Duchamp and his cohorts proceed to make real. But is it not traditional
for avant-gardes to embrace even the most ludicrous charges brought against
them? Accuse painters of building paintings from little cubes and the next
moment they give you a whole aesthetics of cubism. Accuse the avant-garde
of being a mere creature of fashion and the next moment you have Warhol's
affectless parodies of fashionability. Recuperation is mutual. This is nowhere
more· evident than in the pop art of the sixties, an avant-garde deeply
'
involved in reflecting and unravelling the tropes and cliches of avant-gardism,
or avant-gardeness, or whichever of Greenberg's categories best applies.
Like the mass culture it mirrored, pop was an art based on the mechanism of
accelerating consumption. Perhaps some pop artists saw in the enormous
consumptive capacity of popular culture the mirror-image of art's own re-
cuperation. With pop the recuperation of innovation by fashion rises to the
surface and becomes the central subject of advanced art: the figure of
spiraling reflection whereby again and again avant-garde art rises to the level
of the meta and finds its subject in recuperation itself.
If the new is a necessary condition of history, of tradition, of commerce,
then the peculiar manner in which the avant-garde's recuperation has under-
mined the concept of the new might constitute a serious challenge. The death
of the new and hence of the avant-garde itself might thus be the end the
avant-garde sought. One of our theses: the death of the avant-garde is its
most subversive stage.
The recuperation of the new takes place within an economic system

called by various names, none more pervasive than the culture industry. The
present task is by no means to assess the vast literature that constellates
around this term, nor to affirm that such an industry actually exists, nor to
ratify the critique that calls itself forth and claims for itself an adversarial
status by invoking that name-although (much to the point) simply to utter
such a phrase is already to have participated in its circulation, whether or not
one agrees with the analysis it represents. What is at stake here is something
slightly different: the curious way in which this term, this critique of indus·
tries, furthers the very industry it attacked and at the same time conceals
from itself its own industrial character. If the critique of the culture industry
once seemed a means of delimiting the realm of capitalist art and thereby
Economies I 75
also of marking off a field for genuine opposition to it, today this discourse
must begin to describe a ~ore f~ndamental problematic of opposition: the
very delineation of boundaries bnngs together under a single rule the territo-
ries h meant to separate: a certain mechanism of inclusion-by-exclusion that
was never the stated goal of this discourse but is its actual product.
Toe term culture industry was first employed by Adorno and Horkheimer
in Dialectic of Enlightenment. 5 Adorno later described its genesis:
In our drafts we spoke of "mass culture." We replaced that expression with

"culture industry" in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable
to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises
spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular
art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The
culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches,
products which are tailored for consumption by the masses, and which to a great
extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less
according to a plan. The individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit
into each other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap. This is
made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by economic and
administrative concentration. The culture industry intentionally integrates its
consumers from above.6
The term thus indicates, first of all, the historical transformation of popular
art by new (re)production technologies and the forces of modem economic
concentration. The desire to avoid any implication of "authentic" mass
culture is easily understood: Adorno and Horkheimer had already witnessed
the perversion of an idea of folk art into an instrument of social control in
fascist Germany, and their migration to the United States led them to believe
that they were observing virtually the same phenomenon here, if under a
more benevolent guise. Popular art was no longer produced by the masses;
now a seductive and powerful form of mass art was being produced in an
attempt to manipulate the masses "from above." To develop an analysis of
the culture industry was thus first of all to survey the boundaries of what
seemed to be a primary form of ideological and therefore social regulation.
Adorno also insisted that there is no such thing as the culture industry: no
monopolistic factory system regulates all cultural production; the term was
"not to be taken literally." It was merely a way to symbolize the com-
modification of cultural products, "the standardization of the thing itself"
and "the rationalization of distribution techniques" (14). The culture industry
is only an image, though as with the myth of originality, an image with real
effects. For Huyssen the image's influence is oppressive: Adomo's "black-
hole theory of capitalist culture" overemphasizes the totalitarian character of
that culture and hence itself becomes the tool of a sort of theoretical. total-
itarianism that leaves no room for resistance (22). But it might be that
Adomo's image was not sweeping enough, that the system it indicates and
from which it arises reaches far beyond the bounds of his bleakest nightmare.
,.,
The culture industry of the forties gives way in the sixties, in the mind of
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, to a vast "mind industry," an industry of
"consciousness" itself; by the seventies, in the work of Baudrillard, this
industry has assumed the dimensions of the entire culture and projected itself
far into the future. In the Baudrillard of the eighties culture consumes itself
alive.
For Enzensberger the idea of the culture industry is "inadequate," not
because there is no such industry-on the contrary, the industry is enor-
mous-but because the term "reflects, more than the scope of the phenom-
enon itself, the social status of those who have tried to analyze it: university
professors and academic writers, people whom the power elite has relegated
to the reservations of what passes as 'cultural life' and who consequently
have resigned themselves to bear the unfortunate name of cultural critics"
(Consciousness Industry 4). Of course the power elite is manifest in the very
institutions these critics investigate; even so Enzensberger properly insists
that the first test of critical validity must be the discursive status of the
critique. The fully enfranchised position of the institutionalized critic is not a
moral dilemma, a problem of ideological inconsistency, a minor heuristic
problem; it is a sign of criticism's own institutionalization. The nefarious
Commodity is usually someone else's product; one's own stake in the indus-
try is last and least addressed, and when it is admitted it is dismissed as a
mere fact of discursive life. Actually criticism of the commodity is an ancil-
lary phenomenon, for the critique of commodification has already been
commodified within the discursive economy. In the rhetoric of the classical
marxian chiasmus: the critique of commodification is the commodification of
critique. Criticism and critical art are "licensed": no administration from
above, no victimization or slavery: all forms of criticism are contractual
arrangements forged in the free market of discourse. Deleuze might indicate
the final state of this system when he remarks that a "wide range of profes-
sionals (teachers, psychiatrists, educators of all kinds, etc.) [is] called upon
to exercise functions that have traditionally belonged to the police. "7 Bur-
roughs puts the same point more succinctly: a functioning police state needs
no police. For us, the avant-garde is its avant-guardian.
The culture or consciousness industry permeates every text (Adomo's,
Enzensberger's, this one) that describes it: criticism of the industry always
serves as its tacit rationalization, for at bottom it is not so much an industry
of this or that ideological formation but of discursive economics as such. It is
not something Enzensberger says but something he does; it is being done
right here and now. The discursive economy lies behind, frames, determines
the productions of all the culture, consciousness, etc., industries. In dis-
course one finds the same system of productive imbalances, the same un-
equal distributions, the same simulated wants and needs one finds in every
other region of capital. The gross commercialism of popular and high art
~eets both its ideological opposite and its structural, formal, strategic double
m the commodification and circulation of criticism, marxist or otherwise,
p
Economies I 77
into which this text too is inextricably driven. Critics of the culture industry
attempt to reinvent themselves by dialectical differentiation; they delimit a
regime of compromised art and hope thereby to distinguish for themselves
some critical semblance of critical autonomy; but in discourse each at-
tempted autonomization functions simultaneously as its reification. The au-
tonomous zone is immediately recuperated as a sanctioned and delimited
annex. This procedure is the most fundamental task of the discourse on
industry. Critical autonomy is dialectically bound to its reflection in main-
stream discourse; likewise that discourse relies on the continual production
of images of its own negation. The independence of each depends on the
other. Every recuperation of autonomy necessarily generates another dis-
course of autonomy, one that will be recuperated and superceded in its turn,
and so on. Autonomy is systemic. That is why a total rejection of autonomy
is as meaningless as the notion of total autonomy. What we witness here is
less the truth or falsity of autonomous art than the autonomic functioning of
the economy in which it must operate. The economy exerts its terroristic
force over every exception, even as the pure possibility of exception reasserts
itself, until ultimately exception reveals itself as a mode of that force. There is
no more institution of art, no more solid geometry for ideological analyses:
the institution has been dissolved by and into circulation. All discourse is
finally affirmative.
In our putatively postindustrial age of satellite telecommunication and

superconductivity the metaphor of the culture industry must often seem
anachronistic; doubtless the next round of figures for cultural relations will
be drawn from cybernetics. (This is already taking place.) In the meanwhile
we have the discourse of the artworld, an extraordinary euphemism usually
deployed in myopia or utter cynicism, or only so that it can be negated: a
gordian knot of lofts, galleries, museums, agents, reviewers, journals, deal-
ers, collectors, foundations, bars, etc.; a network in which the avant-garde
functions as combination laboratory, farm team, ornament, and comic relief:
the very institution which, according to Burger, it has been the avant-garde's
historical task to oppose. The artworld of most journalistic accounts is thus
hardly .a world: nothing more than a complex of economic and discursive
facilities based largely in New York and a few outposts. What "world" is
meant to suggest is the system's singularity, its coherence, its homogeneity.
This sense of the artworld's unity can be found even in accounts that set out
to challenge its alleged scope: Wolfe's target "Cultureburg"-a mere burg,
far more parochial than anything like a world-is nonetheless a tightly-knit
circle of artists, critics, patrons, and administrators locked in a conspiracy
against hardhats and philistines, on one hand, and against the champions of
authentic culture on the other. A certain order of analysis would of course
~evealthat no such harmony exists, that artists continually bridle against the
ideological and market strictures of private, corporate, and government pa-
tronage, and that similar conflicts mark the commerce between institution
...
and audience. 8 But the artworld's inner tensions contribute to its coherence
and stability: however divided it appears empirically, it remains metastable.
When critics refer indiscriminately to the Art World, one might be tempted to
correct their generalizations with finer distinctions, but the popular accep-
tance of the image of a coherent artworld is not a matter of shortsightedness.
it indicates a profound synching of that image with the structures and
mechanisms of the social world to which its audience is accustomed: in this
pathetic euphemism we immediately recognize the synonymy of economy
and world.
For immediate purposes the heuristic advantage of the image of the
artworld lies largely in its spatialization of culture. Burger and others employ
a temporal perspective-indeed they effectively reenact the recuperation of
the avant-garde by a hegelian model of historical progress-but the avant-
garde also reveals its current condition in the topographical language of
worlds, territories, sites.9 Perhaps the avant-garde is not only a sequence of
movements but a continuous discursive zone; movements occupy this zone,
enter it and fall back, traverse it along numerous vectors on their way to some
final merger or dissolution. Perhaps too the zone is itself in motion: its
marginal relation to the main cultural territory remains constant but as that
territory expands to absorb each new avant-garde phenomenon the margin,
as Barthes might say, retreats ahead of it. The relation between these shifting
territories is, so to speak, geopolitical and might be described as a form of
colonialism. For Jameson colonialism is in fact already implicit in the meta-
phor of the culture industry:
We could say, following the initial Frankfurt School account of the "Culture
Industry," that capital is in the process of colonizing that last part of the mind-
the aesthetic-that traditionally seemed to resist its logic (being governed, as
,, classical aesthetics taught us, by "unfinalizable finalities"): on Mandel's account,
~' then, consumer society would be a thoroughgoing push into this area of the
.
''
·1 I
'
mind-culture, the Unconscious, whatever you want to call it-and a final ra-
tionalizing, industrializing, commodifying, colonizing of the non- or pre-capitalist
enclave left surviving there. 10
Recuperation follows a colonial logic: progress through incursion into and

development of hitherto uncivilized regions: the very movement of the avant-
garde. Some such colonizing operation must be carried out before any
industrial apparatus can be established: the territory must be mapped,
cleared, rendered habitable, occupied under a familiar banner; alien elements
must be driven off, exterminated, or converted; languages must be mastered,
translated; etc. The avant-garde colonizes the extra-aesthetic, the extra-
cultural, the extradiscursive; as always, advanced art is not only recuperated
but is itself a recuperative function. An internalized exterior: precisely the
figure of the colony.
The end of the avant-garde is the reorganization of cultural space. The
culture industry uses its vanguard to remap the foreign as a margin, a site
1111----
Economies I 79
comprehensible only in relation to itself. Elsewhere becomes colony, an
arena of overproduction and underdevelopment for an imperial appetite that
can assimilate and reproduce nearly every sort of exotica. In exchange the
avant-colony is ·compensated with a discourse of radical difference, moral
superiority, and an occasional government grant. In the end this process is so
blatant that it becomes difficult even to speak of exogenous zones: the last
colonial resource expropriated by the market is the idea of the foreign itself.
Thenceforth any project of exception or escape that begins from or deploys
the avant-garde model is inhibited, disrupted, or prevented altogether. But
nothing has really changed since the saint-simonians first drew their maps:
the new world envisioned through the march of the avant-gardes was always a
utopia of total absorption, an endocolonial paradise.
Anti
Tzara:
Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is dada; a

protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: dada;
knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of
comfortable compromise and good manners: dada; abolition of logic, whica is the
dance of those impotent to create: dada; of every social hierarchy and equation
set up for the sake of values by our valets: dada; every object, all objects,
sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are
weapons for the fight: dada; abolition of memory: dada; abolition of archaeology:
dada; abolition of prophets: dada; abolition of the future: dada ... ("Seven
Dada Manifestos," Motherwell 81)
Surely the sound of this chant is familiar: it is the groundnote of all avant-
garde manifestos, as critical as any project for the new, as any utopian dream,
indeed preceding them: a rage to clear ground, to destroy everything that is
not the pure product of desire or the imagination, to destroy everything: an
ecstatic nihilism. It might be said that every avant-garde project arises from
this rage, this ecstasy, from the spirit of the anti; that every avant-garde
sustains itself by exerting this negative force; and that the death of the avant-
garde lies precisely in the erosion of this negation. The avant-garde evolves
convulsively from one form of the anti to another, each successive movement
increasingly comprehensive in its attempt to locate some nonrecuperable
ground, each successive recuperation only revealing further the impossibility
of such a ground. Today recuperation takes on a totalistic character and
cultural opposition as such is thrown into doubt; now it seems that the anti
itself is being recuperated. Or perhaps it has always been the anti that was
most recuperable, not a form of resistance to assimilation but the very
medium of assimilation. Perhaps every avant-garde ends in affirmation be-
cause it begins in negation. If that is the case then the anti and its recupera-
tion are not adversaries; recuperation is not simply the defeat of negation;
rather both are functions of the same dialectical apparatus operating at the
most basic levels of the discursive economy.
Anti is always bound as a prefix to some other term and thereby sub-
sumed by it. By the psychic economy of the bourgeois leviathan, for in-
stance, as in Gablik: "the subversive impulse of modernism has been our
culture's saving grace; the avant-garde functioned as the conscience of bour-
geois civilization" (55); or again in Kramer:
80
p
Anti I 81
Beginning as an avowal of the life offeeling that the defensive and insecure middle
class could not bring themselves to acknowledge, lest its precarious hold on its
own self.esteem be shattered, the avant-garde developed into the critical and
increasingly combative conscience of bourgeois civilization. The cultural history
of the bourgeoisie is the history of its gradual and painful adjustment to this
conscience-an adjustment that made the bourgeoisie, despite its own worst
inclinations, the moral and aesthetic beneficiary of the avant-garde's heroic
labors. (6)
It is typical of our discourse· that not even the avant-garde's wildest dis-
avowals could protect it from conscription into a tedious and dispiriting term
of service as bourgeois conscience. All the histories reenact these inden-
tures. The avant-garde was launched by the bourgeoisie and is locked into a
decaying orbit around it; it was born with the bourgeoisie because the
bourgeoisie had to externalize its opposition in order better to contain it. The
most radical utopianism can be turned back to mirror bourgeois self-satisfac-
tion. Even the most negative anti-artists are trapped in conversation with the
culture they wish to leave behind, the Marinettis and Kramers of the world
happily inscribing and erasing and reinscribing each other in an interminable
rehearsal of No Exit. At all points the avant-garde is held hostage by an
argument and therefore an arrangement with the order it seeks to destroy.
The necessity of this arrangement might explain the curious tone, at once
celebratory and mournful, of most obituaries of the avant-garde. For if the
avant-garde is dead, then where will the bourgeoisie find its conscience? (The
image of a bourgeois conscience is probably oxymoronic.) Where will it find
another agency to clear out its old cultural products and develop such
striking new ones? How will the dialectic of modem culture survive without
negation? The death of the avant-garde, the apparent collapse of its antithet-
ical force, must pose a crisis for even the most reactionary, positivist, anti-
avant-garde critic. That crisis is our present concern.
What exactly is anti-art against? 1 Art per se? new art against old? against
the present? against itself? against the world? Or is it that the anti is aimed
toward every target, toward whatever enemy a given discursive situation
renders most convenient and profitable, whatever allows it to define itself as
anti? Perhaps the ambiguity of the term "anti-art" is essential, productive. It
will not take long to enumerate its forms:
I. Anti-tradition: the revolt against aesthetic convention; an attempt to
clear the ground of old art so that new art can take its place. Here avant-garde
rhetoric militates against the putative tyranny of the masterpiece. Boccioni:
"Our aim is to destroy four centuries of Italian painting" ;2 Picasso: "painting
is the sum of destructions"; Mallarme: "Destruction was my Beatrice." At
times aesthetic revolt is cast as a fulfillment of self-critical tendencies inher-
ent in art itself, as in the hegelianism of Soffici: "Art tends fatally toward its
own destruction .... The destiny of art is to refine general sensibility to the
►
◄
82 / THETuEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
point of making useless any outward manifestations. Art's final masterpiece

will be its own destruction. " 3 At other times the project entails a more
modest logic of personal development: erasing the signs of tradition in one's
own work.
2. Anti-institution art. In Burger's analysis, when it becomes clear that
the attack on tradition tends to coincide with the bourgeoisie's own programs
for art, art turns against the institutions responsible for carrying out these
programs. But art against the institution of art ends by advancing the institu-
tion's interests, revitalizing its moribund agencies, providing it with alter-
natives that constitute its next stage of development.
3. The anti must be directed not just against the museum and gallery
system but against the social order as such. Nothing will really change for the
artist until the society within which art operates is radically transformed
What arises here is a sense that political resistance will inform th~ work of art
and that these aesthetic advances will in turn influence social reform. This is
the realm of committed or engaged art, of Russian futurism, of Brecht, of
ecriture feminine, of the surrealist desire to bring together Rimbaud's
"change life" and Marx's "transform the world"--a desire that ended in the
movement's absurd suspension between bourgeois toleration and marxist
rejection. That suspension is typical and has not changed since the 1920s,
except perhaps in becoming less plausible for being more common. The
bourgeoisie continues to deploy the avant-garde as a surrogate, a spectacle of
revolution (as in the situationist slogan: we are given the revolution to
contemplate in order to forget to participate) and then turns around and
accuses it of not being revolutionary enough, hoping, in the process, to
discredit the very idea of revolutionary art. Since the avant-garde represents
opposition and the avant-garde is spurious, then opposition per se is spu-
rious: no ground for antithetical art.
4. Perhaps then art must make itself even more explicitly political, more
committed: Aragon abandoning the anti-art of surrealism in order to write
proper socialist-realist novels. After the communist party no longer serves
western artists as a rationale for political art, various ideologies of feminism,
anti-imperialism, community, and so on, take its place. Guerrilla theater,
barrio murals, a certain rhetoric of rock music, etc.
5. For Adorno politically committed art-he is thinking chiefly of the
aesthetics of Sartre and Brecht-reinforces the reality it claims to surmount
by ignoring, in the name of revolutionary ideology, the alienation that is the
deepest truth of every work of art under capitalism. The apparently apolitical
work of Kafka or Beckett is more authentically antithetical because it ex-
presses its alienation in extreme terms and thereby reflects that truth, as a
form of negative knowledge.4 What this alienation opens, however, is not
only a critical space but a zone of false dissatisfactions that are quite as
useful for the economy as either the false satisfactions of conventional
bourgeois art or the surrogate commitments of committed art.
.
Anti I 83
Not a historical sequence:_ all of the~e antis are ~robably in circulation at
every stage of avant-g~rd; :1story, van~usly dommant or s~bordi!1ate but
always in effect. But m a a we see _t em all at once, plamly displayed,
tending with one another, subvertmg each other and themselves in a
co:stant process of establishing and displacing and reestablishing the true
~~rmof the anti, _aproce~s which itsel~ ulti~ately had t? be opposed. Many
ritics and histonans believe that dada s anti was the epitome of avant-garde
~evolt;that with the institutionalization of dada the avant-garde's most radical
potential expired; that any subsequent vitality the avant-garde can claim
must be measured as a resurgence of the dada "spirit." So it is in Burger's
analysis: dada's anti-institution art marks an avant-garde zenith; afterward
opposition gives way to progressive accommodations with the institution.
But dada hardly constituted any unified anti-institutional front. In fact (one
should expect no less) it was riven by contradictions; indeed its antithetical
nature might very well demand that it be defined by and as these contradic-
tions. What we witness here are dada's internal conflicts and their consolida-
tion into a sirigle figure of negation; the discursive circulation of that figure;
its subsequent devaluation as a standard of negation; and points of com-
plicity with and resistance to this economization by various forces identified
with the movement. Any apotheosis of dada as a coherent and unified
opposition and the death of dada are one and the same, and dada was itself
deeply committed to this process.
Dada's inner turmoil is a matter of historical record. Fierce battles over
control of the movement's definition and. direction and particularly over the
question of whether its anti-art was to be fundamentally aesthetic or political
were everyday affairs in dada party politics from its earliest Cabaret Voltaire
incamations.s It is extremely difficult from this vantage to sort out the
different strands of these conflicts: all the firsthand accounts are partisan
(many so overwrought that they are parodies of partisanship), and alliances
were constantly shifting; radical and conservative dada reversed polarities
wit~ dizzying frequency. This sort of ideological chaos is inherent in dada's
anti, so that it is finally impossible to resolve dada contradiction. What is
more: every attempt to do so is inevitable and itself a theory-death.
But even if this confusion cannot be resolved, it can be depicted. ls the
emphasis in dada anti-art on the anti or on the art? An exemplary case: in his
t 2
:: ~ memoir and manifesto, Merz, Kurt Schwitters takes the part of aes-
.,, fi etic against political dada and embodies the two sides of the question in the
l d~res of Huelsenbeck and Tzara: political dada is "Huelsendada" (husk-
..: a, ~n expendable surface) while Tzara is the leader of essential dada,
:l ke:~r ddad_a." "~u~lsendada 'foresees its end and laughs about it,' whil,e
t cou t a~~ism will hve as long as art lives" (Motherwell 60). (Huelsenbeck s
5 mo~ e~aihng recollection: "As I think back on it now, an art for art's sake
l [Moth ung over the Galerie Dada .... (It] was an antechamber of ambition"
erwell 33.]) In Schwitters's account Tzara emerges as the champion of
,.
aesthetic dada But this is not the Tzara one finds in every other account: for
Hugo Ball-someone at least as concerned as Schwitters with a purist anti-
art-Tzara was a mere opportunist, the crassest sort of self-promoter. As
Russell observes, "Ball's growing antagonism to Tzara developed out of his
suspicion that Tzara was interested in turning dada into just the latest of a
series of modem art movements, with himself at its head. In opposition to
him, Ball expressed the essential avant-garde desire that art transcend art,
that it lead beyond itself, even if that meant denying itself." Russell goes on
to quote a typical sentiment from Ball's Flight out of Time:
It can probably be said that for us art is not an end in itself-more pure naivete is
necessary for that-but it is an opportunity for the perception and criticism of the
times we live in, both of which are essential for an unstriking but characteristic
style. . . . Our debates are a burning search, more blatant every ~ay, for the
specific rhythm and buried face of this age-for its foundations and essence; for
the possibility of its being stirred, its awakening. Art is only an occasion for that, a
method. (110)
'
I,
,·
" To engage in a "criticism of the times" was a transcendental pr9ject, not a
political one. The "rhythm" of this anti-art is thinly hegelian: negation
becomes a matter of purging the inessential, purifying art (of art) until it
achieves the absolute. For Ball Tzara's posturing and finagling were precisely
huskdada, the sort of base material that dada alchemy had to bum away. But
at the same time the quasi-mystical rhetoric that surrounds Ball's accounts of
dada-and accounts of Ball himself both before and after dada (his saintly
character, the monkish existence he later led)--also sounds strangely like
Huelsendada: as Huelsenbeck wrote, "My dada, which I introduced into
Berlin, was a philosophy that went beyond art into life itself, as Gauguin and
Rimbaud had done before us" (Russell I I 2). (Peculiar associations: as if to go
past art into life were exile; as if Berlin had become Tahiti or Harar.)
How to consolidate these diverging, intersecting, colliding opinions?
Schwitters: Tzara is a champion of pure anti-art and Huelsenbeck nothing
more than a politician. Ball: Tzara was a sleazy entrepreneur eager to sell
dada out to the highest bidder. At the same time, Huelsenbeck and Ball, who
seem to be on opposing sides of the political-aesthetic split, tum out to be in
some sort of accord: purge art of the inessential and return it to "life"-a
project that, in still other accounts, was Tzara's as well. It would be a mistake
to dismiss all this as mere cafe bickering; in fact it was essential. Dada's anti
was protean, mercurial: today's purist was tomorrow's politico, depending on
the rhetorical tide; positions and allegiances could be shuffled virtually at
will in order to advance one or another ephemeral enthusiasm and/or antag-
onism; the very same evidence could be marshaled to justify any ideological
reversal. These laughable inconsistencies are among the most consistent and
serious elements of dada anti-art. They should also make the movement
extraordinarily difficult for a cultural historian to pin down. As a result most
historians simply ignore them, or arrange them under the aegis of some
Anti I 85
uction, some general ideonarratological regime that formalizes all
aster re d . . N . .
111 ssy contrad1ct1ons as egat1on, a coherent force contained within a
these meless conventional model of dialectical progress.
more Theorforms this model ta k es ar~ ~1am1·1·
_1~rto_anyon~ who has read even a few
. of the movement. From its ongms m Zunch, dada broke into two
stud. iesamps, one em1gratmg
· · to p ans· (aest h ehc· d a d a) and the other (political
main
d ) moving to Berlm; t ere eac h respective
c . h . wmg . o f the movement thrashed
~a Ifato death in a few short years. Or dada negation finally exhausted itself
itse
b ause once you have negate d everyt h"mg you h ave left yourself nothmg .
:~a
ecre to do: whence surrealism, the positive afterlife of dada nihilism. 6 Or
incorporated both negative and positive: witness Michel Sanouillet's
~empt to settle the perennial critical difficulty, inherited from dada itself, of
:etermining whether the movement was a creative or destructive force. Here
it becomes a question of dada versus dadaism. As with Greenberg's avant-
gardism, the ism is a sort of lexical tumor, a symptom of some ideological
carcinoma .(the prognosis: terminal; the movement's entombment in mu-
seums will follow shortly). Sanouillet:
Perhaps the dialectical relation between Dada and Dadaism would help us leap
over the initial paradox which has stopped many a budding scholar and which
Lucy Lippard has excellently summed up as follows: Dada, "This agent of
immediacy and destruction, has created some of the most enduring objects and
attitudes of our time." ... [But this] seems to me basically a false problem, and
only an apparent paradox. Dadaism created while Dada was destroying, which is
what we all do unknowingly. That is why it is absurd to oppose two currents
within Dada: one, negative and anti-artistic represented by the writers Tzara and
Huelsenbeck, the other positive and creative, by the painters Arp, Janco and
Ernst. The best example of positive/negative dialectics is given by the work of
Kurt Schwitters. As Huelsenbeck put it: "If the Dadaist movement is Nihilism,
then Nihilism is a part of life, a truth which would be confirmed by any professor
of biology. "1
A tidy conclusion: everything mean and nasty in dada is part of a system for
the general good; destruction turns out all right in the end, just as it does in
nature. The dialectic solves all, sets all contradictions in order. As Georges
Hugnet puts it, in a miraculous logical jumble, "Almost hegelian without
knowing it, [dada] did away with everything, making affirmation equivalent to
ne~ation" (Motherwell 196). The anti is immediately and continually circum-
sc_n~ed, dismantled, and reinstalled in a diminished and modulated form
withm. . this d"ra1ectrca
· 1 apparatus. Antr-art
• · can only
cannot truly destroy, 1t
~~~trpate in the production of more and more works. Nothing is really
po: e~ated; everything turns into discourse, into history. The anti is
funcet~ess to do anything but generate its opposite and ends as a minor
ronary. of the p ure pos1trv1sm
Th. ·· · o f production.
•
same rs rationale is hardly restricted to Sanouillet and dada apologetics. The
sense that the anti must be recuperated and given full employment in
the service of the dialectic-a dialectic in which the fabulous violence of

negation has been almost comp~etely undermined by a long history of syn-
thetic accommodations-is mamfested everywhere in avant-garde discourse.
In Poggioli for instance:
the conventions of avant-garde art, in a conscious or unconscious way, are
directly and rigidly determined by an inverse relation to traditional conventions.
Thanks to this relation, the conventions of avant-garde art are often as easily
deduced as those of the academy: their derivation from the norm is so regular and
normal a fact that it is transformed into a canon no less exceptional than predict-
able. Disorder becomes a rule when it is opposed in a deliberate and symmetrical
manner to a pre-established order. (56)
Poggioli omits at least one factor: it is not disorder that is orderly but its
representation in an orderly theory, a regulatory discourse. Even as hegelians
imagine that negation mediates the real, so the dialectic has come to mediate
that negation in advance and rob it of its force. This is why Poggioli can
conclude that "it might not be too difficult, when all accounts are tallied, to
formulate for the avant-garde ... the science determining the laws that
govern the exceptions, not the rule": i.e., 'pataphysics. Habermas draws an
analogous horizon around the avant-garde: all its experiments only "served
to bring back to life, and to illuminate all the more glaringly, exactly those
structures of art which they were meant to dissolve. " 8 The same paradigm
animates Huyssen: the avant-garde "only makes sense if it remains dialec-
tically related to that for which it serves as the vanguard" (4). Or Hughes:
"The new pantheon [of MOMA] wanted everything and its opposite. It thus
tended to defuse the tensions of all moments within the struggles of the
avant-garde by rendering them historical" (Shock 392). Or Brecht: "Cap-
italism has the power instantly and continuously to transform into a drug the
very venom that is spit in its face, and to revel in it. "9 Or Raoul Vaneigem:
"pissing on the altar is still a way of paying homage to the Church." 10 Etc.
What emerges here is perhaps the most elementary- form of recuperation:
the recuperation of the anti by the dialectic itself. The anti is unthinkable
without the relations expressed in the dialectic, which is to say that at its
most basic level the avant-garde defined itself as a primary mode of the
discourse it otherwise rejected. Conformity/resistance, tradition/innovation,
creation/destruction, stability/movement: the avant-garde cannot be con-
signed to the second term in any of these binaries: it must be seen as the
means by which the polarity as such is articulated. No conformity without
resistance, no tradition without innovation. To install dada in such a system
and to install it in a museum are virtually the same act: all of dada is
recuperated and redeployed by the dialectic as a kind of instrumental unrea-
son, a processed opposition. Dada, the putative nth degree of anti-art, tacitly
permitted itself to be incorporated into the very dialectical machinery that
sustains bourgeois culture. Its most frenzied disruptions were proper func-
tions of one of the oldest and most normative devices for maintaining cultural
order. While the dadaist claimed to be a "virgin microbe" (Tzara) fatally
Anti I 87
infecting the bou~g~~is body, he was a~tually inoculating it against the
disease. His very mh1hsm gu~ranteed contmued development and served as a
laboratory for the safe, effective, and profitable management of the anti. The
most negative of avant-gardes thereby turns out to have been the most
affirmative.
The death of dada did not occur at the end of any decline: from the very
outset dada gave up its ghost, its image of negation. If the historical avant-
gardes understood completely that modern art functions above all as a
discourse, they also volunteered to be displayed on its screens. Negation for
display: which is not to say hypocritical, just for show, as if some more
sincere presentation of the anti would have made a difference; to display
negation is always to expose it to the eye of power, to invite, indeed to
demand surveillance, and no longer just surveillance by a master: in dis-
course the eye of power is a mirror for exercising self-control.
Dada's first task was to create an image of itself-actually, as we have
seen, several conflicting images-in the public mind. It operated as a specta-
cle and as a spectacle it was drained of its force. It died of exposure. Hugnet:
"Did not the Dada group gather together too many incongruous tendencies
that tore it apart? Dada was staggering beneath the number and quality of its
representations" (Motherwell 187). The avant-garde obsession with publicity
is common knowledge: "Dada knew how to set the big rotary presses in
motion" (Huelsenbeck, Motherwell 30). Here is Tisdall's and Bozzolla's
portrait of Marinetti, the "Caffeine of Europe":
Marinetti was a man of his time. He was an agitator, like Alfred Jarry, and an
entrepreneur, like Guillaume Apollinaire. But more than this: fifty years before
Marshall McLuhan he had perfectly understood that, in the expanded world of
twentieth-century communications, the medium is the message; that, whatever
you have to say, how you say it is as important as what you say. . . . Uoder
Marinetti's auspices, the presentation of culture was for the first time handled as if
it were a political campaign .... To back up the effectiveness of the publicity
machines that already existed, Marinetti invented his own. (8-9)
Recall that the first futurist manifesto was published not in an art journal but
in Le Figaro, "the most influential [news]paper in the capital of the cultured
world: Paris.... The futurist group had sprung ready-formed from a full-
page advertisement." Although the manifesto's tone implied that futurism
wasalready a fact of modern life, there was no movement until Marinetti
managed to attract a few compatriots through the publication of this text. The
tant-garde's advertising campaigns were often recruiting efforts. "We pub-
ish,'.' Breton wrote, adapting a phrase from Tzara, "to search for men, and
00thmg else" (Jean 112). But avant-garde publicity was more than just a way
!~ sprea~ a movement's name. The anti needed to see its image reflected in
e pubhc eye; that image was a register of public reaction and therefore a
measure of the movement's force.
It might be difficult today to appreciate the. furor futurism or dada was
sometimes able to inspire. "Treatises by famous critics praising or denigrat-

ing dadaism appeared in the shutters of neighborhood kiosks throughout
Berlin. Every newspaper felt obligated to present [its] own theory about the
social and aesthetic merits of dadaism." 11 Reaction became an element of
the artwork. The press was a performer, a co-creator. For dada negative press
was usually preferred: a work had to be loathed to exist, and it was not always
easy to attract the contempt of a preoccupied bourgeoisie. Huelsenbeck and
his colleagues had to educate the public to despise them. Their first perfor-
mances generated little reaction; it was some time before dada could enjoy
"uniformly negative press reviews" and longer still until cooperative hostility
between dada and the press could guarantee a decent riot at any given dada
event (Gordon I 17). When public loathing was absent, dada invented it:
"many [review] articles, and the most disagreeable ones, were written by the
dadaists themselves under false names; Breton, for instance, signing as
Decharme, and Eluard as Paul Draule" (Motherwell 180). Hence too the
discomfort dada experienced when the press betrayed it by supporting it.
"Despite Hausmann's private misgivings over the favorable critical reactions
the April 30th soiree received, a second, even more grandiose, production
r was planned for May 15'' (Gordon 119).
r If futurism and dada were the first movements to realize how deeply
embedded art was in discourse, it was their very fascination with this dis-
course, their desire to subvert or even master the discursive economy in
which they knew art operated, that led to their downfall. For in their attempt
to engage the discursive apparatus they surrendered to its mediation. This
historical miscalculation-the more or Jess conscious decision to confront
bourgeois culture on its own discursive turf-was more than anything else
responsible for the avant-garde's fatal assimilation. It was its very representa-
tion that exhausted the anti. As soon as the anti was projected on the
culture's screens it was already reified. It was also thereby turned against
itself: the vehemence of dada negativity set a standard that could be called
up as evidence against every avant-garde that failed to live up to that inten-
sity. The represented revolts of futurism, dada and surrealism led to the
charge that all avant-garde revolt was merely symbolic; negativity as such
came to seem passe. The avant-garde was the proxy for the avant-garde it
might have been but rendered impossible, a surrogate for some other dissent,
a simulated departure that defined departure itself as a function of cultural
enclosure, a relay in the circulation of representations. The avant-garde is not
just our official culture, our newest academy, as Hughes would have it: it is
the official narrative of the futility of resistance, the futility of the anti itself.
In the end it might turn out that there is no room at all left for the anti; all
criticism is discourse, and discourse has no negative force that is not reduced
to dialectical systems-maintenance. If this is the case, then even as the most
antithetical movement is paradoxically, dialectically, the most affirmative, so
perhaps those conservative critics who seal the death of the avant-garde in
the name of tradition are calling for the collapse of the cultural order and are
thus the worst nihilists of all.
Anti I 89
But there is another anti. If anti-art submits itself to the dialectical device
and thereby inscribes that device within itself, it tends also to operate
reflexively, attacking those internalized traces. Dada saw itself among its
enemies; it knew that the avant-garde becomes what it opposes and therefore
had to oppose itself. Dada exposed in itself all its contractual arrangements
with bourgeois culture. It made itself a parody of everything it despised, a
parody even of the spirit of parody, of parody as an attempt to let oneself off
one's own hook. It reserved a special violence for the avant-garde's most
cherished illusions. In a sense dada produced a sixth form of the anti that
gathered together all the others and turned them inward. The anti became-it
often expressed itself in just these terms-an act of suicide. It embodied what
it negated and called for its own destruction. As they said in Berlin: every
man his own football; which is both to demand an anarchy of hobbyhorses
and to mark each of us as his or her own target: what one must kick is
oneself. Self-promotion and self-abnegation converged in a single ubuistic
gesture. Dada exaggerated its certainty that modern artists are their own
worst enemies, that underneath the idealistic pose an artist is either a
hypocrite or a fool And even if Dada was a little more honest it knew that
this honesty carried no ethical weight: artists who understood their situation
and remained artists were even more contemptible than the bete painter.
Against the transcendental and revolutionary projects of a Ball or a Huelsen-
beck dada therefore projects a darker, more repellant figure: that Tzara, who
was above all the heir of Marinetti and Jarry-Ubu, who could speak in the
same breath of artistic purity and of cashing in, who claimed to be a paragon
of anarchy but might well have called out the police on Eluard, Peret and
Breton; 12 that Tzara for whom dada was nowhere truer to the spirit of
negation than when it was rushing to the gallery to hawk its anti-wares and
whose fondest hope for art was that it would finally humiliate itself so
completely that it could no longer find a single excuse for existing. If Burger
emphasizes the heroic mood of dada, here we encounter its profound defeat-
ism, its unblinking recognition that dada was completely implicated in every-
thing it wanted to eradicate; that even anti-art is ludicrous, pointless, more
art, and perhaps then the worst of all; that there will never be any critical
distance for art, never any integrity, any moral privilege, any ideological
immunity anywhere in cultural discourse: no task but to push the avant-garde
lie to extremes the better to expose and deflate it. When all accounts were
tallied, even the anti had to go. What has been hardest for criticism to accept
is not dada negation but this utter cynicism about negation. The fact that in
death all of dada's bangs gave way to institutional whimpers, that so strident
a program could meet so vapid an end, was part of its program. The public
display and thereby the evacuation of the anti was its most radical project.
Tzara:
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 write this manifesto
to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh
gulp of air; 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 sens'e.
(Motherwell 76)
What drives this simultaneous presentation and cancelation is a recognition

of and hence a revulsion against the anti's tendency to resolve itself almost
immediately into a virtual factotum of .affirmative culture. Tzara is groping
for, and doubtless not yet finding, an anti that will not be so easy to install in
Sanouillet's well-tooled little dialectical machine, an anti that will turn
against the teleological instrumentalis~ of the dialectic, that will tum against
itself: in these syntactical contortions he is trying to make contact with that
force in the anti which cannot be recuperated.
Dada defeatism opens-just barely, and by no means widely enough for
this discourse to follow it through-an irrepressible negative that the dialec-
tic cannot entirely confine: something that criticism can only catch out of the
corner of its eye, for when it turns to face it it is no longer there; something
'., that cannot be represented within the white economy of discourse because as
soon as it is represented it ceases to exist. It has always been true that the anti
must break with itself at the very moment it is posited: the break marks its
proper dialectical function: to produce a perpetual enjambement within the
dialectic, to prevent closure. That is why the death of the avant-garde has
such difficulty totalizing itself: some residual antithetical movement always
'I
.
' seems possible (this is absolutely not the beginning of another narrative in
which the avant-garde rises from its ashes). But if it has always been essential
to the dialectic that the anti continue to break away from every positivism, it
has also been essential that in the escalating spirals of recuperation every
break must be brought back into circulation. In the long run discourse cannot
finally conceal the generality of this circular process; the anti can no longer
disguise the fact that it has become purely systemic and thereby loses its
force, inspires no more confidence, projects itself no further. That is why the
death of the avant-garde cannot be refuted either. But perhaps in the way
certain self-canceling passages of Tzara's manifesto make nothing manifest;
perhaps in dada's rejection not just of bourgeois culture but of every given
form of avant-garde opposition to it; perhaps in dada's rage against its rage
against a system in which even its marvelous violence is prefabricated:
perhaps in its doubtlessly failed abandonment of the avant-garde as such we
begin to see the seeds (only the seeds) of another negation. Now it is as if the
anti must break from the dialectic altogether. The question of whether art is
bourgeois or antibourgeois, whether the anti is finally creative or nihilistic
has no further importance; these positions merely constitute one another in a
continuous mechanical displacement. What occurs now is a stranger, vaguer
situation in which the anti is at one and the same time necessary and
impossible, indestructible and destroyed, assimilated and vanished. Today
the most radical anti is the one that ruins itself in advance, that has always yet
to appear, that evades every dialectical deployment. Breton closed the first
L_
Anti I 91
surrealist manifesto this way: "It is living and ceasing to live that are
imaginarysolutions. Existence is elsewhere."13 Creation and negation are
meaningless:the only possibilitynow lies hors-discours,a place that, one is
assured,does not exist. If we are to imaginethe anti any longerit can only be
as somethingmonstrous-or precisely not monstrous, not displayedin any
form,howevergrotesque-something that persists only by the impossibleact
of abandoningthe dialectic, severingits discursiveengagementsand disap-
pearingfrom the screens of the spectacle.A ridiculousproject.An event that
nevertakes place, that is already written and represented,that still escapes.
--
The Germ of Consent
The avant-garde is not the victim of recuperation but its agent, its proper
technology: this formula, which has begun to take on a sort of banner tone
here, as if it were already reaching out of the text to inscribe itself on a dust
jacket-a capsule truth, handy for marketing-has yet to be applied to the
avant-garde artwork itself. For avant-garde discourse is not a matter of
movements alone, nor is it some abstract Discourse metonymized by the
"Adornos" and "Greenbergs" and "Burgers" of the scholarly index, nor is it
merely a few tangential lies told by Marinetti, Tzara, Breton. The discursive
economy circulates works, and in order to circulate these works must have
incorporated, in some form, the economy's structures and values. Discourse
is not extrinsic to the work, it is not an assault on the sanctity of the art
object: in its most fundamental and characteristic devices and tropes the
poem or painting has already introjected the economic relations that will
provide for its recuperation. The avant-garde work is not reduced to this or
that discursive function; it intends it, it is constructed from it. One must
therefore isolate the seed of recuperation lodged in the avant-garde work
from the outset, the germ that marks it for and as recuperation.
The task would seem to involve a fairly straightforward deconstruction:
explicate the work's complicity in the systems it opposes and therefore its
inability, among its manifold inabilities, to achieve a fully integrated identity:
by now a classic move, and one that has acquired its own interests and
implications. Today, because of its place in the academy at least, it is difficult
for deconstruction to avoid producing alternate readings, better readings,
'
' 1'
truer readings: to avoid promoting an industry of reading. But in some
manner that too is the task at hand. It is not a matter of better or truer
decipherings of avant-garde works; one must proceed without pretending to
cancel the operational truth of the artist's illusions about the work or the
work's illusions about itself, without pretending to supercede previous read-
ings, all of which are true economically, because they circulate. We must
identify the germ of recuperation embedded in the avant-garde work without
generalizing it into a whole truth about a whole work. For what one seeks
here is neither the aesthetic object nor its interpretive proxy; one must not
interpret an artwork but rather diagnose certain symptomatic, pathogenic
traces of the economy scattered throughout the work, even in its ruptures
and gaps (the language of rupture and gap is by now so overdetermined as to
be virtually useless: another legacy of avant-garde discourse): the points at
which the work begins to articulate its death.
In the pathology of recuperation the diagnosis too is a manifestation of
92
The Germ of Consent I 93
the disease, which is in part to recall that one of this essay's abiding concerns
is to discover what it means to write a text on the avant-garde. Whether one
criticizes or supports the avant-garde, representation is a mode of economic
control. To demonstrate the inherence of recuperation in the artwork is also
to mark one's own text as yet another agent of the discursive economy. For us
today the problem of the avant-garde is thus essentially a critical one: how to
enter its field without falling (blindly or not, it makes little difference) into
every trap of representation; how to write without merely manufacturing
another or even a better theory for circulation, another history for exchange.
To explore recuperation without being entirely caught up in it, or in the
illusion that one is entirely free of it. It might be that the desire for such a
writing is the silliest illusion of all: one either is or is not a discursive agent,
there is no third possibility; the desire to have it both ways, or neither, is what
drives the avant-garde and the criticism that pretends to represent it into tacit
collusion with the economy. And yet the desire persists: to confront re-
cuperation even in one's own text without being altogether subsumed by it; to
invent a writing that is realistic about its conditions and chances but has not
given up, that abandons every utopia but not the hope that invoked it. A
writing that sees itself in the history it describes, that never pretends it is
above the recuperative law, that drives recuperation all the way to the surface
and turns it against itself. A writing not simply recuperation, capable of
erasing itself as it goes along.
JUXTAPOSITION
In surrealism three is uncountable. Everywhere the surrealist looks, the

world is organized in twos, in amorous or warring pairs, like beasts lining up
to escape the flood. Surrealism is a mania for the binary: reason and mad-
ness, mundane reality and dreamed ideal, logic and objective chance: it is
always a matter of combination, of opposition, of the real and the anti and
some hope for their future resolution in the absolute surreal.
There is, first of all, the erotic encounter. Surrealism wants to achieve the
definitive expression of the erotic in art, "words making love," /'amour fou.
"Every night," Breton wrote in Les Pas perdus, "I left the door of my hotel
room wide open, hoping to wake up at last with a companion beside me
whom I would not have chosen" (Jean 113). The encounter he desires is with
his unconscious as much as with a mysterious lover; for Breton the compan-
ion one finds might be either woman or poem, or both. In fact surrealism
wants to eliminate the distinction between these encounters, between what
one loves and what one imagines, between what one desires and what one is.
Breton's Nadja is at once the name of a woman, an other, and the name of a
book that begins with the question, Who am I? But this union of a self that is
also other, externalized, alien, unknown (Rimbaud's je est un autre) and an
other who is one's proper destiny, the truth of one's autobiography, one's
~oem-this marriage of true minds has nothing in common with any domes-
tic stability. No one ever settles down in surrealism. Love, to adapt Breton's
94 f TuE TuEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
famous phrase from the close of Nadja, will be convulsive or it will not be at
all. A permanent revolution. (The erotic is revolutionary and the revolution
must be made erotic: history has given the lie to this surrealist dream and
doubtless will continue to do so in every further reification of desire.)
Aragon: "Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction. The marvelous is
the eruption of contradiction within the real." 1 The eroto-imaginative en-
counter is always riven by some difference; its truth is gauged by the
intensity of the difference it embraces.
In surrealism these opposition-relations are mediated by a theory of the
image. The image is the atom, the most elementary unit of the surrealist
enterprise; as Breton quotes Reverdy in the movement's founding manifesto:
The image is a pure creation of the mind.

It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or
less distant realities.
The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and
true, the stronger the image will be-the greater its emotional power and poetic
reality. (Manifestoes 20)
The stock example of such an analogical image is Lautreamont's: as beautiful

as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of an umbrella and a sewing
machine. Nor is this sort of image a matter for surrealism alone: Marinetti
too was driven by a demon of analogy. Martin:
At the heart of Marinetti's new theory was his concept of analogy. A substantive
was to be followed directly by its "double ... to which it is bound by analogy;
e.g. man-destroyer escort, woman-gulf, mob-surf, plaza-funnel," and a "chain of
analogies" was to evoke the successive movements of an object. An analogy
represented to Marinetti "the immense love which joins distant and seemingly
hostile things. It is by means of very vast analogies that this orchestral style, at
once polychrome, polyphonic and polymorphous, can embrace the life of mat-
,, ter." (129) 2
'I '
If this was an "aesthetics of association," as Russell asserts (138), it would
seem to have little to do with the associationism of eighteenth-century
British psychology and aesthetics. Surrealism especially avoided ordinary
comparison and contrast; it had no interest in building complex from simple
ideas; it wished to intensify the image, weakened by centuries of reasonable
and correct analogy. What was crucial was the potential illogic of the analogy,
the convulsive unlike implicit in every like. The surrealist tried to bridge
unbridgeable gaps, to push analogy past its limits. The project claims a
political dimension as well: for the surrealist the bourgeois image follows a
logic of reasonable association; the bourgeoisie has no other logic at its
disposal; hence to disrupt that logic is already a revolutionary act. For Breton
it is the violence with which reason is transgressed that drives the image into
the unconscious and opens its utopia of desire for the revolution.
But despite the insistence on convulsions and breaks, on irrationality and
the disruption of logic, the surrealist image is always a form of relation. The
-
most remarkable thing about these images is that they make sense. Not
logical sense, certainly, but nonetheless an acceptable and at times quite
familiar order, an order eminently available for discourse. It is the instrumen-
talism of the image that is at issue here. Witness this fragment of an interroga-
tion of Desnos, reportedly answering while under an auto-hypnotic trance:
Q. What will you do in five years?

A. The River (from the final letter starts a drawing: wave, small boat, snow.
Written with much care) She is called Bergamote.
Q. What will Breton do in five years?
A. Picabia Gulf Stream Picabia ....
Q. What will Eluard do in five years?
A. 1,000,000 francs.
Q. What will he do with this money?
A. War to the fleet.
Q. Who is Max Ernst?
A. The deep river and the Spanish grammar. (Jean 103-105)
What must be noted is not that the answers do not folJow but that they do, not
that they are nonsense but that their presentation and arrangement lend them
a sense they might not otherwise be able to claim. The form of question and
answer provides this "pure psychic automatism" with a syntax in which its
discontinuities become meaningful. In surrealist games where the question
and answer are arrived at independently, one finds oneself as often as not
granting that the chance encounter of question and answer is proper, fitting.
Who is Benjamin Peret?

A rioting menagerie, a jungle, freedom.
Who is Andre Breton?
An alloy of humor and the sense of disaster, something like a top hat.
What is a kiss?
A divagation, everything capsizes.
What is daylight?
A naked woman bathing at nightfall.
What are eyes?
The night watchman in a perfume factory.
What is hovering between Suzanne and me [Breton]?
Great black threatening clouds.
What is a bed?
A fan quickly opened. The sound of a bird's wing.
What is a voyage?
A big glass sphere with several reflections.
What is equality?
A hierarchy like any other. (Jean 222-23)
We must assume that the images which have survived are an editorial sample,
the most successful of a vast series of images the vast majority of which
produced no affect. But anyone who has read the work of Peret and Breton
would probably grant that the imag~s identifyin~ them are in !heir way quite
reasonable, that a zoo in revolt, a JUn~le and hberty compn~e a perfectly
sensible surrealist description of the wddness of Peret. If the Juxtapositions
are extreme, they nonetheless maintain a cons~stent rh~toric; they build from
a limited vocabulary and reconcile apparently rrreconcdable terms by arrang-
ing them according to strict syntacti_cal ~ec_hanism~. ~at w~ e~counter
here is thus anything but an anarchic pnnc1ple: this 1s orgamzat10n, not
disorganization; regulation, not deregulation. A surrealist might respond that
the order of these juxtapositions follows the mind's own hidden order, but
perhaps in such exercises as these the mind is also training itself to contain
difference. The surrealist image incorporates everything it appears to dis-
solve. As Breton indicated, surrealism means more reality, not less, which is
precisely the logic of recuperation and precisely why surrealism was de-
ployed: in order to assimilate more reality into the discursive economy. The
"derealizations" (Alquie) of surrealism are a stage in the reassertion of the
real.
The syntax of the surrealist image is the syntax of recuperation. The
image brings together self and other and defines the other as a representation
of the difference of the self: Breton and Nadja form one image in the chapter
of Breton's autobiography named Nadja. (The same syntax orders diplo-
matic relations between hegemony and its margins.) It is the possession of
the other as well as the expansion of the self that is at stake in the surrealist
image, and if that possession is never absolute, if the other escapes and in
doing so reveals the je itself as un autre, difference is nonetheless compre-
hended, circumscribed, reincorporated, packaged in the commodity form.
MOVEMENT
Luigi Russolo's The Revolt (1911) is hardly the best futurist painting-
hardly the best, that is, of a kind of painting that many critics would find
hardly the best. There is something about this picture that would seem too
mechanical even for a futurist, for whom mechanical might be a term of
praise. Surely Boccioni's States of Mind (1911) or Severini's analytical Dy-
namic Hieroglyphs of the Bal Tabarin (1912) or-should one wish to keep the
subject matter more explicitly political-Boccioni 's Riot at the Gallery
(1910) or Riot (1911), or Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911) are all
richer, livelier, more representative explorations of futurist style and method.
There is something flat, rudimentary, dull about Russolo's faceless mob
pushing through an expressionist city, bracketed by two-dimensional, uni-
directional "force-lines." The painting's symbolism is especially crude. The
force-lines arrowed leftward before the angry mob represent in the most
s_imple-mindediconography "the irresistible force of the people's will" (Mar-
tm 118). A catalogue essay for a futurist exhibition at the Sackville Gallery in
London described the painting in these terms: "the collision of two forces,
tha~ of the revolutionary elements made up of enthusiasm and red lyricism
agamst the force and inertia and reactionary resistance of tradition. The
angles are the vibratory waves of the former force in motion" (Martin 118).
Red revolution drives violently through the drab colors and rigid structures of
the old city: nothing could be more predictable. All of which might be only to
say that Russolo is less painterly than his colleagues, less affected for one
thing by cubism (cf. Martin 118), a point some would hold in his favor. But the
painting is interesting despite its banality, or maybe because of it. For more
plainly than in any other futurist painting, here an art movement tries to
converge with a political movement by means of a figuration of movement,
and it is this very figuration that brings it to a halt.
The futurist apotheosis of motion is well known. Futurist manifestos
constantly exalt movement in the most frenetic terms and rhythms. "For us
the gesture will no longer be an arrested moment of the universal dynamism:
it will clearly be the dynamic sensation itself made eternal ... the universal
dynamism must be rendered as dynamic sensation." "Everything moves,
everything runs, everything changes rapidly. A figure is never motionless
before our eyes, but continuously appears and disappears. Because of the
persistence of the image upon the retina, moving objects are multiplied,
deformed, succeed each other like vibrations within the space through which
they run. Therefore a race horse does not have four legs; it has twenty and
their movements are triangular" ("Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,"
Martin 50-51). Boccioni: "Art does not seek to accumulate knowledge, the
artistic emotion demands drama. The emotion in modern painting and sculp-
ture sings of gravitation, displacement, the reciprocal attraction of forms,
masses and colors, that is to say, movement, that is to say, interpretation of
forces" (Martin 161). "Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and
the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motor bus rushes into the houses which it
passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus
and are blended with it" ("Technical Manifesto," Apollonio 28). The obses-
sion with movement was of course part of the futurist desire to make art, in
Rimbaud's phrase, absolutely modern. Art had to embody the excitement of
the modern city. The sculptural pose or still life could not represent the "fast
and frenzied" metropolitan experience that inspired futurism (Boccioni,
Apollonio 109).
The emphasis on experience is crucial: futurist art sought to represent the
experience rather than the pictorial image of urban life. "If we paint the
phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with upraised fists and the noisy
onslaught of cavalry are translated upon the canvas as sheaves of lines
corresponding to all the conflicting forces, following the general law of
violence of the picture. The force-lines must encircle and involve the spec-
tator so that he will in a manner be forced to struggle himself with the
persons in the picture" (Sackville Gallery catalogue, Tisdal! 41). Or as Bra-
gaglia wrote in his 1911 defense of futurist film, "we are not interested in the
precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and
analyzed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces
sensation" (Apollonio 38). Futurist art was neither a reprise of Muybridge's
cinematic analyses of human and animal movement nor a neo-cubist attempt

to open up a figure's three-dimensionality on a flat surface a~d set it in
motion. Cinema technology helped one to see ~ovement, but s~emg wasnot
enough. The futurist wanted to produce motion, to ~ompel 1t. Movement
should take place not only across the canvas but out mto the_gallery space
and into the street as well: painted movement was a way to stimulate move-
ment and not just to simulate it. The goal was to keep in motion the social
movement (in the broadest sense of the phrase) into which the artist's
experience propelled him.
It is not that the sole purpose of a painting like Russolo's was to incite a
riot. If the futurist painting or sculpture is occasionally a call to arms, it is
primarily one movement in a series or field of movements-movement as
such. The political iconography of Russolo's Revolt must be placed beside a
rather apolitical fascination with the dynamism of crowds. A riot is a limit of
this dynamism; from a certain perspective any busy street is a riot. In a sense
politics is reduced to an occasion for dynamism. Russolo's painting could
have been reproduced in reverse, in negative, for the rightward course of
futurism's postwar career. In the same manner Boccioni's Riot at the Gallery
is only vaguely connected to the ephemeral socialism of early futurist ide-
ology; it could as easily be a picture of shoppers rushing for a sale. What
matters most to futurism is not a movement's ideological commitment but its
sheer force. Futurism does not evaluate movements, it measures them. The
painting or sculpture is a "milieu-object" animated by and animating a
metaphysics of dynamism, of speed, which for the futurist exceeds the
velocity of politics; politics is only interesting when it approaches this
velocity. Speed is the ultimate measure and value; speed is its own ideology.
Hence the most famous futurist dictum:
We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the
beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like
serpents of explosive breath-a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is
more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace . ... We want to hymn man at the
wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the earth, along the circle of its
orbit. . . . Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, be-
cause we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. (Marinetti, Apollonio 21-22)
In the futurist project the canvas is an accelerator, a relay: it must produce

movement, which is the purpose of futurism, which is a movement.
The futurist work is thus the matrix of an attempt to forge a total
homology between the physics of the art object, the physics of the street, and
the cultural physics of the vanguard. Futurism's ideologically indifferent
fanaticism, its willingness to pretend to either socialism or fascism, to move
in whichever direction the force-lines of the social field impelled it, is insep-
arable from this apotheosis of movement and speed. Whatever social move-
ment would create more movement within the futurist movement, whatever
movement would allow the futurist movement to generate more movement in
paintings, texts, public riots, or internecine friction was embraced. Move-
ment as such wasprimary and to remain primary movement had to operate at
every level, on the canvas, in the cafe, in the street; and the futurist had to
move rapidly among these sites. Boccioni:
Fidelityto the movementmust be completeand without mentalreservations. . . .

It is essential that faith in complementarismocongenito be combinedwith such
intellectual qualities as are necessary for the complete futurist. We need young
men (and there are few) of secure faith and self-denial;of culture and of action
who aspire in their works-as yet uncertain-towards the total perfectionwhich
will indicate the radiant path of the ideal. (Martin61)
The painters' technical phrase, complementarismo congenito, the innate

complementarism of form, mediates between the form of the work and the
form of the movement. To have faith in such a formal principle already
assumes a faith in the complementarity of the futurists themselves. The
demand for a kind of regimental discipline may already anticipate futurist
fascism, though the fact is that no futurist ever practiced such devotion: the
logic of movement kept alliances and allegiances within the movement in
perpetual motion. These disputes could take an ironic turn: in 1914Carraand
Severini denounced the "tireless and not very reflective activity of Marinetti
and Boccioni, ... a profoundly passeiste ... nature" (Martin 185). The
futurist logic of movement demands that even movement must be left behind.
In Russolo's Revolt the crowd charging leftward into the future is thus as
much futurism itself-or rather a futurist idea of itself-as any historical
proletarian movement. But when one looks at the painting for a while, a
certain optical illusion begins to move over its surface, the sort of foreground-
background trompe-l'oeil that Dali found so amusing. For now it is no longer
clear that the crowd really is forcing these force-lines ahead of it, through the
city and into the future. The lines could just as easily be converging and
collapsing onto a crowd that is struggling vainly before being crushed. The
force begins to move back toward the right, pushing the mob before it,
engulfing it. Perhaps these lines come from somewhere beyond the frame,
projected by a superior power, but perhaps they are pieces of the frame itself
collapsing around the movement. For futurism not only depicts forms of
movement, it also frames them. Boccioni: "We proclaim the absolute and
complete abolition of the finite line and closed sculpture. Let us break open
the figure and enclose the environment in it" (Martin 126). To frame the
environment as/in art: does this revitalize the artwork or aestheticize the
world? For Tzara the answer lay in the brute fact that the futurist still
produced art objects. If the cubist sees a cup in three dimensions the
"futurist sees the same cup in movement, a succession of objects one beside
the other, and maliciously adds a few force-lines. This does not prevent the
canvas from being a good or bad painting suitable for the investment of
intellectual capital" (Motherwell 78). Even if Tzara's dismissal is not par-
ticularly good art history it indicates a crucial problem of the futurist enter-
L
prise. To set the painting in motion is also to frame movement in the Paint"
To engender movement and to bound it: this is the double-jointed move~ng.
of recuperative aesthetics. On one hand mobility, plasticity, velocity peO::nt
nent revolution; on the other the object, the position, the state~ent
manifestation: framed movement. "This illusory movement," Tzara c~ ~
t:-
dada; in futurism it is altogether an illusion, a representation of movemente
trick of the eye. At the core of the hypermechanized society reflected i,a
futurism there lies not automobilism, dynamism, or complementarism n:i
revolutionary urbanism or a simultaneity based on science-fiction visio~s of
total media access but the technology, indeed the technolatry of recupera-
tion. Futurist art enacts the historical dilemma of a metaphysics of movement
yoked to the production of works whose movement is completely absorbed
by the movement of capital.
FRAME
None of this is to suggest that the framed movement of futurism or of any

other avant-garde is cut off from so-called social reality. If one function of the
frame is to separate, to bracket, to distinguish, the frame is never fixed and
constant, it is never a matter of simple containment. The frame shifts and
expands, and this movement is economic. To set the frame itself in motion:
to pry it loose from its mute invisibility and free it for circulation; that too is
the task of the avant-garde.
In the beginning, let us say, the frame around a work of art was a means of
ratifying its difference from the world of mundane objects. Mallarme: "This
is the picture, and the function of the frame is to isolate it" (New Painting 31).
For the most part the frame was a silent function; only in special cases (Las
Meninas, Tris tram Shandy) did it draw attention to itself. In avant-garde
discourse it is usually Duchamp who is credited with first having opened the
frame, bringing it into critical focus and making it available for new projects.
The moment he placed a bicycle wheel upside down on a stool, the moment
he signed a urinal with a fictitious name and tried to install it, upside down, in
an important exhibition: the invention of the earliest readymades marks the
frame's entry into the avant-garde. To take a mundane object and propel it
virtually untreated into an art context and thence to call it art was above all a
feat of enframing. A technique for drawing in discourse itself.
The gesture is commonly supposed to have proven that anything can be
art. What the artist frames as art is art. For conservative critics the ready-
made has always seemed a terrorist act; one hears again and again that if
anything can be art then everything is art, hence nothing is art. But the
terrorism might be more in the critic's mind than in Duchamp's. There is little
doubt that he wanted to break open the classical frame, but it is difficult from
this vantage to maintain that he had any interest in doing away with it
altogether. Certainly his goal was to expand the field in which he worked, as
well as to reflect on the production or rather the nomination of certain
objects as art, but it is hardly the case that for Duchamp every object wasart.
The Germof Consent I IOI
A principle, an aesthetic of selection was crucial. What he chose wasproper
to him, washis; the readymade was the personal expression, among other
things, of his fabled and doubtless largely fabricated laziness, that idio-
syncratic economy by means of which he sought to make his art with the
least effort possible, without the whole sweaty Rodinianmelodrama of labor.
"I like breathing better than working."J It is likely that provoking fears of
total cultural anarchy, making the fear of framelessness visible, amused
Duchamp,but he was never entirely dada.
What all the bickering about whether everythingor nothing is art some-
times occludes is that Duchamp's readymade was meant above all to frame
framing itself. It was an act of mind intended to emphasize the fact that art
must be an act of mind, that it must be "intellectual"; it was a wayto debunk
the cult of the oil painter, that "bete" with his "retinal" pretensions and
fetishized "olfactory" paraphernalia. Duchamp's gestures were never mere
gestures; they were designed to reveal the agency of the gesture, to reveal
how much art is a composite of such gestures. The readymade framed the
fact-one of the abidinghalf-truthsof avant-gardediscourse-that the paint-
ing's frame is a frame of reference, a frame of mind, an epistemological
horizon; that "the painting[is] a functionof the frame (and not the reverse)"
(Krauss 191 ). (Todayan entire theoretical apparatus has grown up around
such gestures; Derrida'sworkon the parergonwillstand here as an index of a
vast enterprise.)Duchampmade visiblethe waythe frame makes visible,the
wayit is alwaysa kind of window.(Theanalogybetweenwindowand picture
is an ancient trope, one in fact central to Duchamp'sown oeuvre: The Large
Glass, Fresh Widow.)He showsthe showing.
His reframings also indicate, at least in a preliminary manner, what
framesthe frame of mind:discursiveand institutionalspace,formalizedmost
effectivelyin the whiteeconomicspaceof the gallery,the museum.Duchamp
framed this space too, from the inside out. In his shiny, white-covered,
rectilinearbook, Inside the White Cube, Brian O'Dohertycurates a polem-
ical exhibit of Duchampiangestures. At the 1938New York International
Exhibitionof Surrealism,Duchampsuspended twelve hundred coal bags
from the ceiling; in 1942 he wove a Mile of String in a complex web
throughoutthe galleryhousingthe First Papersof Surrealismexhibition(68,
75).The formerwork,by meansof an illusionof weight,madethe exhibition
space seem threateningand thereby intenselyvisible.(Whencefollowsany
numberof stock treatisesabouthowthis oppressiveweightsymbolizesother
sorts of oppressionfrom above,about his heroic subversiveinversionof art
contexts, etc. And why are so many readymadesproduced by installing
somethingupside down?)The secondworkexhibitedexhibitionspace itself
as an obstruction.The string was in part an allegoryof the velvetrope: it
redrewthe gallery as a space in which art is both offeredand withheld,
renderedsimultaneouslyaccessibleand inaccessibleto its audience.(The
workhad other featuresas well:the fact that Duchampused a mileof string,
forinstance-or didhe onlyclaimit wasa mile?-mightreflecthis interestin
\
102 / THE TuEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
measurement.) O'Doherty is especially struck by the first installation; for

him it marks
the first time an artist subsumed an entire gallery in a single gesture-and
managed to do so while it was full of other art .... By exposing the effect of
context on art, of the container on the contained, Duchamp recognized an area of
art that hadn't yet been invented. This invention of context initiated a series of
gestures that "develop" the idea of a gallery space as a single unit, suitable for
manipulation as an aesthetic counter. From this moment on, there is a seepage of
energy from art to its surroundings. (69)
The bags hanging from the ceiling and the string webbing the gallery space
make its walls visible as such and hence make visible the fact that "the
history of modernism is intimately framed by that space." These installations
inaugurate an age in which "the history of modem art can be correlated with
changes in that space and the way we see it. We have now reached a point
where we see not the art but the space first" (14).
Frames around frames. The gallery is frame as imprimatur, sign of value,
seal of judgment; the wooden frame around the canvas is an instantiation of
this institutional frame. Krauss:
This institution of the frame is a function of what could be called the Institution of
the Frame. It is an act of excision that simultaneously establishes and reaffirms
given conceptual unities-the unity of coherence, the unity of the enframed
simple, the unity of the artist's personal style, his oeuvre, his intentions-and
these tum out to be the very unities on which the institution of art (and its history)
,,,
"
presently depends .... The notion of the painting as a function of the frame (and
not the reverse) tends to shift our focus from being exclusively, singularly, riveted
on the interior field. Our focus must begin to dilate, to spread. As the boundary
between inside (painting) and outside (frame ... ) begins to blur and to break
down, room is made for the possibility of experiencing the degree to which
painting-as-simple is a constructed category. (193, 191)
In the progress of the avant-garde another frame, another framed space and
space of framing is broken open and framed. Hence recent artists follow
Duchamp in producing works designed to frame and criticize the space that
frames them. "The art of the seventies locates its radical notions not so much
in the art as in its attitudes to the inherited 'art' structure, of which the gallery
is the prime icon." "With postmodemism, the gallery space is no longer
'neutral.' The wall becomes a membrane through which aesthetic and com-
mercial values osmotically exchange .... Context provides a large part of
late modem and postmodern art's content" (O'Doherty 77-79). Haacke
extends Duchamp's lessons about museum space into a political critique of
specific institutions' real ownership and control; Smithson, Heizer, Christo,
and others attempt to break out of the white cube into open space. Though
one might wonder about these projects when pieces of desert begin turning
up in museums. One of the commonest complaints about earthworks: they
-
turn the desert into yet another white cube, another annex of the white
economy.
In this history of modernism as a series of transgressions of or escapes
through successive institutions of the frame, every transgression is an entry
into yet another containment. With each break the frame re-forms itself at a
further limit. To break the frame in art is to frame the break, to reframe every
space one enters. That is Duchamp's lesson: the frame is something the artist
always does. There is no outside-the-frame in art. The artist's desire to be free
of the frame is a function of the frame's need to expand. Painting and
sculpture reach out through gallery space, then out of the gallery into the
street, the desert, the human body, always pushing the frame ahead of them
(another reading of Russolo's Riot). What O'Doherty calls the "dilemma of
the picture plane and its tropism toward outward extension" (23) is not
arrested by the gallery's walls, nor by any physical walls anywhere. Every
discourse is a frame and every frame is a space of discourse. The avant-
garde's attempt to represent this space subversively and therefore to break it
open is only a trope of the space. It is a way to frame transgression itself. Far
from bringing us to a nihilistic state in which nothing can any longer be art,
Duchamp's careful reframings help set the frame loose to become a more
flexible, expansive, comprehensive tool for cultural absorption, a net thrown
out into cultural space for greater and greater catch.
COLLAGE
The impact of collage is enormous: more than any other formal device of
the avant-garde, collage and its mutations (photomontage, assemblage, sam-
pling, etc.) entered the culture at large. Collage is everywhere, from the
gallery to the preschool to the highgloss ad; in this age of the putative
disappearance of master narratives it is a masterform in its own right. One
reason for this success is that collage is both loaded and empty: a rich formal
apparatus, a compelling critique of pictorial convention, and a blank on
which any number of cultural programs can be inscribed. Standard theories:
1. Collage erodes the boundaries between art and life. The first materials
of collage were appropriated from the street, the cafe, the rubbish heap:
trivia, detritus, the banal and castoff, the inconsequential represented as such
and thus given new consequence; shredded newspaper headlines, fragments
of anatomical and mechanical drawings torn from magazines, an image of
chair caning (it is crucial, we are told, that what Picasso incorporated into
Still Life with Chair Caning was not real caning but its representation). The
enthusiasm for the ordinary that motivates the still life-the painter arranging
objects on a table is already a pioneer of collage-enters collage as a critique
of art's high/low dichotomy. Collage attacked the cult of the masterpiece, the
parnassian, the bourgeois-sublime: it produced the masterpieces of this
attack. It was a way to show that all art, a marble bust of Napoleon in the
Louvre as much as the rustiest junk sculpture, was a collage of images culled
from the trash heap of culture. Collage also extends art's ancient quest for the
..
◄
sublime out of the studio and into the street. It is a continuation of th

impressionist plein air movement. The artist returns from the banlieu to dri~
through the city's passages or the flea market at Saint-Ouen in search of
some otherwise worthless object that speaks to the soul, then introduces this
fetish into the work (Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris). (The Schwitters Merzbau
is the Gesamtkunstwerk of this fetishism.) Under the cover of this spiritual
quest a familiar endocolonial project carries out its acquisitions, revalues the
worthless, recuperates the everyday.
2. The juxtapositions of collage are readily assimilated into an aesthetic of
erotic encounters. Here we need only note, as does nearly everyone who
crosses this terrain (e.g., Perloff 51), that if the word "collage" (colle) literally
means glued together, in colloquial French it also means shacking up: a cozy
mix of erotic and illicit. Breton and N adj a are a proto-collage.
3. Tzara produced texts by cutting up newspapers and reading out the
fragments in random order; Arp allegedly tore up an unsatisfactory drawing
and threw the pieces to the floor, then pasted them as they had fallen. (The
symmetries of the work in question belie this account.) This. convergence of
collage and chance or random composition became a central avant-garde
device and yet another way to attack authorial authority. The attack could be
ascribed to any collage, random or not: the construction of pictures or texts
from elements not invented by the artist set a certain "automatism and
anonymity" (Hugnet, Motherwell 158) against the cults of originality and
genius. But by the same token (the coinage of recuperation) the logic of
collage could be reversed: the collagist could claim to be just as great an
original as any romantic artist. In surrealism chance encounters and random
composition were linked to a psychology of unconscious will; collage was
recruited by an aesthetics of selection, like that which animated the ready-
made. My chance is not the same as your chance, Duchamp remarked. Or
witness this statement from a contemporary collagist, Joel Lipman:
Every word and every fresh mark impressed upon the page is an aspect of my
personality as a poet devoted to visual literature. While I neither draw nor write in
fashioning my bookworks, I've enormous breadth of resources-several dozen
fonts of type, some rubber, some wood, some lead, some oddities like plastic
letters or cookie cutters-the letters can be originally used so that I, my artist's
personality and concerns, am every bit as evident as in a linear poem or standard
work of fiction.4
The debate between these two theories of collage, the anti-expressive and the
expressive, continues to profit both parties.
4. Collage, and especially photomontage, were seen as political interven-
tions. This is a tactic of Berlin dada, refined especially by Heartfield. The
juxtaposition of images from official systems of representation (propaganda,
advertising, etc.) could be redeployed dialectically, as the contemporary
photomontagist Klaus Staeck insists:
-
text-picture montages generally embody a dialectical contradiction, employing
irony to generate curiosity in the viewer.... The montage technique is especially
suited to exposing hypocrisy. Instead of trying to refute all advertising lies, Staeck
feels it is enough to make people look behind the colorful pictures and be
suspicious. . . . Staeck's work serves as a kind of counter-propaganda ... A
poster has been successful when it has triggered a fundamental discussion about
critical conditions and possibilities for improvements
Juxtaposition exposes contradiction; in mass-reproduced photomontages

like Staeck's posters it provides a tool for the education of the masses and
thereby also for the politicization of art. But this exposure is made possible
by the image's circulation in the discursive economy; it is the circulation of a
"better" ideology by the same means.
5. At the "end of art history," as Hans Belting conceives it, the artist no
longer has a
fixed distance from past art. He is no longer himself supposed to occupy a stable
position within a continuing history of art. As a consequence, he feels free to
undermine the positions assigned to past works of art by art history, as they are
reflected in the (ideal and universal) order of the museum. Along with his distance
from past art he also lost his stance of opposition to it; he now decomposes or
reintegrates it just as he wishes, via the techniques of montage and co Hage.6
Collage dismantles the integrity of the traditional order of art, to which it

thereby consigns itself.
6. It is often claimed that, more than any other artform, collage is capable
of representing the chaos of modern life, the fragmentation, discontinuity,
and speed of transition from image to image that mark the citizen's daily
experience of the street, or of that most contemporary thoroughfare, the
mass media. The same chaos can be read, in varying accounts, as a cause for
celebration or lament, as beautiful anarchy or hideous decay. In either case
collage emphasizes the way aesthetic continuities can mediate the discon-
tinuities of experience. The collocation of fragments produces a coherent
picture of fragmentation.
7. If collage puts the street into the artwork, it also teaches us to see the
street as a collage, which is currently to say, as a kind of text, a "forest of
signs."7 Collage is a mode of the ongoing textualization of the real. The
medieval figure of the world as a unitary and coherent book gives way to the
modem figure of the world as a fragmentary collage-text.
8. As for the outer world, so for the inner one: collage also claims to
provide updated associationist maps of the unconscious. It becomes a formal
allegory of deep psychic structures figured through the primary collage
process of condensation, displacement and so on; the mind is structured like
a collage. Here collage, like the frame, is more than a formal device, it is an
epistemology in the service of the white economy.
9, Collage is deployed as a masterform by such theorists as Rosalind
)06 / THE THEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
Krauss in poststructuralist analyses of representation. "The extraord·

contribution of collage is that it is the first instance within the pictorial airtnary
8
anything like a systematic· exp loration. of t he con d"1t1ons
· of representabir of
. " (34) :
entailed by the sign lty
The collage element as a discrete plane is a bounded figure; but as such it .

figure of a bounded field which it enters the ensemble only to obscure. The fiel~.a
thus constituted inside itself as a figure of its own absence, an index of a mate -•~
presence now rendered _literally inv~sibl~. The collage element performs ~:
occultation of one field m order t? mtr?Ject the figure _of a new field, but to
introject it as figure-a surface that 1sthe image of an eradicated surface. It is thi
eradication of the original surface and the reconstitution of it through the figure0}
its own absence that is the master term of the entire condition of collage as a
system of signifiers.... As system, collage inaugurates a play of differences
which is both about and sustained by an absent origin: the forced absence of the
original plane by the superimposition of another plane, effacing the first in order
to represent it. ... [C]ollage operates in direct opposition to modernism's search
for perceptual plenitude and unimpeachable self-presence. Modernism's goal is to
objectify the formal constituents of a given medium, making these, beginning with
the very ground that is the origin of their existence, the objects of vision. Collage
problematizes that goal, by setting up discourse in place of presence, a discourse
founded on a buried origin, a discourse fueled by absence. (37-38)
A system not only of endless supplementarity but of endless exchange.

Absence keeps the frame ajar, but this absence is framed by a theory that is
itself then reified and circulated. The chain of supplements is circumscribed
in theory by the discursive economy, the same economy that tries to fill the
absence at the core of the Picasso collage with enormous quantities of cash.
Collage "represents the moment at which the logic of consumption definitely
entered the work of art. " 8 It is thus the figure of both the infinite play of
difference and the commodity's continual conscription of that play. The
perpetual displacement of the collage-sign is itself displaced by the law of the
commodity which at every point effectively frames the work of art.
IO. A collage of theories: and here add one more fragment to the com-
position: collage is a blueprint for recuperation, a map of endocolonization, a
program for encoding the marginal without eliminating its utility as margin.
To empty art of its old semiotic content and fill it with cultural marginalia is
to incorporate the margin and give it a new value. Collage thus brings
together the previous figures-juxtaposition, movement, frame-in a sort of
meta-collage. It juxtaposes fragmented and discontinuous signs in order to
develop a syntax for normalizing their contradictions; it represents move-
ment in order to recuperate movement; it assimilates and frames an enor-
mous variety of disparate material. Far from being a formal utopia in which
high and low, art and life, psychic and public mingle easily, collage is a "false
democracy" (Ron Silliman).9 It is a miniature of the gallery, the museum, the
colloquium, a still from the film of circulation and exchange, the most radical
form of the institution of art itself. Collage is both a window onto what
>
The Germ of Consent I l07

escapes art and its trap. It is a sign of this truth: in culture every exit is a
revolving door.
MANIFESTO
The manifesto not only inaugurates an avant-garde movement, it stands as
its epitaph. This essay has consistently argued that within what Debord
called the society of the spectacle no coherent representation, no discursive
manifestation of opposition can survive as opposition. Hence the manifesto's
peculiar significance, for it is here that an avant-garde first shows forth,
makes clear, exposes all its positions, all its proposed negations and escapes.
The manifesto is a ground of both theoretical resistance and dialectical
entanglement; it is intelligence transmitted to the enemy, a formal contract
under which the anti submits itself to the law of discourse. And what is at
issue here is not just this or that particular manifesto but the tendency toward
the manifesto, the will-to-discourse at the heart of every avant-garde project
and work.
The manifesto ranks with collage as a preeminent avant-garde device.
Political manifestos were of course commonplace long before the avant-garde
took up the form and turned it to its own purposes. In the revolutionary
movements of the nineteenth century the manifesto served a number of
purposes: to clarify ideology and consolidate positions of power within a
movement, to advertise for comrades, to bait the bourgeoisie: all tasks
adopted by art movements in the twentieth century, plus a few more. The
manifesto form had to be enhanced, intensified, adorned; its rhetorical cru-
dity had to be refined. By the time of futurism the manifesto held a place of
special privilege. Of all avant-garde forms it was the one that reached the
widest audience earliest: witness again the publication of the first futurist
manifesto. Or this: one Sunday in July of 1910, Marinetti and his cohorts
threw eight hundred thousand leaflets entitled Contra Venezia passatista
from the campanile, causing a minor riot. (The manifestation was a way to
manifest the rhetoric of the manifesto.) Avant-garde manifestos became a
common sight on the public walls of every European capital. For Marinetti in
particular the manifesto was a favored form: he exalted the "art of making
manifestos" and readings from his manifestos became a regular part of
futurist performances and public demonstrations (Tisdall 98-108). "Even
Apollinaire conceded in 1916 that the Italian excelled at this form of writing,
and he and many others later maintained that Marinetti's manifestos of 1909-
15w~re his finest literary performances" (Martin 36).
. Hts finest literary performances: it is precisely under the aegis of phrases
like this that projects for political subversion come to accommodate the
aestheticization of politics. Perloff is especially anxious to promote this
process:
To giveone's text "the form of Manifesto" ... was to create what was essentially
a new literary genre, a genre that might meet the needs of a mass audience even
108 / TuE TuEORY-OEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
as, paradoxically, it insisted on the avant-garde, the esoteric, the antibourgeois

The futurist manifesto marks the transformation of what had traditionally been ~
vehicle for political statement into a literary, one might even say a quasi-poetic
construct. (81-82)
Perloff further defines the manifesto as a form in which "to talk about art
becomes equivalent to making it" (90): art and art discourse merge in the
manifesto, which thus "paves the way for the gradual erosion of the distinc-
tion between 'literary' and 'theoretical' texts that becomes a central problem-
atic in our own critical discourse" (115).
It is not just that manifestos come to be written artfully but that a literary
standard mediates a political one. The manifesto assigns a discursive value to
alterity; subversion is played out as publicity. The manifesto foregrounds
ideology and then reframes it as art. It is the primary form in which the
politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics learn to eclipse
one other. In the manifesto the avant-garde can echo the mass call to arms
.,
.. without having to abandon the confines of the cenacle. The manifesto is an
.,
.,I allegory of political organization that dissipates the pressure for organiza-
tion: that is why it was so easy for Marinetti to impersonate his movement
before it existed. Even the hyperkinetic rhetoric of the manifesto is a gear in
.,
1
the dialectical machine. Poggioli quotes Trotsky's remark that the "hyper-
.,
,, bolic image reflects, up to a point, the fury of our times," a fury Poggioli
,,
.,
t,
identifies with the avant-garde's "attempt to surpass the limit of man and
nature" (182-83). Such imagery domesticates the excess to which it aspires.
The path of avant-garde hyperbole traces the frontier of recuperation. At the
limit of this rhetorical inflation hyperbole exhausts itself.
Throughout his life, in manifesto after manifesto, Breton defended the
position of surrealism, perhaps never realizing that these very defenses
rendered the movement indefensible. As collage frames fragmentation, so the
manifesto frames the anti. What the manifesto makes manifest is a position
that is thereby appropriated and set in motion within conventional cultural
dialectics. The real value of the manifesto is the force with which it recuper-
ates and circulates the language of resistance. The manifesto is a guide to
governing the exceptions it endorses: a 'pataphysical handbook.
ERRASING
But what if there were a way to circumvent these pairings and framings
and manifestations? What if there were another figure for what once was the
project of the avant-garde?
Surrealist apocrypha: one day Breton and Picabia cooperated in the
following manner: while Picabia drew a picture, Breton followed behind,
erasing the drawing as it appeared. This work is exemplary in several ways: as
collaboration (anti-individualism, communalism), as a destruction integral to
the work itself (anti-object), as ephemera (antitradition), as a way for two
artists to control and contain the work strictly as a form of communication
between them, in effect protecting it from reification by destroying it at the
point of origin (antidiscourse, anti-economy). Today this collaboration stands
as a strange but powerful emblem for a posthumous avant-garde, reinscribing
and erasing itself, out of earshot, beyond the pale, at a never-secure distance
from the white economy.
Some thirty years later this act was repeated. Rauschenberg decided to
erase a work by an established artist and persuaded De Kooning to supply
him with a suitable drawing. Are these two projects commensurable?
Rauschenberg's erasure might seem more destructive because it was not
integral to the drawing, because it eradicated a work of considered value. (We
are assured that Rauschenberg did not use De Kooning's scrap paper; the
work had to be valuable for the erasure to have any value.) But whereas
Picabia and Breton apparently saw their work as rigorously anti-art,
Rauschenberg seems to have conceived his within certain conventional art
paradigms. He describes the craft involved in the project, his experimenta-
tion with different kinds of erasers to find the right medium, the labor
involved, etc.; and the erased De Kooning is now regularly displayed along
with the rest of Rauschenberg's oeuvre. The relationship between De Koon-
ing and Rauschenberg also bears little resemblance to the one between
Picabia and Breton: conspiracy gives way to a parody of mentorship, of the
anxiety of influence, an anxiety doubtless eased by the precursor's generous
participation in his demise.
Are we then to privilege Breton-Picabia over Rauschenberg-De Kooning?
Are the surrealists more authentic, more radical, more coherent than the
abstract expressionists? Foolish to pretend to separate them, for even if the
earlier work seems more radical, both are now equally fables of artlore,
indeed, as this essay witnesses, episodes in the same narrative. In both cases
the defetishization of the object refetishizes it on another, discursive level.
But even so: the figure of the eraser.
b
after
Crisis
for Foucault the histo~ of prisons does not reveal the suppression of
riminality so much as its careful reproduction within an elaborate institu-
~ionaland discipl~nary struc~ure. In a similar 1_11anner the history of sexuality
does not reveal its repression so much as its abundant deployment in a
discourse operating as an agent of the larger social project of controlling
bodies and desires. In neither case are differences canceled; rather they are
reproduced in manageable forms and circulated within networks of produc-
tive discursive relations. Much of Foucault's later work describes social
institutionsthat function not by eliminating differences-although it is often
convenient.for them to appear to do so-but by incorporating them, by
representingand thus regulating difference through strategic technologies of
power/knowledge.What we have seen in the history of the avant-garde is an
analogous,in fact an interrelated, project. The avant-garde is one mechanism
of a general organization of social forces that operates in large part by means
of the careful distribution of differences, imbalances, oppositions and nega-
tions, and that regulates them through a variety of more or less effective
discursiveagencies in the so-called public sphere and along the margin itself.
The avant-garde is marginal only insofar as margins are central to the econ-
omy; it is a relay point through which the other is incorporated, the hidden
disclosedand hence enclosed in discourse. 1
Nonetheless the avant-garde does not fit quite neatly into the social order
modeledin Foucault's genealogies. The obituary dislocates it. Imagine this
scenario:a criminologist calls a press conference to announce that crime is
dead, that it died of its very proliferation, that it died precisely because
everyoneknew it existed, because we are surrounded by images of crime and
thisspectacle.renders criminality a mere hoax. After the press conference he
returns to his laboratory to find it vandalized, his research destroyed, his
equipmentlooted; he is not greatly bothered by the destruction of so super-
fluous a facility as a laboratory for studying what no longer exists and
~erhaps never did. And when the press turns up at his devastated lab ~d
.e~ands to know whether the existence of people who could lay waste to his
~: s wo~kproves the absurdity of his ideas, he replies that, on the cont~ary,
certamty that these events would be reported and discussed only ratifies
th
e truth of his theory. Such a scientist would be a laughingstock. In fact the
reverse
. seems true: what everyone beheves• · that there is
is · more an d more
cnme, that the very discourse of criminality the public obsession with tales
and · and images of crime actually' contributes to the spread 0 f
. .theones
cruntnalbehavior, and all this talk helps to generate more funding, more
113
...
facilities, more personnel, more technology for evaluating, proce •

institutionalizing criminality. Any theory claiming that crime is erad~smganct
. al I . f . icatedby
an mtern og1c o overrepresentat1on would be considered a trave t
t h h · s y. And
ye ashwhi~ave seefn,as we seheeveryw er~ m ava~t-garde discourse, it is very
muc t s sort o travesty t at charactenzes obituaries of the avant-
·
The very mnovatlons· an d transgressions
· on which cultural discourgarded ·
d d ~ . . al . h se e-
pen e 1or its surv1v are said to ave used themselves up in a vast
. th at shou Id Iogically
pro d uctlon · have put everyone out of business Exover-
that business has never been better. · cept
So after c_rossing this over~eveloped, overtraveled, mapped and meta-
mapped te~am we se~m to amve at nothing more interesting or inevitable
than a logic~ conclusion, at one and the same time egregiously silly and
perfectly senous,_ a non-event and an actual catastrophe. What changed
between the heroic age of the avant-garde and today is the history of the
avant-garde itself We have witnessed too many frontiers that turned out to
have been cultural centers from the outset, too many negations that were
always already nods of assent: hence no more faith in the anti's ability to stay
anti, in its power to rise above the exchange equations of cultural economics.
Avant-garde discourse is the vanguard of this lost faith, this consciousness of
.. 'I
' .'l the apparently unlimited capacity of recuperation. In this sense the avant-
garde turns out to be en avant· of an unprecedented epoch, a development
unforeseen in the manifestos of its earlier age: the contraction, the collapse,
'•·
, I'
.I
the theory-death of the very dialectical device by which the modem era
(beginning wherever one wishes to mark it) has always sustained itself. What
,J . the obituaries promote is a strange threat-perhaps fictive, perhaps both
fictive and true-to the manifest order of cultural discourse: the recuperation
not just of phenomenal or operational differences, not just of x or y dif-
,,
,, ference, but of every cultural-aesthetic difference, of difference per se; not
'
11 just the demystification of innovation or opposition, but a real (because
represented) change, the closure-by-disclosure of their possibility. A stage
where the differential and synthetic movements hitherto believed necessary
for cultural progress-a play of differences that could only be maintained by
a kind of blindness, the illusion that each new form might constitute a real
break with the system-no longer seem viable. Decadence, perversion, non-
sense, chance, subversion, transgression, every conceivable disorder: all
have been put to work. This is what Jonathan Crary indicates when he wri~es
that the "liqu~faction of signs and commodities has advanced to a pomt
where liquidity no longer spawns the nomadic or the fugitive." 2 Thenceforth
negation appears only so that it can be disappeared (to appropriate a phrase
already recuperated from the lexicon of state terrorism by pop stars and
cultural theorists). In many cases it does not appear at all because it cannot;
it has no frame, no logic to support it; any exception to the rule is simp~Y
ruled out. Even if it exists-insofar as it does exist-it cannot exist: that is
the absurd situation of alterity at the end. It survives in discourse only as ~
rhetorical style, a formal support for writing such as this, at the level 0
--
Crisis I 115
certain insistent but empty syntactical forms: on one hand on the other, not
this but that. It survives as an implausible alibi for more production and as a
way to keep predicating its own demise.
There has never been a project for delegitimating cultural practice that did
not tum immediately, or sooner, into a means of legitimation. The widely
disseminated awareness of this unlimited legitimability has eroded the ruse of
opposition. The de~th ~f the avant-ga~de ~ight thus be the most visible
symptom of a certam disease of the dialectic, a general delegitimation of
delegitimation. One might call it a crisis were it not for the fact that it
announces an end to crisis theories of art. The crisis-urgency of the avant-
garde repeated itself so often, with such intensity and so little in the way of
actual cataclysm, that it wore itself out. We are now inured to the rhetoric
and market-display of crises. Crisis is normative, hence there is no more
crisis; only its exhaustion is critical. What we witness then is a crisis of the
end of crisis: a delegitimation crisis (to counterphrase Habermas), the col-
lapse of the technology of operational differentiation. A situation in which
difference can be reproduced but can no longer be different. A situation
characterized by the acceleration of the rate of recuperation past the rate of
differentiation; the theory-total instrumentalization of opposition; the de-
polarization of traditional terms of cultural production and analysis; the
entropic leveling of points of exchange within the discursive economy; the
supersaturation of the dialectic; the whiting out of cultural maps.
It is essential-it is also symptomatic-to admit that to speak of such a
crisis is to indulge in that inflated discourse of inflation which Charles
Newman identifies with postmodemism; and to indulge it not distantly, not
just ironically, but because it is the grotesquely proper tone of post-avant-
garde discourse (no rhetoric is more inflated than Newman's own).3 To speak
thus is to insist on an event that never took place, that can be readily
controverted by mountains of evidence (thousands of avant-garde works,
thousands of dialectical tracts) but nonetheless continues to exert itself as
real. A theory-death. Nothing really comes to an end in the economy of this
death, there is not even a deceleration in the velocity of exchange, in fact
everything is continually recycled in an accelerating resurrection of argu-
ments and styles. The end of art as a parody of Hegel: art dissolved not in the
Spirit but in commerce. Here the supreme and final form of consciousness is
not of the Absolute but of the absolute impotence of negation, and when this
impotence is fully realized, the collapse of the system into an absurd com-
merce in theories of its own death. At the end of history, at the culmination of
the dialectic, at the point where structuration is totalized: an interminable
discourse of termination.
If difference has been buried in avant-garde discourse, it would seem to

have resurfaced powerfully in what is commonly identified as poststruc-
tural.ism.For us the fundamental problem of the dialectic has been the very
efficiency with which it manages the differences on which it depends; the
t
dialectic overmasters the differential movements from which it is co .

eroding their. force until difference is barely conceivable. But at lens~t~ted,
Nietzsche a certain philosophical project has been concerned with~ st~ce
free of the dialectic's self-defeating tyranny; poststructuralism reprereaking
. . f h. . k dk . sents a
cu Immabt10no t_ ts pdroJect,d~way_to mar an eep m play a difference that
cannot e cons1gne to a 1a1ect1ca1 economy. The following passage fi
Michael Ryan's attempt to establish a theoretical rapprochement bet:om
. an d marx1sm
deconstructlon . descn 'bes D em 'das' mterest
. eenf
in the possibility0
a nondialectical other:
Identity presupposes alterity; the selfsame exists only in its relation to its other
which, in classical dialectics, is always its opposite or negative. The second ste~
of the traditional speculative dialectics, however, annuls this insight and sublates
difference and alterity or contradiction. The other-relation that troubles the simple
self-identity of an entity or a concept is negated, preserved, and turned into a
moment in what is now a process of attaining a more complex, concrete self.
identity, as opposed to the simple self-identity one began with .... It managesto
incorporate, and therefore neutralize, its own worst enemy-difference and al-
terity, as part of its own coming into being.
This "cunning" is perhaps why a thinker such as Derrida finds the hegelian
dialectic at once fascinating and pernicious. It recognizes the mediated nature of
all supposedly proper entities, their constitutive expropriation (nothing is self-
sufficient), but it orders this potentially heterogeneous differential into a systemof
simple binary oppositions or contradictory negations (Being-Non-Being, Cause-
Effect) and suppresses the heterogeneity of alterity and difference in favor of a
theology of truth as self-identity or "propriation," which arises from the process
of mediation-that is, the return of the other-relation into the self-identity of the
entity, concept, or subject. Hegel's concept of mediation thus represents an
annulment of the mediacy or other-relation (not negation or opposition, but
differentiation) Derrida would like to use as a lever for subverting metaphysical
self-identity.4
There is no need to rehearse yet again the whole critique of logocentrism and
the metaphysics of presence that this account represents. But the enormous
amount of material from which one could draw in this connection, the vast
discourse on the possibility of such a difference in virtually every post st rur
turalist thinker, subthinker, and journalist writing today (all these ban Y
introductions and grafts [corporate mergers] of deconstruction and • · .) ~re
themselves signs of the pyrrhic success of deconstruction, its uncanny vt~f
tory against itself, the cunning with which it too recuperates difference.
Derrida's remarkable explorations of the nondialectical other, his move from
the anti to differance, are a philosophical counterpart of dada's groping for an
anti that is no longer merely the thrall of the dialectic and hence no longer
anti at all, it is also crucial to note that in either case discourse now targ:s
this other as well for recuperation. It is a project on which Ryan is alreaify
quite advanced: the tacit development of a discourse that can profitably re.y
non- or postdialectical difference once the classical dialectic has been dis-
-
Crisis I 117
credited. The institutionalization of deconstruction as a rhetoric for artistic
production ?o ~ess t~an as an academic-critical methodology, and the eleva-
tion of the s1gmfier difference to brandname status, produce a curious sort of
supplement. The difference of difference is erased. Or to be more precise:
since the very language o~e em~loys for disclosing difference is always
already employed by the d1scurs1ve economy, difference takes on a dual
status, both open and shut, undecidable but completely circumscribed not
.
only by the metaphysics on whose ruined ground it is doomed to wander, not
'
only by logocentrism, but by a sort of econocentrism as well. The notorious
play of differences is after all not mandated only by the indeterminacy of this
or that signifying subject; it is mandated and mediated by the economic
character of discourse. Hence on one hand a breach with every metaphysics
of totality, on the other the astonishing ease with which the discourse of
difference, undecidability, marginality, and so on has been adopted and put to
work. It is as if deconstruction offered philosophy and criticism a means of
closing off, and closing themselves off from, the very difference they had to
invoke, as if in the end the invocation was above all a means toward this
closure. Difference is theoretically irreducible but the very process of the-
orizing it reduces it to a discursive commodity; the attempt to put the logic of
difference to work cannot overcome the exhaustion of every discursive logic.
A historical coincidence places the death of the avant-garde and the end
of its difference at the same moment that difference began to take on such
enormous importance as a critical-philosophical term in the various cultural
and academic enterprises that arose from poststructuralism. If the avant-
garde was the vanguard of the conversion of certain deep and abiding cultural
differences in the public sphere, then institutional deconstruction in all its
forms might represent a further stage of this process, carried on after the
avant-garde expired. One could even assign an approximate date to this
event: 1967-69, a time when avant-garde obituaries were proliferating; when
the new left had arrived at a critical impasse, a delegitimation crisis that it
wasnot to survive intact; and when Derrida's first major texts (De la gram-
matologie, L'Ecriture et la difference, La Voix et le phenomene) were just
being published. The evacuation of the anti in advanced art can be situated
alongside the defeat of the quasi-revolutionary movements of the sixties, the
putative end of the new left spilling over into the cultural experience of the
same people. Avant-garde endgames are often played out at moments when
faith in or theoretical alliances with progressive social movements break
down. Furthermore, within a few years of the spectacular events of May 1968
academic-poststructuralist discourse effectively refocused what had pre-
viously been the radical difference of anti-art. This is not to say that theory
gave up real difference for a merely textual one but that the fundamentally
discursive character of that difference revealed itself later on in an in-
creasingly self-conscious and refined form. It might also be the case that, to
paraphrase Baudrillard, when there is so much talk about difference it is
because there is no more difference.s Difference still "exists," in some (non-
I 18 / THE THEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
ontological) sense of the word, but all that can be found, all that can b
represented are discursive fetishes of difference. e
It is commonly charged that deconstruction is a conservative meth-
odology, even a cynical enterprise for blocking off any critical attempt to deal
with historical social reality. (It would be difficult to substantiate this in a
careful reading of Derrida.) The charge is often advanced by those-includ-
ing some disaffected poststructuralists-who wish to salvage some notion of
identity or practice from the positivist ideologies that they believe poststruc-
turalism undermines. But we must consider the possibility that it is no longer
a question of whether one methodology will fare better against power than
another, but rather that criticism as such no longer has a critical function
and, according to a familiar logic, perhaps never did; that criticism is not an
adversary force but rather a means by which culture discovers its contradic-
tions so that it can accommodate them to itself. At this stage, Gregory Lukow
writes,
The consciousness industry reaches a new level of hegemony and palatability

when it can incorporate negation and still emerge with its regressive . . . fictions
intact [Cultural discourse today] is defined not simply by the recuperation of
images, nor by the recycling and anaesthetization of memory, but by the prolifera-
tion and assimilation of criticism itself. Dissent no longer needs to be neutralized.
It is part of the act of submission.6
The present critical project has been engaged most of all in order to compre-
hend that strange critical state.
This apparent dialectical crisis, in whatever senses it has and has not
occurred, suggests a number of divergent, coterminous, contradictory, coop-
erative scenarios. There is no question of choice here: all are enacted, with
various combinations and emphases, in post-avant-garde, postmodernist dis-
course. A brief sketch will help map the concerns of the concluding chapters:
Frrst and most simply: what appears to be the collapse of the dialectic is
nothing more than a vague terminological crisis (to adapt Aragon's early
dismissal of the Russian Revolution). Delegitimation crisis is here merely a
name for the uneasiness of a handful of critics and artists about the continued
pertinence of certain habitual categories of cultural production and analysis.
In this case theory-death is strictly a death in theory: the forms of artistic
production once called avant-garde continue but the language responsible for
processing them can no longer manage; old categories have worn out and
new ones have to be invented. This crisis is minor, actually rather trivial: a
transitional phase of analytical reappraisal, the prelude to a limited range of
categorical readjustments and the resumption of normal relations between
art-production and discursive control. Business as usual, with new packag-
ing.
At the same time the death of the avant-garde as a politics of aesthetic
revolt is a means by which the same rhetoric of aesthetic opposition can be
p
Crisis I 119
repeatedjust as vehemedntlridn.dis_cou~sesthha~consider themselves radically
different.The avant-gar e 1s 1sm1sse as w 1te, male, etc.; now projects for
the representation of gender? class? and ~ace take its place, but perhaps
'thout effectively restructunng the1r relations to the economy.
WI At the same time we have seen critics such as Poggioli argue that the
similation of the avant-garde constitutes its victory through infiltration.
:ecuperation is not a loss but a gain. The absorption of advanced art into
mainstream cultural practice does not mark the delegitimation of delegitima-
tion or the ultimate impotence of critical art and art criticism; it proves their
disseminated vitality. Only the ~pocalyptic mood, the bohemian romance of
the avant-garde is abandoned: everything important about advanced art
remains.
At the same time it might tum out that the death of avant-garde difference
creates a paradise of undifferentiation, the sort of atopia one finds on certain
postmodernist maps of cultural space, maps resembling nothing so much as
the blank map of the sea in The Hunting of the Snark. If exception is
normalized and rendered unexceptional, it is also generalized, as though the
entire culture had become marginal; one drifts euphorically in a space
without center or privilege. At the same time this redistribution of epistemic
geography is entropic: the tension between center and margin generates less
and less energy, meaning, information. Decentering, pluralism, repetition,
drifting,blankness, all often proposed as signs of a (post)heroic supercession
of modernism, are just as likely nothing more than further signs of cate-
gorical decay. Indeed the very label "postmodern" indicates a certain lin-
naean exhaustion, a supersaturation of categories and epochs.
At the same time the avant-garde is most radically en avant at the very
moment of its death. Death is proof not of the avant-garde's insignificance but
of its historical force. If its apparent disruptions were only modes of cultural
order, then perhaps in death the avant-garde leads the way to a real disrup-
tion, a real disorder, the death of the system it served. Its triumph occurs at
the moment when recuperation is so generalized that the dialectical ma-
chinery supporting the institution collapses under its own incorporated
weight. The avant-garde as the vanguard of recuperation, delegitimizing
delegitimation by delegitimizing itself: the suicidal telos of dada, fulfilled a
half century later when the very mechanisms of recuperation are reified,
when the very critique of recuperation can be circulated as a discursive
commodity,when everyone knows that death is as lucrative as it is mean-
ingless.The avant-garde satisfies the death instinct at the heart of its will-to-
discourse, a death instinct operating throughout the culture. This death must
never be confused with actual termination; it is death everlasting, in which
the avant-garde remains in the van.
. At the same time the historical syntax of dialectical crisis remains rooted
10
t~e very dialectic whose destruction it announces: every new epoch is
achievedthrough such a break. Perhaps then, as the exhaustion of the avant-
garde has proven thus far to be inexhaustible, so the crisis reflected here is
the latest form of the system's persistence. Just as the avant-garde turned 0
. h . 1· Ut
in one retros_pect to hav~ been a ~e.ans b Y wh ic _capita ism. continually
adjusted itself to changes m the conditions of change itself, so this current or
just-past crisis might tum out to have been merely the latest stage in th
development of the institution of art. In this light postmodernism would b:
something more than the simple reshuffling of discursive categories but
something far less than an epistemic break, and in any case another alibi for a
culture of full employment. Business as usual, but under new management.
At the same time this crisis might indeed signal a break whose scope
cannot yet be determined. If the dialectic was once a medium for cultural
expansion, it eventually began to inhibit this growth; ultimately two poles
were not enough, the sites of exchange had to be decentered, pluralized. The
dialectic grew too congested and had to be abandoned, or rather, since
nothing in this discourse is ever altogether wasted, remaindered to a market
for secondhand goods. The avant-garde's end, in both senses of the word, is
thus part of a general reorganization of cultural-discursive space. Ending is a
way to proceed. 1 The cultural apparatus is now in the process of redesigning
not only its means of categorizing cultural phenomena but also a vast range
of discursive structures and relations. But at the same time the most radical
posthumous forms of the avant-garde begin to shake themselves loose from
this process. The death of the avant-garde entails not only a massive re-
deployment of cultural power but also another project: what was once ad-
vanced-critical art now shifts into some infra or ultra band of the spectrum of
cultural production, invisible to everyone who still clings either to the tradi-
tional dialectical model or to its imminent successors. Here postmodemism
is a sign under which discourse struggles to repossess what it fears it is about
to lose .
....
Post
Postmodemism is the ?e~t~ o~ ~odernism or its l~test avatar or a perpetual

disruptive tende~cy. ~1th1~ 1_t;1t 1s the current penod or one already past or
the end of all penod1zmg; it 1spostavantgarde or postmovement or postart or
ostpolitical or posthumous or postpost; it is posthistorical or a new way to
~iculate the presence of the past, for instance through past-iche, which is or
is not subversive, is or is not conservative, is or is not a "blank parody, a
statue without eyeballs" (Jameson); 1 it is one more attack on the hegemonic
order or one more surrender to the "cultural dominant" (Jameson) of con-
sumer capitalism or a curious hybrid of both; it is a threat to the dialectic of
enlightenmentor yet another of its mystifications; it is an ideology promoting
"the transformation of the bourgeois public sphere into the public sphere of
the corporate state" (Buchloh 52) and the subsequent "rise of a new psycho-
logicaltype of artist: the bureaucratic or organizational personality who lives
in a condition of submission to a cultural and economic power system
because of the rewards of money and prestige which are offered in return for
such submission" (Gablik 62); it is "instability within immobility" (Newman
184)or a means to "contest" the "dominant or liberal humanist culture ...
from within its own assumptions" ;2 it is or is not a legitimation crisis; it is a
widespread skepticism about master narratives (Lyotard), and this skep-
ticism produces either a real epistemic break or merely a meta-master-
narrative of the collapse of master-narrativity, or the master narratives are
driven deeper into the political unconscious;J it is bourgeois reality de-
constructed or simulated or imploded or reasserted; it is the elimination of
everyidea of autonomy and alienation, a strange _postalienation in which we
are completely seduced by the spectacle; it is the end of the age of the
signifiedand the beginning of the age of the signifier (Barthes); it is the final
mutual assimilation of high art and mass culture prepared for by the avant-
garde, and this marks either the tragic destruction of standards of quality
(Krameret al.) or a new "opportunity" (Huyssen ix); it is a "field of tension
between tradition and innovation, conservation and renewal, mass culture
and high art, in which the second terms are no longer privileged over the first;
a field of tension which can no longer be grasped in categories such as
progress_vs. reaction, left vs. right, present vs. past, modernism vs. realism,
~bstraction vs. representation, avant-garde vs. kitsch" (Huyssen 216-17); it
1 th
e supercession of Negation by Difference, by the Other; it is the age of
!~
0
e plural, which is or is not merely liberal pluralism; it is Culture giving way
. cultur~~(Hutcheon 18), a dispersed and untotalizable field of molecular,
micropohticalsites (sexual, ethnic, regional, etc.); it is formal depthlessness,
121
_J
flatness, the embrace of the superficial, an "emptiness (that is] abs

packed" (Jameson 82-83) or a deconstruction of the metaphysics f olute1y
dity; it is a resurgent aesthetic of the sublime (Lyotard) or of schi~ P~ofun.
(Jameson); it is the end of origins and the rise of a logic of repres P r~nia
··
reproduction, repetition; it· is
· me d'ia h ypnosis
· or t he latest manneentation
. ,
realkulturpolitik; it is Warhol, Haacke, Kruger, Smithson, Beuys"~m or
Steinbach, Levine; it is Lyotard or Habermas, Jameson or BaudriJ~~~•
Adorno or Huyssen; etc. etc. . . . ,
There is~ wh~le industry, a thriving mark~t in these definitions, condi-
tions, and stipulations. At the moment when this vast catalogue is exhausted
when all the etcs. are used up, then postmodernism too will be theory-dead
and some other uni!11aginable,e~er paler a~d more transparent ex-neo-post
will have to be devised to explam the persistence of the same phenomena
Here the task is not to sort through the entire oppressive catalogue, com~
parison shopping for the latest-truest hypothesis under some pretense of
settling a debate that the economy dictates must never be settled. For our
present purposes what is called postmodernism will simply pass for the
afterlife of the avant-garde, or rather one volume of that afterlife, the volume
most widely read: its inferno, so to speak. Later on we will skim its pur-
gatorio; there is no paradiso. Our concern will be with postmodernism as the
afterlife of the anti, with the ways in which, among all these inter- and
exchangeable definitions, some desiccated, spectral, marketable semblance
of the critical always continues to appear.
The death of the anti is carried out with the same flurry of text production
that accompanies every cultural death and demonstrates its economic utility.
Sometimes this theory-death is a theater of defeatism (all critical art is always
recuperated, so why not give it up and at least get a nice check from the
dealer), and either celebrated (free at last of avant-garde delusions) or la-
mented (the historical avant-gardes were the last moment of authentic art) or
repackaged and resold as the newest critical mode. Sometimes this death is
denied or ignored and classical dialectical categories are simply reasserted.
Sometimes these categories are displaced by a discourse of difference or the
plural, though quite often these displacements only signal the return of the
dialectical economy in another form. Thus one might reject (negate?) nega-
tion as a function of phallogocentrism but redeploy it in other guises, for
instance as "new kinds of affirmative resistance that don't operate through
negation" 4 but within which negation continues to operate, itself curiously
sublated. The putative demise of dialectical positions is followed by their
resurrection in some sort of remapped discursive space, and this leads to
further deaths and discourses.
For Jameson, while the " 'semi-autonomy' of the cultural sphere ... has
been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism," culture has now exploded,
pervaded every feature of social and psychic life. And this perspective
Post I 123
al O suggests that some of our most cherished and time-honored radical con-
c:ptions about th_en_at~reof cultural pol!tics may thereby find themselves out-
ded. However md1stmct those conceptions may have been-which range from
~;gans of negativity, opposition, and subversion to critique and reflexivity-they
~ shared a single, fundamentally spatial, presupposition, which may be resumed
in the equally time-honored formula of "critical distance." No theory of cultural
politics current o~ th~ ~eft today ~as _been able to do ~it??ut one notion or
another of a certam m1mmalaesthetic distance, of the poss1bihty of the position-
ing of the cultural ac! outside the _massiveBeing of_capital, which then serves as
an Archimedean pomt from which to assault this last. What the burden of
[evidenc·e]suggests, however, is that distance in general (including "critical
distance" in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of
postmodemism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes
to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates
and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation; meanwhile ...
the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and
colonizingthose very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which
offered extraterritorial and Archimedean fulcrums for critical effectivity. The
short-hand language of "cooptation" is for this reason omnipresent on the Left;
but it offers a most inadequate theoretical basis for understanding a situation in
which we all, in one way or another, dimly feel that not only punctual and local
countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare, but also even
overtly political interventions . . . are all somehow secretly disarmed and reab-
sorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part,
since they can achieve no distance from it. ("Cultural Logic" 87)
If the passage testifies to an acute experience of recuperation, it actually

closes off this critical distance only in order to reopen it elsewhere. As a
marxist Jameson cannot abandon the functional necessity of critical auton-
omy, only its singularity.
Jameson's exploded culture is a version of postmodern pluralism. Of
course cultural pluralism is often accused of being the same monotonous
plural one finds in the shopping mall or on cable television, a plurality of
brandnames: the hip doxa of the plural as just a cover for the latest phase of
consumerism. Thus Hal Foster writes a manifesto "Against Pluralism" in
which he accuses it of playing "right into the ideology of the 'free market,' "s
the same charge Burger leveled against the cult of the new. But pluralism also
claims to enhance rather than undermine the critical. It proliferates critical
sites and opens new lines of alliance between disparate cultural groups. As
David Plotke writes
'
a "mass" terrain signifies the dispersal of power-partly as the effect of prior
mass struggles-in a manner that precludes political strategies that conceive
the~selves in a relation of simple exteriority with regard to power. . . . The
P~lihcal totalization that can be imagined is a complex, heterogeneous project
with a series of subjects-of interlocking speech communities-rather than the
expressionof a single subject which expands through "converting" other forces
/ TuE 'IHEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
124
• or images of itself. Such a political totalization represents the i'.
trr'
mto m . h R h 1ormof
dem counter-hegemonic force, a new egemony. at er than the breathtak' a
mo entration of politics at a single point, crystallized into a solid se 1ng
cone . c. h' h 1
• amess
weapon which can shatter a~ _opalposrb~g iorc:, t rs ne~ efgemony would be a
dense, fluid articulation of pohtrc su ~ects a ong a sen es o fronts.6
As a result of this dispersal those who once professed to be univers 1

intellectuals must become Gramscian specific intellectuals, no longer co:-
cemed with the false transcendentals of modernism, released into a multi-
plicity of molecular zones of action. But the ~isc~very that ~ower is not
monolithic makes little difference; power functions Just as efficiently, if not
more so, in a discontinuous field. That is one reason why the formal discon-
tinuities of avant-garde works were ineffective as a subversive device. And
that is why, far from constituting an effective attack on the pluralism of
power, critical pluralism remains an effect of power.
For Jameson or Plotke some sort of critical distance must survive be-
cause it must survive, because they need it to survive. Since dialectical
thinking is unthinkable without dialectics, the dialectic must still be in
operation. But this hardly grants such thinking any instrumental force.
Postmodemism is a crisis of instrumental reason at every level save one.
Dialectical exhaustion cuts deeper than the question of whether or not
autonomy should be binary or dispersed: it is a situation in which our
thought cannot master the forces that produce it. The very cultural mecha-
nisms by which thought is generated tum out to be the same mechanisms by
which it is assigned the instrumentality strictly of exchange. There is a sort of
by-his-bootstraps logic behind Jameson's response to the abolition of critical
distance. It is the same wishful thinking that motivates his critique of what he
takes to be totalizing visions of postmodern enclosure:
What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total
system or logic-the Foucault of the prisons book is an obvious example-the
more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore,
by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying ma~hine, to that very degree
he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the
impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are
increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself. (57)
The implication is that theories are optional: if one model is too restrictive,
then reject it for another. We are more or less free to describe culture as a
prison or to leave openings for what would once have been called praxis.
Jameson's rhetoric of win-lose games is itself designed to pressure the reader,
or at least the writer, into willing himself into a discourse in which victory is
plausible. But what Jameson wills is nothing more than the reassertion in
weaker form of the same distance he claims has been abolished in
postmodern space. The notion that reflections on the impotence of critical art
are voluntaristic is answered by the voluntarism of new-in fact already
Post I 125
. d-paradigms of critical opposition. Nietzsche's famous dictum
discredite are 00 facts, only interpretations, is enacted as a fantasy of
that t~erealwish-fulfillment. Just as the cultural agencies of Jameson's late
d1·a)ecttc
• • try to recuperate d"1vers1ty· mto
· t he logic
· of consumerism so
capitalisdmrnism tries to recuperate it for the discursive economy by dep,loy-
postmo e residual d1alect1ca
. "thin · · l structures. Whet h er or not postmodern art is
1
ing1~ more diverse than the art of any other era, the white economy still
actu / still represents and thence regulates whatever diversity is there.
Opt1on
!'
abs~r are recognized so that they may be circumscribed. The proxy ide-
· . t ti f . d. h d
oJogYof the plural remamsalapro!ec _?r r ~mmgNan •~ ar _atwork organiz-
ing discursive exchange . ong ~am111ar 1mes. de~atlon m1ght give way to
thing called affirmative resistance, revampe 1or a decentered age, now
~~~: claimed) dispersed rather than binary, but this resistance has a great
~e~Iin common ~ith the negation i~ sup?osedly_l~ft be~ind.
Resistance is m fact a key term m this neocntlcal discourse. As we have
seen, one of the ~ecurrent pr~bl~ms_with ~he notion of o~position is that it
supposedly imphes an exter:ionty m which no one_ b_eheves any longer.
Resistanceis proposed as an internal, hence more reahstlc, hence even more
criticalstrategy. Postmodern resistance seems to entail some arrangement of
the following more or less interrelated tasks: a continuation of the anti-
aesthetic attack on the institution of art that Burger associated with the
historicalavant-gardes; a critique of the dominant forms of ideological repre-
sentation,frequently employing methods adapted from deconstruction and
semiotics, sometimes directed at the institution of art, sometimes at a
broader social field, and often involving specific attacks on formations of
gender,class, or ethnicity; the manipulation of mass-media imagery and
technologiesas both the targets and tools of the critique; a continuing effort
to comprehendwhat it means for critical art to occupy an internal rather than
an autonomous site; and an attempt to transform internalization into strat-
egiesof empowerment rather than a form of imprisonment. We will proceed
I
I,, I
by examining this resistance in the work of Hans Haacke and Barbara

Krugerand in some of the discourse that surrounds them. This analysis will
not involveany assessment of their artistic value; the goal is only to locate
within them the current mutated form of the germ of recuperation. The
argumentis that postmodern neocritical art is characterized not only by the
~tipulationslisted above, but also by an increasing reflection on recuperation
!tself;neocritical art is caught up in a sort of transfixed hypnotic reflection on
imagesof images of its own containment: a contortionist attempt to reflect
the mirror image of its mirror image to grasp and arrest its representation
;~en as it finds itself incapable of an;thing but its reproduction. This reflec-
tonframes every one of its projects.
a Burger argued that the authentic anti-institutional art of the historical

0
~:nt-gardes came to an end with the recuperation of surrealism, but for
er observers this "anti-aesthetic" project survived and became even more
incisive. For O'Doherty it provides the only viable definitionof "wh .

clumsily called postmodem1sm · " : "th e system bY wh'1ch the work of art· at is
waspassed had to be examme · d" (89). Duchamp's reframmgs · of gallerys 1sts
· · and seventies,
gaverise to the conceptual art ofht e s1xt1es . _toJosephKosuth
P~e
to Art & Language, to Buren and Haacke. The question might rem . '
whether this a~ re~ly. belies Burger'~p~rio~ization,.whether the resurg:~~
critique of art institutions from the ms1de 1s anyt~mg more than a weak
repetition of a project that can no longer be earned out in these terms.
·whether the critique of recuperation was itself recuperated and what it migh~
mean if it was.
Discussions of Haacke's work often focus on whether or not it is re-
cuperable, resists recuperation, will be or has been recuperated. Wealready
witnessed one exchange on this matter: in an interview with the artist
conducted by Yve-Alain Bois, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalind Krauss, the
critics proposed that the factual, informationalcharacter of Haacke's work
was anti-aesthetic and therefore protected it from recuperation, to which
Haacke replied that "nothing escapes eventual recuperation." The same
concerns frame almost every analysis. Example: the first essay in the cata-
logue for Haacke's 1986-87 exhibitionat the New Museumof Contemporary
Art is by Leo Steinberg,who opens with Roy Lichtenstein'sfamousremark
about the state of the artworld in 1963-"It was hard to get a painting
despicable enough so that no one would hang it-everyone was hanging
everything"-and assesses Haacke's chances of putting up a better fight.7
The implicationis familiar:any antitheticalart that succeeds in the artworld
is a failure;Haacke's politicalart is attractiveto certain establishedsectorsof
the artworld, ergo he has failed.He has been recuperated,and becausehe is
recuperated he is ideologicallydead; the New Museumcatalogue,one imag-
ines, is his epitaph.
In Steinberg's account artworld success undermines critical autonomy.
One might expect that other commentators,for whom the primacy of this
critical distance has been abolished in favor of more postmodern arrange-
ments, would read the matter differently.But as it turns out most of these
readings involve attempts to employ the same categories of autonomy or
distance. Writingin Art in-America, BenjaminBuchloh highlightsthe cen-
sorship of Haacke's work, the cancellationof a 1971showat the Guggenheim
Museum,and the rejectionof an installationat the Wallraf:.Richartz Museum
in Cologne,events to which Haacke's supportersrefer again and again.8 The
1971censorshipis an especiallyprized motifin Haacke criticism;indeedthe
New Museum catalogue's emphasis on the early work that inspired the
Guggenheim'saction, Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a
Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (92-98), and on the subsequent
debate about these events, might seem disproportionate for a balanced
critical assessment of a major retrospective exhibition. Overall Buchloh
portrays Haacke as a sort of outlaw: few major works sold, few major
exhibitions, interferencefrom exhibitors when he does manage to get his
>
Post I 127
k displayed, and so on. What Buchloh omits is that although Haacke is

hardly a hous~ho . name, h e is
wor Id . _cert ~·n1y est~.b.hshed m
· the artworld, in
various art inst1tut_1ons,and especially m neocntical art discourse. He has a
as sociation with a'b'well-known New York gallery (John Weber)· his work
has been wid~ly exhi 1te m t e_umte
Ions d . h . d states and Europe; it is' sold at
·ons and discussed frequently m the artpress; and he holds a position in a
auctl Th . h .
university art depart~ent. . . e pomt ere _isnot to begrudge Haacke a living
but to indicate that his cntlcs draw the hne_separating inside from outside
here it suits them. If Haacke has had his troubles with museums and
;eaters and does not ~uffer fro~ the sort of ~nancial success Lichtenstein
has had to endure, he 1s no outsider. By now his work must be considered in
some sense canonical. Buchloh knows this, but he constructs a figure of
censorship (the censorship itself was of course quite real) to valorize the
truth of neocritical art, a truth that he is anxious to represent, in both senses
of the word. It might be worth noting that he thereby also puts an end to the
censorship, releases the silenced work into another, highly voluble arena; he
turns a form of suppression into a form of articulation that increases the
work's discursive value and doubtless, sooner or later, its market value as
well.Censorship can produce extraordinarily garrulous works. There is a sort
of tacit collusion between the neocritical and neoinstitutional wings of con-
temporary art that closely resembles relations between their forebears in the
modem era. The emphasis on Haacke's exclusion from a few artworld institu-
tions obfuscates the virtual identity of every institutional site, an identity that
Haacke himself seems anxious to illuminate. What takes place in the cata-
logue and in numerous artpress accounts of Haacke's work is an attempt to
create for him a theater of critical distance, a proxy autonomy-one that also
serves to establish the critical credentials of Buchloh or the New Museum by
association-despite the fact that this distance is supposed to be the-
oretically dubious and despite the fact that the work itself is an exercise in
these very doubts, a self-conscious demystification of autonomy. Though
Haacke does not pretend to be indifferent or immune to such conscription.
One could say that this discursive theater is his intended stage: he knows
how it works and up to a point works hard to make it appear as it is.
The notion that Haacke's work is grounded in information, that it is
"factographic" (Buchloh) and hence anti-aesthetic, is a recurrent theme in
discussions of his work. It is also one of the reasons why the Guggenheim
cancelled the 1971 show, stating that the Shapolsky piece was political
propaganda or sociological research, not art. In general it is Haacke's goal to
present within the frame of art, in sharper and sharper focus, those networks
that connect the artwork and artworld with corporate and state power,
networks that the framing of art usually enables the cultural apparatus to
con~eal. (The Guggenheim's action was an attempt to reimpose the con-
v~ntionaIlimits of this frame.) In response to the Guggenheim, Haacke later
displayed-in straightforward conceptualist fashion-lists of the museum's
trustees and their corporate ties. On other occasions he has exhibited repro-
b
ductions of Seurat's Les Poseuses and Manet's Bunch of Asparag

alongside plaques describing the paintings' successive owners and th~s
corporate holdings. He frequently incorporates hitherto peripheral museu;
phenomena into his works: the plaques and banners that announce who
owns what, who sponsors exhibitions, and so on. At a time when corporate
support of the arts is as public as it is today, the logic of such work is hardly
surprising. Haacke also uses the icons and techniques of advertising and
political propaganda to frame the ideologies of capitalist representation. In
Voici Alcan his manipulation of public relations imagery equates corporate
sponsorship of the arts (in this case opera) with corporate sponsorship of
political oppression (in this case apartheid). Haacke exposes the intimate
relations between cultural and state power, the ways in which these relations
are veiled or framed in order to protect the illusory autonomy of the artwork.
This information, these factographic facts, are represented in Haacke's
work and then recycled in discourse about it. The assumption is that
Haacke's presentation raises the viewer's consciousness to a more critical
attitude toward art and its institutions; and since they repeat the same
information, Haacke's supporters must believe that they too participate in
this consciousness raising. But if Haacke's information is information about
the ties between art and capital, what is the status of this information within
his art, and what is the status of information about Haacke? What occurs in
Haacke's work is not simply the transmission of political information but its
reification. By the time the work arrives in the gallery, by the time the viewer
it is meant to address has any access to it, it is already a commodity. The
work disrupts its institutional commitments along one vector only to rein-
force them along another, a process abetted by neocritical commentary. It is
evidently impossible for critics to avoid this process. In her contribution to
the New Museum catalogue, Rosalyn Deutsche criticizes a tendency to
reduce Haacke's work to art-historical paradigms by "utilizing the discursive
form of the monograph and positioning the works within the artist's career,"
transforming them from radically contextual, politicized objects into con-
ventional "unique products of sovereign artistic subjects." "In his 'mature
phase,' he emerges, predictably, as an 'exemplary political artist,' a new
version of the 'great artist' who is, in fact, the real object produced by
monographic study." Haacke's work, she argues, "militates against such
neutralization. "9 Her point must be extended even further; one must be more
precise about this reframing of Haacke's reframing. The neutralization of
Haacke's work elicits various representations-including Deutsche's own-
of Haacke's resistance. At the first stage Haacke offers a critique of art
institutions; at the second the institution tacitly reasserts itself by reinscrib-
ing Haacke within art history; at the third Haacke's resistance to this opera-
tion is reasserted by sympathetic critics, who thereby frame the resistance
itself. The allegory of autonomy is exposed, then submerged in a myth of
career, then exposed again in a further critique of autonomy submerged in a
myth of anticareer. The allegory is at one and the same time deconstructed
--
Post I 129
and reallegorized ·
as a political drama in which critics can till
I I • .
.
s assign them-
selves supportmg ro es, a proper Y mtemahzed neocritical aut b
associat1on. n or er o grasp ese concatenated reframings one "ght hy-
· I d t th onomy-
·
very least imagme · ano th er sort of text on Haacke's work th at t e
mt
· h nf · • , one at never
mentions his name, t at co ronts this mformation about the ti·e b t
culture and capit· al wi"thou t th e s1· igh test reference to the hero whos e ween d
· h · conveye
it-rather as one. mig . . t mterrogate
. h the anonymous
. advertising and propa-
ganda that he mimics, one mig t thus glimpse the unwitting complicity f
Deutsche and most_oth~r commentators with the very systems of represen~-
tion the work and its, disc?~rse presume to attack. In a ruse of transparent
reflectio~ on Haac~~ s political t~th, Deutsc?e opposes art-historical para-
digms with a neocntlcal art paradigm-coordmated modes of discourse that
we must reflect and frame here in a metacritical paradigm, in discursive
reflection on discursive reflection: a spiral of reflections that seems proper to
Haacke's work.
It would be easy to exaggerate Haacke's wish to produce an art that is
unacceptable to art institutions. "I am not afraid of being recuperated. On the
contrary. As long as one remains alert, aware of what is going on, recupera-
tion can be one of the ways of infiltrating the mainstream consciousness. At
that level, I think it matters what happens in the art world. It affects the social
atmosphere. That's why the big corporations are so eager to get control over
it." 10 Recuperation is not a loss but a gain: much the same hope that
motivated Jameson. Critical distance might be abolished but a new sort of
difference opens up, this one even truer because it is lodged in the belly of the
beast. What looked like absorption is rewritten as a romance of subversive
infiltration.All one needs is to remain alert, as if consciousness of recupera-
tion were enough to produce a counterrecuperation. The latest refuge from
recuperation is recuperation itself. Postdialectical criticism becomes a maze
of reflections of mutual recuperation. And this strange formulation too must
be inflated in neocritical discourse: one must not only accept recuperation
but actively embrace it, distill it within oneself. Hence Jameson on Haacke:
"the strategy which imposes itself can best be characterized as homeopathic:
ever greater doses of the poison-to choose and affirm the logic of the
simulacrum to the point at which the very nature of that logic is itself
dialectically transformed." 11 Bois uses the same analogy of disease and
treatment: Haacke's Les must de Rembrandt is "about the ineluctability of
recuperation. . . . This recuperative power undoubtedly complicates
Haacke's preparation of the antidote. His strategy is to convey his awareness
of this in the work itself" ("Antidote" 143). But it is difficult to see ~ow a
homeopathic representation of recuperation could constitute an antidote,
since recuperation is a disease that thrives on such representations. Haa~ke
and his advocates are still trying to build difference from the representatJo_n
of difference even as the circulation of their work demon strates. that th1s
cannot be accomplished They are still seeking autonomies they clrum ~0 . not
ex·ist , still fine-tumng. the· moral and 1deolog1ca
. · l mtegn
· ·tY 0 f their positions
rd
◄
even though there is no integrity of positions. That is the real le

Haacke's work. The difference between the Guggenheim's official sson of
ment and one by Buchloh or Deutsche or Jameson or Bois or even :se~-
himself is merely ideological, a difference between representations, not~~ e
iliem. m
In discussions of Christo it is commonplace to point out that all th
zoning he~ngs and debates abou_this projects are esse~tial features of th:
work; Chnsto documents and displays them along with his fences a d
wrappings. One looks forward to a Haacke exhibit in which not only corp:-
rate holdings are shown but also re-representations of this information from
various ideological vantages, including Haacke's own. Since the critical
economy is as much a feature of the politics of cultural institutions as the
stock portfolios of their boards of directors, it might mark a lapse on
Haacke's part that he has not yet included this sort of material within the
expanded frame of his work. All the more a lapse since Haacke seems in
other respects so clearsighted about the artist's-his own-complicity in the
cultural economy. "Artists, as much as galleries, museums and journalists
(not excluding art historians) hesitate to discuss the industrial aspect of their
activities. An unequivocal acknowledgment might endanger the cherished
romantic ideas with which most art world participants enter the field, and
which still sustain them emotionally." 12 In Haacke's work the hesitation
takes place precisely under the guise of acknowledgment. There is no ques-
tion that he has challenged traditional notions of aesthetic autonomy or that
he is willing to confess his own stake in the so-called consciousness industry.
But it is just as true that he uses these achievements to preserve for himself
an operational fiction of marginality, a neocritical privilege that the work
itself must call into question. And even Haacke's most probing critics have
avoided analysis of their part in this process.
Moreover: there is in fact little information in Haacke's work; his facts
hardly constitute information at all. One cannot be informed about what one
already knows. It is difficult to believe that at this stage anything revealed in
Haacke's work would be news to anyone in his actual audience. What is
really at stake in his work and in work on his work is the economic function
of neocritical repetitions of avant-garde critical gestures. Today there is a vast
display of works that reiterate what everyone attached to this economy
already knows about art's political-industrial character, represented in such a
way as to maintain production levels and at the same time to keep all parties
involved from glimpsing the full extent of their involvement. The problem is
not just that the news is not new but that this politics of resistance occludes a
deeper politics of complicity. Neocritical gestures frame recuperation so as
to preserve some fiction of critical distance that the work's various represen-
tations are already in the process of erasing. We must assess both the real
limitations of Haacke's art and the way in which those limitations represent a
fact about recuperation that the artist and his supporters have yet to con-
front. Let us then imagine for Haacke's work and its allies another ambition,
p
Post I 131
her sort of agency, a stranger homeopathy than anything invoked by
anot . . . ti
Jameson: not to resist r~cuperatlo~ m any orm, by either the myth of
autonomy or the myth of internal resistanc~, _butto em~race it completely, to
present the fullest and most uncomprom1smg portrait of the way in which
~e critique of recuperation produce~ ~nd reproduces its ~wn recuperation in
discourse, in order to expose the cntical poverty of one s own work and of
criticism at large.
That is what Barbara Kruger finally accomplishes, what the posthumous

avant-garde can never avoid accomplishing: a clearer and clearer reflection of
recuperation. Consider her image appropriations of the late seventies and
eighties. It is an art in which one sees yet again the shadow resurrection of
avant-garde dialectics in increasingly self-conscious and constricted forms;
an art that struggles to resolve in itself the contradiction between the critical
and the commodity in favor of the critical but must finally endorse the
commodity-form it most deeply desires, and that reveals itself as the work's
true subject; an art that tries to resist recuperation but in which, indeed by
means of which, resistance is itself recuperated; an art that attempts to
present the artist's incorporation by the artworld as a position of neocritical
privilege,only to find this privilege too revoked; an art in which the project of
opposition gives way to contented tropes or images of opposition; an art
accompanied as always by texts eager to rescue the work's critical truth from
its knot of commitments, an enterprise that only drives it further into the
economic web.
Kruger's work typifies a certain renewed interest in political art, and
especially in the politics of representation, that occurred in the eighties. For
Foster such artists as Kruger, Dara Birnbaum, Jenny Holzer, Louise Lawler,
Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Martha Rosier and Krzystof Wodizcko
expanded the focus of anti-institution art to address more general culture
industry systems, in Kruger's case deconstructing not only art institutions
and corporate neocolonialism, as in Haacke, but gender images as well. 1 3 In
her best-known work appropriation involves selecting a stock image from
mass culture-say an advertising image of some part of a woman's body-
and reproducing it in such a way that it becomes critically visible. The image
is framed and often distorted (cropped, fragmented, blurred, seen in exagger-
ated close-up), with some word or phrase-"Perfect," "We are your circum-
stantial evidence," "We won't play nature to your culture," "You molest from
afar"-superimposed over it. The strategy seems to be based on the inargu-
able though incomplete thesis that power supports itself through the deploy-
ment of signs, images, rhetoric, ideologemes, etc. Whereas the mass media
expropriate allegedly seductive images of women for marketing purposes, as
well as to reinforce gender hierarchies, neocritical image-appropriation pur-
ports to subvert this practice; by reframing the image's frame, both the
context (sexism) and the formal means (technologies of media manipulation)
are exposed. In theory viewers are thus informed about power and em-
h
powered to perform analogous operations on similar material e · ·

't h · A
1 s raw egemomc state. t the same time, as a reproductiv ncountered ·
. in
. t' 'd h . .
appropna 10n prov1 es yet anot er cntrque of the myth of artist' e techntq
. . ~e,
As we saw in Haacke, neocritical art must demonstrate its ~~ngrnaltty.
its own positions within the culture industry. Any number of artwo {eness of
mass-media sexism, but Foster believes that most do so witho~ s ex?~se
their own "entanglement in discourse" (108). In Foster's account ~zr~g
progress as an artist-Deutsche's observations on ·art-historical ca" ger 8
. h . d . . ,eers are
pe rt ment ere-is etermmed along this track. Her early "intercept 1·0 ,,
s tereo types "'imp1· 1ed not only that such cultural fictions and subiectns of .
· b ;i posi-
trons are more a solute than they are but also that the artist is in a tran
·
d ent al re Iatlon h " scen-
to t em (112). She had to move beyond this sort of work t
find a way to attack gender hierarchies without reverting to the illusio~0~
~uton~my, and sh~ accomplished this primarily by destabilizing the rela-
tionship between image and text. The motto superimposed on the pho-
tograph no longer pretends to express the work's absolute meaning: "neither
photograph nor text, neither connotation nor denotation i~ privileged as a
stable site or mode of truth; in fact, the usual coordination of the two (as
employed in the media to fix unstable meanings) is undone. More important,
her photo-texts shift address and block identifications in a way that allowsfor
no certain or essential subject position" (112). The caption's authority to
determine the work's ultimate meaning is disrupted; shifters (you, I, we)
attach themselves to advertiser, viewer, image, and artist as well. By decen-
tering the referent Kruger supposedly allows the work's critique to· move in
several directions at once. "Though as seductive as any mass~mediaad, her
photo-texts work to reflect the masculine look that subjects women via a
false feminine ideal and to block the feminine identification that· submits to
this construct" (112). As a result the artwork is able to assess its relationship
to normative media practice in a self-critical manner. Despite the fact that her
deconstruction of representation is still a representation, that it also re-
produces stereotypical images of women, its very refusal of transcendental
privilege, its radical reflexivity, its homeopathic "tactic of subversive com-
plicity" (108) marks the work of Kruger, Holzer, Rosier et al. as an advance
beyond other postmodern art. "[I]t is this reflexivity which allows her work
to circulate, and not be totally recuperated: 'I will not become what I mean
to you' " (115).
Here again art's attack on autonomy is cast as a new form of autonomy.
And here again a critic finds the key to cultural resistance in a reflexivitythat
he does not practice. In Foster's essays every form of representation is called
into question except the one in which he is engaged: nothing in his text fa~es
up to its own entanglement in discourse. Kruger and Foster use a confessron
of recuperation to conceal the extent of their recuperation. Kruger may have
broadened the scope of her critique past standard conceptual-art obsei:va-
tions about the institutionalization of art and past entry-level feminist indict-
ments of mass-media gender bias, but she cannot for one moment resist the
Post I 133
comm Odification ofbli

her work. Nor can Foster avoid turning a discourse 0
. campaign . It 1s . as if an mverse
. n
. tance into a pu city ratio were in effect
resrs
. critical postmo derrusm.
· · th e b roa d er th e cntique
·. of art's recuperation
ID neo d I d h .
. hter shallower an more acce erate t e cycle of rts recuperation The
'
the tJg • . . · . .
c~ nt obsession with representation
b hi b
represents the mcreasmg visibility of
. only produces more discursive
b discursive apparatus, ut t s o session
t e chandise. Toe history of the avant-garde shows that wherever art engages
mer . b . . If . 1
the discursive economy 1t s~ ~ts 1tse to its ~w. Whether or not the work
can escape eventual absorption 1s no longer an issue: at the point of engage-
ment absorption has_ alfl:a~y occurred_. Reflexi_vi~yis not even minimally
immune to recuperation, 1t 1s recuperation that 1s immune to reflexivity. All
Foster can really claim for Kruger's work is a smart tautology: by remaining
aware of her entanglements Kruger is .able to avoid being unaware of her
entanglements.That is the usual extent of what passes for counterhegemonic
art.There is no image appropriation that can truly resist the general economy
of appropriation; to counterappropriate is just barely to raise the question of
appropriation, and to raise it only to a level where it too can be recuperated.
Recuperationuses artists like Kruger to render neocritical resistance and the
critique of recuperation itself as neutral and profitable as any other com-
modity.
For a while there was some productive controversy around Kruger's work
about its material form and ideological site. She distributes the work in the
fonn of postcards, T-shirts, posters on public kiosks, and billboards while
she continues to show and sell in galleries. It might be that she is merely
hedgingher ideological bets by exhibiting both inside and outside the gallery
system (narrowly conceived). But some critics see in her dual practice the
sort of internal resistance that Foster advocates. Carol Squiers:
Kruger was occasionally taken to task by critics for making such a well-mannered
presentation of her political critique. Why wasn't she just printing posters? Why
wasshe selling her work in commercial galleries? Kruger responds forcefully:
"These were objects. I wasn't going to stick them on the walls with pushpins. I
wanted them to enter the marketplace because I began to understand that outside
the market there is nothing-not a piece of lint, a cardigan, a coffee table, a human
being. That's what the frames were about: how to commodify them. It was the
most effective packaging device. Signed, sealed and delivered." 14
Th~ ?stensible rigor of such remarks works in two ways: it bolsters the
artist s hard-nosed image and provides an alibi for profit-sharing. It also
uoderscores the fact that in Kruger's work there never was any distance
~etweenthe billboard and the gallery wall. In the end Kruger's work func-
~ons the same way the avant-garde did, as one more market for exchanges
;:,tween the culture industry and its critique. Through Kruger or Holzer or
th s~erthe billboard is colonized for the artworld and vice versa. Hence too
-~:rrelevance of the controversy surrounding Kruger's move to the commer-
cr Y and politically compromised arena of the Mary Boone Gallery, a
controversy that should be read as j~st another attempt to maintain ex-

hausted dialectical categories in a functional posthumous form. is
Foster argues that the shiftiness of the pronouns in Kruger's skewed
slogans makes them more critical. But it is only further evidence of th
critical vacuity and economic vitality of dialectical arrangements. "You de~
stroy what you think is difference": when _oneplaces the artist herself in the
subject position one marks the actual proJec~of ~ostmodem neocritical art.
A project that this essay, no less· entangled m discourse than any other, is
powerless to do anything but support.
Foucault writes that "there are no relations of power without resistances.

the latter are all the more real because they are formed right at the poini
where relations of power are exercised." 16 Opposition to power is fundamen-
tal: it is a condition of power itself. That is exactly its problem. The formation
of resistance at the point of power does not mark its immediate utility for
neocritical postmodemism, but rather its overwhelming difficulty.What neo-
criticism finally represents is the way power deploys the resistance without
which it cannot come into being. Discursive resistance to capital is subsumed
by the movement of capital: the modes of cultural resistance currently
proposed in every postmodemism constitute interventions only in a symbolic
order that has already been colonized. Neocritical resistance further serves
economic interests by refusing to mark the full extent of its own economiza-
tion.
What is important here is not just the old saw that all art is a commodity,
but the increasing phenomenalization of this process in the postmodern
work; an uncertainty about the critical potential of this reflection; and the
recuperation of whatever critical potential it might ideally have had.
Jameson: "aesthetic production today has become integrated into com-
modity production generally" (56). Of course this integration has not just
occurred, but today everything in the work that exercised any difference
from the commodity dissolves into it. Then this dissolution becomes the
work's subject: the work of art reflects more and more on its commodity
status and discourse must come to mediate this stage as well. That is what
occurs in pop art: the culture of the commodity becomes art's explicit subject
and its critique meditates on its own commodity form. Staniszewski: "Pop
~ n:iakes _capital. visible" (14). Thus it is hardly surprising that in the
eighties, with the mcreasing phenomenalization of the commodity form of
art, pop would stage a resurgence. In the work of Haim Steinbach and Jeff
Koons the critical space between aesthetic and commodity forms is virtually
erased. But for Staniszewski it is neopop 's rejection of the critical and
embrace of the commodity form that finally authenticates it as critical:
~- h8:5no inh~re~t use value. Aesthetic criteria in the modern era are not
utilitarian.The _s•~~•fic~nce
of art is created by its circulation within an economy
made up of exhibitionm galleries, ownershipby patrons, endorsement by critics,
Post I 135
cano?izati?n in art history, and reproduction within the mass media.... Pop is
the d1alect1c~ moment w~e~ art chan~~s: no longer something mythically outside
the system m an aesthetlc1zed cond1t1on of modernism nor an instrument de-
ployed with subversive intent, art is institutionalized as fuel for the cultural and
economic machinery-while serving as one of capitalism's most self-reflexive
representations. (14-15)
Reflexivity remains, but apparently without any critical work to do. One
senses the same impasse in this passage from the editors of the journal in
which Staniszewski's article first appeared:
This issue of File we present as a commodity and it is a commodity. The artists in

this issue use language and the subject of commodification as the canvas upon
which they layer their artworks. . . . Pop art was the first to present itself as the
environment of accepted notions for today's younger artists-they feel free to
create within the language of commodification because they see themselves as
creating commodities, and they are. This is not a moral issue. (8)
But even here, in this putative moral vacuum, the avant-garde persists: the
editors close the commodity issue of File with further calls for cultural
resistance, and for all her pro-popism Staniszewski can still regret that "it
would not be surprising that pop-some twenty years later-continues to be
a testimony to where value is unfortunately located in late capitalism-in
celebrity and money" (24, emphasis added).
In "A Product You Could Kill For," his catalogue essay for Damaged
Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object, a 1986New Museum exhibi-
tion of work by Steinbach, Koons, Allan McCollum, Gretchen Bender,
Louise Lawler and several others, Brian Wallis also argues that
just as the bourgeois society of the modernist era seemed capable of assimilating
the most outrageous or radical developments of modem art, so now the global
advertising and business community seem able to acquire and potentia!ly seal off
works which seek to critique or at least draw attention to the economic and social
systems they encourage. It is a thorny issue, and one which is critical to the role
of artists today, for it signals not only an artistic problem, but a more general
theoretical and strategic question of how one might structure opposition to
totalizing structures and controls
-in several cases a question the artists claim to have abandoned; by now it
goes without saying that critics hold more tenaciously to the dialectic than
artists do. Wallis continues:
The artists in this exhibition seek to operate at the core of the economic system
[doubtless because they find themselves already there]. to signal its weakness
through sly complicity [Foster's subversive complicity, here cranked down a
notch]. These works may legitimately be called "damaged goods" for, while on
the surface they appear to valorize the brilliance and perfection of new consumer
objects, they harbor an ambivalence, one which inserts doubt, introduces humor
b
and absurd ~verproduction, d~atizes d~s~lay, and provok~~ questions. More.

over, in re~usmg t? adopt conventional art1s~1cmo~es ~r t~ad1tional materials, b
utilizing the margmal and supple~e_ntal devices of 1~stitutions,. by overemphas:.
ing and eroticizing the formal qualities and presentations of their work, the an·
question the convention. al.1zed assumptions
. of t h e systems they inhabit. Inists
doing they suggest new strategies for the social consideration of the producti so
promotion, and exchange of all manner of objects. 11 on,
So also David Joselit !o~ates t~~ pseud_o_-consumer objec_ts pr~duced by

Steinbach and Koons w1thm trad1t1onal cnt1ques of commodity fetishism and
everyday life descending from Marx through the surrealists, Lefebvre and
the situationists. "Steinbach and Koons recontextualize or recast [in Koons's
case, quite literally] real consumer products in order to embarrass their
function in the everyday world." 18
But it is a palpable confusion about the critical that most typifies the
discourse around neopop commodity art. The artists are certainly exploring,
perhaps in an even more rigorous manner than the first generation of pop
artists did, art's perpetual commodification. Steinbach 's shelves of designer
merchandise and Koons's stainless steel icons are screens on which the
merger between art and the life of capital is clearly projected, but no one can
quite determine what the images in those screens should signify. Holland
Cotter:
Steinbach 's apparent refusal to use his objects purely as vehicles of critical self-
scrutiny, and the strong sense one gets that, for any number of reasons, he finds
them beguiling rather than appalling, has made his work highly problematical for
some members of his audience. Hal Foster ... has put the question this way: "Is -
[this] a stance of semiotic resistance, a pose of revolutionary decadence (i.e. a
conformity so blatant as to be subversive) or a gesture of cynicism that is more
camp than critique?" Foster concludes that cynicism is the bottom line (see
Ai.A, June '86). In response, Steinbach maintains that his art does not answer to
a programmatic either/or, that verdicts of innocence or culpability are not his
concern, that his work exists precisely on that thin line of ''extreme ambivalence"
between criticism and celebration: a state of fascination,-you might say, both with
the enticement of the objects and with the values they create and preserve. 19
It is the same ambivalence we observed in debates on the politics of impres-

sionism and futurism: discourse cannot finally decide whether artists like
Steinbach are neoconservative or neoradical, but the debate itself is quite
productive. Victor Burgin: "the art 'most likely to succeed' today is that
which is in essence nothing but a blank slate upon which critical discourse
can be inscribed. " 20 The implicit dismissal is meant to distinguish this blank
postmodern art from the ideologically committed art Burgin prefers, but the
claim holds for all postmodern art. It has long since slipped beside the point
whether Steinbach or Koons or Kruger or anyone else is sincere or cynical,
critical of the commodity or enthralled by it, or some postmodern paradox-
ical both. What is now at issue is that this art and discourse on the com-
modity is carried out as an exchange of discursive commodities. The personal
-
Post I 137
positions of the artists h~~e no critical weight; inde~d the work often reflects
00 the artists' lack of cntlcal agency. Koons or Stembach or any other artist
of the moment, whether or not that artist resists the commodity form,
resembles no one so much as Baudrillard's schizo:
Whatcharacterizeshim is less the loss of the real,the lightyearsof estrangement

fromthe real,the pathos of distanceand radicalseparation,as is commonlysaid:
but, very muchto the contrary,the absoluteproximity,the total instantaneityof
things,the feelingof no defense,no retreat.It is the end [forus strictlythe theory-
death]of interiorityand intimacy,the overexposureand transparenceof the world
whichtraverseshim withoutobstacle.He can no longerproducethe limitsof his
being,can no longer play nor stage himself,can no longer produce himselfas
mirror.He is now only a pure screen, a switchingcenter for all the networksof
influence.
21
THE DEATH OF WARHOL
In recent art no screen has been blanker or more frequently traversed

than Andy Warhol's, and surely never more than just after his death. In the
parade of obituaries that pursued him into the grave it seemed as though
every Warhol that had ever been projected was rerun a hundred times. We
were shown the hoax Warhol and the major Warhol, the shallow Warhol and
the Warhol whose Deaths and Disasters series conveyed a nearly ex-
pressionistdepth of feeling, the Warhol whose genius was or was not artistic,
the commodityWarhol and the anticommodity Warhol, Warhol the joke, the
fool, the decadent, the subversive, the radical, the prophet, Warhol the
deadly serious sycophant, and Warhol the canny deadpan satirist of the
vanityof consumerist wishes. Also the Warhol who had already died as an
artist in 1968when Valerie Solanas made her iconic assassination attempt-
an attack that wasboth tragic and a warholianparody of the political violence
of the era-and whose life and work thereafter assumed a posthumous air.22
Withthe highly publicized auction of his estate, to establish a foundation for
supportingthe most traditional kind of art education, we were even given
Warholthe collector, the philanthropist, the patron of the arts: Andy de
Medici,the closet classicist.2 3 The reproduction of tropes from a reproduc-
tive discourse about an artist obsessed with reproduction. Nor, one imag-
ines, is this cycle yet concluded, for now the art-historical enterprise owns
him completely: with the conclusion of his biological life a whole new
chapter of his discursive life is opened. Just as, one further imagines, he
might very well have wanted: not so much our approbation or even our
distaste, simply our attention. The artist who was "famous for being fa-
?10us,"as Kramer sneers in his obituary; and one is sure without determin-
i~gthe source that the phrase is already a quotation. Perhaps from Warhol
himself.
~ot~ing but repetition, a rehearsal of obituary tropes. There is no way to
a~otdthis rehearsal:one must still register the importanceof Warhol'sdiscur-
siveapotheosis,his critical value in the theory-death of the avant-garde.It is
1111
clear that Warhol occupies a key position in this history, for although h
hardly a surrealist and only vaguely dada and could probably not hav e Was
less about his ideological entanglements with the institution of art ex: c~d
respect to their glamor, his critique of autonomy was absolute and'une:~t in
cal. What is most si~nificant a~~ut Warhol is_tha~ he so thoroughly turne:•;~;
means of recuperatlon-repehtl~n, ~e~haruzatlon, stereotyping, the efface-
~~nt of self by persona, theatncal1zatlon, flatness, commodification, pub-
!•c1ty, a to_tal embrace of the econo~y, openness. to every interpretive
1deology-mto the very substance of his work, and without a single pretens
that he was doing anything else. Nor does it matter whether or not this~
his intention, whether or not he meant to be subversive. Assessments of
Warhol are inhibited by concerns over whether his motives were pure or
crass, whether he had any integrity, whether his work was a commodity in
earnest or parodically, for in the work itself the distance between commodity
and parody collapses. In Warhol and hence in every work that crosses his
screen the issue is not intention but production, and not only that he pro-
duced but that he was himself a product. "I feel very much a part of my
times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rockets and television." "My
image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and
brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection
of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but permanent
symbols that sustain us. "24 The very blank slate on which Burgin writes.
Warhol cannot be rejected on the basis of his personal banality or ven-
ality: what must be comprehended is the banality and venality of the culture
he transparently represents. Any posture of superiority to the spectacle of
recuperation would only have interfered with his theater. A pure symptom:
that is all he constitutes. Perhaps not so small an accomplishment, for his
work thereby reflects the fact that no public art can ever be anything more
than a symptom. In the language of neocritical brokerage one could say that
Warhol became the most critical artist of his age by demonstrating without
any alibi the absolute identity of art and commerce. The proposition remains
absurd: if it were true it would rob critical art of every possibility, every
future. Which discourse can never allow us to do. Perhaps then the proposi-
tion's truth still lies beyond us. Perhaps Warhol was simply high-comic relief
in the theory-death of a critical art that continued posthumously around him,
even as he is said to have lived on posthumously in his own life.
THE DEATH OF BAUDRILLARD
It will be remarked that no thought so dominates this text as that of

Baudrillard: the same reductive obsession with the circulation of discourse
(of signs), the same melodrama of implosion and collapse, the same
postapocalyptic hysteria. A common enough game: subsume the text you are
reading under the aegis of another you have already dismissed so that you 3i:e
relieved of the need to consider either. Should one then pause to answer this
critique, to preempt it, to disagree, to develop a critique of Baudrillard, a
p
Post I 139
•tique that is quite possible but would serve here chiefly to claim a the-
en &. , ? L . .
oretical advantage 1or one s own text. et me instead shirk my dialectical
responsibility and, f~r the sake of your a_rgument:pretend to assent, to go
ven further, to say: if no thought so doininates this text as Baudrillard's, so
~so 00 fate so exemplifies its future, if in a far more extravagant way than will
ever occur here.
"Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated
in its purged form" (Simulations 37). Could Baudrillard possibly be unaware
that his theory has undergone this very metamorphosis, the very simulation
it describes, in yet another artworld comedy? With the 1983publication of an
American translation of Simulations Baudrillard found himself assigned the
role of prophet, patron saint of a new art style. So writes Eleanor Heartney in
an article on neopop, "Simulationism: The Hot New Cool Art."
These artists' conscious appeal to the art consumer and their embrace of the art
market are accompanied by an effort to maintain a philosophical distance from
the larger culture of which the market is a part. The strategy that makes this
distance possible is "simulation"-a term borrowed from the French theorist Jean
Baudrillard, whose writings are very much in vogue among the intelligentsia of
the art world.2 s
That Baudrillard's essays on simulation are hardly a program for philosophi-

cal distantiation, let alone a new aesthetics, should be plain enough to
anyone who has read them. The history of the avant-garde provides many
instances of resistance turned into collusion but in neocritical postmoder-
nism the reverse takes place: a description of total recuperation sponsors
simulations of resistance. Baudrillard ends by lending artists like Peter
Halley an alibi, a mask of resistance under the cover of which painting and
art discourse can sustain their normal operations. The critique of simulation
is simulated, becomes Simulationism, the brandname of a newer cooler art;
the terror of Baudrillard's texts is transformed into a coy farce, a marketing
ploy. No exhibition of Halley's grids goes unaccompanied by texts or talks
documenting Baudrillard's influence, variously distorted (a distortion doubt-
less proper to the texts). But for other artists it is Baudrillard himself who
must be resisted. The 1988 "Resistance (Anti-Baudrillard)" show at New
York's White Columns gallery sought to salvage oppositional art from the
cynicism and nihilism the participating artists perceived in Baudrillard's
theoretical endgame. 26 Like impressionism, like futurism, like Warhol, like
so much else in the history of avant-garde discourse, Baudrillard's theory
provides a screen on which the same dialectical squabbles between radical
and conservative can be replayed again and again. The very same screen it
observes.
"These collectors, they all talk about Baudrillard now." 2 1 Asked in 1986
abo~t whether he appreciated being so admired in the artworld, Baudrillard
replied, "I like it of course. Because of the ambiguity of my relationship with
the university,I am pleased that my work operates in other areas. I noticed in
140 / TuE TuEORY-0EATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
Berlin and in Australia as well, that the figures prominent in the plast·
in performance ha·d ta ken over my b oo k s, often m · the most unorthicartso r
manner. ":a 8 But one year later the attention is no longer so gratifying· .
it seems to have gotten out of hand. In a news article entitled "~l
tx
0
10
t
Prophet," Heartney-evidently ARTnews's official Baudrillard corr:ctant
. h . d' hi . . spon-
dent-_descnbes t ~ circus surroun mg s return v1s1tto New York. "Like a
gathenng of the faithful, the New York art world turned out in droves ti
glimpse of Jean Baudrillard, the latest French theorist to make its requfr:
reading list. Sponsored by the Whitney Museum of American I~
Baudrillard's lecture . . . was filled to capacity." His writings, Heartne'
reports, "currently have the status of divine writ in the art world." B:i
Baudrillard disappointed his fans by denouncing simulationist art. "I cannot
get inv~lved in explaining this new art of simulation. . . . In the world of
simulation there is no object. There is a misunderstanding in taking me as a
reference for this work." "With that," Heartney concludes, "he gathered his
notes and headed back to France, leaving his followers to speculate on the
wisdom of choosing a hero from among the ranks of the living." 2 9
One cannot altogether blame the poor prophet for the idiocy of this
narrative but neither could one hope for a richer spectacle of simulation.
Baudrillard's New York reception-or its representation and hence histor-
icization in ARTnews-was a kangaroo court. The theory of simulation finds
itself simulated in the pure and indifferent circulation it sought to expose.
Every truth that might have constituted a critique of simulation is emptied
out as if in reverse, as if it never existed in the first place. If this were simply a
story about the absurd fate of one theorist, it would hardly be worth repeat-
ing, but the circulation described in Baudrillard's theory and into which his
theory is cast passes through this text as well, and it further suggests that the
fate of his theory stands for the fate of critical theory at large. Theory is a
primary and ineradicable apparatus of the hyperreal, of precuperation, a
screen through which everything that might once have been praxis is ab-
sorbed in advance. Critical theory is theory-dead. But .it is only from theory
that this process is visible.
p
Afterlife
It is not difficult to imagin: w?atever little re~ponse this essay is liable to

receive. For the most part d1sm1ssals of what will be taken as its nihilism, its
cynicism, its def:atism_, its adhere~ce to this or that dubious theory, its
outmoded obsession with recuperation. But the essay was not written for
those who reject an insistence on recuperation only in order to conceal from
themselves the extent of their own recuperation. It was written for those who
have witnessed recuperation in all its force, who have been willing to think
for more than a minute about the alchemy of the commodity form in respect
to their own projects without rushing to embrace some imaginary solution.
(It was also written precisely so that it could be dismissed.) Those for whom
there is no satisfactory answer to the first and last question posed by this
essay: what is the status of your own text in the white economy of discourse?
Here the history of the avant-garde has been above all the genealogy of that
question.
The death of the avant-garde is one means by which this economy

endures. Death is necessary so that everything can be repeated and the
obituary is a way to deny that death ever occurred. Under the cover of the
obituary artists and critics continue exactly as before, endlessly recuperating
differential forms, endlessly manufacturing shabbier and shabbier critical
goods. Long after theory proclaims their demise we still see the same drives
to originality, to novelty, to autonomy, to the anti, all exposed, framed, and
evacuatedin a continuous cycle of discursive commitments. After the death
of the novel a dozen series of designer fiction and a critical obsession with
narrativity; after the death of painting an artmarket glutted with new can-
vasesand the feeling if not the fact that everything sells; after the death of the
new a massive public merger of art and fashion; after the death of the anti a
theater of neoresistance. As in a certain psychic mechanism: compulsive
patterns of repetition are terms of a fatality one actually desires.
The death of the avant-garde is old news, already finished, no longer
worth discussing; but those who think so have not yet even begun to think it.
ptere is no post: everything that claims to be so blindly repeats what it thinks
1
,1r
~ has ~f.Lbehind.Only those wifffng to remam Tii'tlieaeatli offfie avant-garde,
t ose who cease trying to drown out death's silence with the noise of
ne~critical production, will ever have a hope of hearing what that death
articulates.
141
.
,...
C
142 / TuE TuEORY-0EATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE
One could further object that _the phenomena we have been _considering
are exclusive to the artworld, mdeed to a small sector of 1t, and that
elsewhere the economy does not exert such severe recuperative gravity. But
we have made this exasperating journey through the artworld for no other
reason than that it is a salient instance of a cultural system whose generality
is in no way contradicted by the specificity of any local condition described
here. As the avant-garde wasa vanguard of bourgeois development, so a great
many others follow in its wake.
It will also be objected that this exercise fails by restricting itself to a
white, male, eurocentric history, by refusing to explore heterologies of gen-
der, class, ethnicity, etc. But this refusal is deliberate and should not be
mistaken for ignorance or indifference, for any brute racism or sexism. On
the contrary. The history of the avant-garde demonstrates with the utmost
clarity that representations of the other within the discursive economy are
above all recuperative. Those already incorporated by this economy cannot
boost their ideological credit by pretending to represent those whom the
economy has always oppressed, and after so many centuries of having been
spoken for it would be madness for a woman or african or chicano to find it
objectionable that one would decline any longer to do so, that one caught up
in this economy would be inclined instead to turn against himself. Moreover,
given this history, there is reason to be pessimistic that those heterologies
will have any better success representing themselves within the white econ-
omy. Nothing has been done to dismantle the recuperative systems within
which this new critique is being circulated in exactly the same manner as
every critique that preceded it. But history will decide what these heterol-
ogies accomplish.
The anti (in whatever mutation) is impossible and the anti is inevitable,
and the more that inevitability reveals itself the more impossible it becomes.
It is not a dilemma that will be solved by adjusting ideological content or any
aspect of form; rather it is a question of the material means by which the
economy contains every opposition. A few avant-garde projects articulate
their stake in and resistance to the economy in the most material terms:
earthworks, alternative exhibition spaces, the independent publication net-
works of language writing: projects that address discursive economics as
such. And mail art, which resists the economy by reappropriating not just the
means of production but the means of distribution as well, an art whose very
medium is a critique of circulation.
All of these projects have engaged and thereby made themselves visible
to the discursive economy in enough ways that it has been possible to annex
them. In earthworks the white cube turns itself inside out to extend its grasp;
~temative spaces serve as colonial trading posts; language writing offers
itself _to academic discourse on the state of poetry; mail art turns up in
gallenes and museums and in many cases claims that what makes mail art is
not the mail but the art. Even so these material attempts to break from the
Afterlife I 143
discursive economy straddle the margin and point toward spaces where it
fades into invisib~litt earthw~rks that do not trail lifelines to the gallery,
clandestine assoc1atlons of writers, correspondence networks that conceal
themselves from the economy at all costs. If the death of the avant-garde is
its complete representation within the white economy, then one must assume
that other projects have realized this and decided to disappear. In the end it is
the theoretical condition of this disappearance that poses the greatest chal-
lenge.
The avant-garde work is only the trace of an impulse whose trajectory
extends beyond, into the next work and beyond that, precisely because it
knows that every work will be recuperated. In the same manner dada,
surrealism, and so on are not movements so much as interruptions of move-
ment, encystations of the anti. The futurists' insistence on the primacy of
speed might have been correct but if so they were wrong to formulate
futurism. Breton might have been right about the subversive power of desire
but if so he was wrong to create a party to represent it. And yet the demise of
these avant-gardes should never be mistaken for the exhaustion of the energy
that compelled them. The avant-garde exceeds cultural limits and recuper-
ates its own excesses and still projects a further potential for excess that it
can no longer represent. Its public, economic, dialectical function cancels its
differences but even so it is driven by forces that are difficult to contain in
economic or dialectical codes.
1\vo deaths then: one completely circumscribed by the discursive econ-
omy and another completely disengaged from avant-garde commerce, one
that seeks total representation on the economy's white screens and another
that has vanished from them. It is only right: after death one should go up in
smoke, or underground.
Imagine artists for whom every hope for the future of art has been purged
in the apotheosis of the economy; artists sick of the constant parade of
recuperations, of being caught in all the double binds of opposition (the anti
is mandatory, the anti is impossible); artists who know that the death of the
avant-garde was the terminus toward which they were always driven. For
them this death is absolutely in effect. Without exception art that calls itself
art, that is registered as art, that circulates within art contexts can never again
pose as anything but systems-maintenance. The only critical art would be
that which is neither critical nor art: the dada impasse, a point beyond which
there is precisely nothing. What is somehow irreducible in this figure of what
once were artists is that even at this null point, even in the crisis of a
delegitimation that was for them the only legitimation of art, they must still
paint, write, compose, construct, and must still follow the movement of the
anti. How will they proceed if there is nowhere left to go? Perhaps by going
nowhere, by following the anti through its death, by a kind of discursive
suicide. They are so resigned to recuperation that they resign from it. No
more frenetic searches to discover the newest autonomous, semi-autono-
C
144 / THE THEORY-DEATHOF THE AVANT-GARDE

mous, internal autonomous ?r postautonomous zone that will only turn out
to be tomorrow's endocolomal enclave; n? more struggle~ to ~rest an image
of difference from confessions of collus10n; no more d1alectical push-pull
between art and anti-art, but a curious departure, an a~andonment of art and
its discourses in favor of ... what? It cannot be described here, for the next
stage of resistance must be carried out against this very discourse, this very
incursion. What one must imagine is an unprecedented silence, exile and
cunning; samizdat networks, amnesiac and subhistorical; a moratorium, a
boycott, an invisible greve that pretends to neither parnassian nor critical
autonomy, that makes no pretense whatsoever, that is fully committed to its
anonymity. Not Burgin's "empty avant-garde gesture," in fact not a gesture at
all. Not a critical theater in which to represent oneself but a hidden struggle
to dismantle in oneself, in one's network, the entire theatrical apparatus. A
fast for burning off discursive toxins. Perhaps merely a remote workout with
Camus's idiotic rock but perhaps something more. Slothrop 's disappearance
from the tracking systems of Gravity's Rainbow, the grey wraiths of Bur-
roughs, the rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, the still unchronicled derives
and detournements of the situationists. "If only art could accomplish the
magic act of its own disappearance!" Baudrillard cries. "But it continues to
make believe it is disappearing when it is already gone." Hardly gone: in fact
it is everywhere (for Baudrillard, the same thing). Though something from it
might be gone, might yet vanish, and "an enormous energy can come from
disappearance." 1
One could say that this image is hardly original, that the history of the
avant-garde is littered with a thousand inane bohemianisms, daydreams of
escape, outlaw romances, all long since ruined by postmodern deter-
ritorializations, by the mapping and incorporation of every exteriority. But it
is not in order to escape to any utopia that one imagines this disappearance.
One is quite willing to accept the fact that for those inside a culture there is
no outside; one is quite willing to drop the rebel, the outlaw, the exile, or any
of the other stock figures under which most readers will subsume this refusal,
and to take the critique of autonomy all the way. But that is not the same as
acceding to the implication that lacking an ideal exteriority one can only play
by the economy's rules, that one must continue to supply it with recuperative
occasions. It is the arrogance of discourse to assume that all resistance must
acknowledge it, that secrecy is surrender, that unless its enemy shows itself
no enemy exists. We cannot judge what might occur in such privacy; we
cannot know what gifts anonymity provides.
Nothing here is intended to describe this disappearance, to mark it as a
solution, a superior truth, a better technology, a more coherent program. No
prophecies, no calls to arms, no pretense of moral support, no manifestos.
The point is in no sense to nominate a newer truer avant-garde or more
stringent postmodernism: there is no movement here: the point is to use the
thought of disappearance, this second theory-death, to mark the limits of
Afterlife / J45
. . 1 urveillance. Theory can no longer project new models into the field
cnt~~r:versed by the avant-gardes, for those pr~jections have now revealed
on~ 1purpose. One· must therefore proceed m the certainty that nothing
thelf rea·t s any longer 1s a f:nen
· d t o art, nor 1s · art any longer a friend to itself·
o newn 'f1cisrn cannot represent anyt mg 1t does not wish to condemn to'
e h' ·
that
. 1 · · · no Ionger spea k s th e v01ce
ent·on. that cnt1c1sm . of alterity, or speaks it
1
circu.a order ' to cancel what 1s· a Iways Ieft of 1t; · t hat the material conditions of
onlyin . ti . . 1 . ~
ra1 theory prevent 1t rom mventmg so uttons 1or those who still wish to
1
cu tu out the avant-gar d e 's 1egacy,· t h at 1'f d 1'ffierence must be discovered
· it· is
carrrsely a difference from us.
pre~at which has disappeared cannot be represented. It is strictly a the-
oreticalsubject: someone who must exist but with whom we cannot dwell or
be reconciled, who has already refused our support. A figure that serves us
only as an indictment and marks as severely as possible the limits of our
discourse,a space beyond which we can have no interest.
"All men are deceived by the appearance of things," Heraclitus reminds

us, "even Homer himself, who was the wisest of men in Greece; for he was
deceivedby boys catching lice: they said to him, What we caught and killed
we left behind, but what escaped us we bring with us. " 2 The vanished,
invisible,silent artists who pass away from us in the avant-garde's second
death haunt discourse like Homer's phantom lice and remain far more
dangerousthan any neocritical representation of internal resistance. They are
an unmarked sign that escape is still possible and must escape us. It is an
escape that traverses this essay and traces within it the force of differences
that cannot be represented in the white economy, that one can only represent
as an allegory of unrepresentability. The death of the avant-garde is an event-
horizon,a limit of visibility, and thus a discursive phenomenon in the strictest
sense:its death from discourse. The theory-death of discourse itself In every
obituaryof the avant-garde criticism writes its own epitaph.
And what if all this were true? Suppose everyone knew it, assented to it,
what difference would it make? None at all: nothing would come of it but
moretexts reflecting their emptiness. But we have traveled this path to arrive
~t this very point, where artists resign from discourse and discourse resigns
itself to reproducing its death. A vanishing point. The last chapter of the
death of the avant-garde is blank.
Notes
'Jbe author would like to thank Charles ~axter, Marjorie Perloff, Arden Reed, Charles
Shepherdson, James E. Young, and Robm McBurney for their support of this project.
'PATAPHYSICS
J. Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), 6; Wolfe's
emphasis.
2 • Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 198!).
3. Marjorie Perloff, Th~ Futurist _Mo"!ent: Ava?t-Garde, Avant Guelle, and the
Language <!fRupture_ (Chicago: Umvers1ty of Chicago Press, 1986), 90 . See also
GiovanniLista, Futuri~m, t~ans. Charles Lynn Clark (New York: Universe Books,
1986),8-21; and Carohne T1sdaH and Angelo BozzoHa, Futurism (London: Thames
andHudson, 1977), 31-32.
4. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald
(Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1968); Charles RusseJJ, Poets, Prophets, and
Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-
Garde,trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
5. "Cultural resistance" is a phrase borrowed from Hal Foster's Recodings: Art,
Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1985). See below,
"Post"
6. A strong defense of avant-political art can be found, for instance, in the work of
Lucy Lippard. See for example "Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power," in Brian
Wallis,ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (Boston: Godine, 1984),
341-58.
7. Gregory Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Der-
ridato Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 169.
8. Yve-Alain Bois, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalind Krauss, "A Conversation with
Hans Haacke," October 30 (FaH 1984), 48.
9. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of Signs, trans.
CharlesLevin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 87n.
IO. Fredric Jameson, Foreword to Jean-Fram;ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Con-
dition:A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xvi. .
II. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde m
France:1885to World War I (New York: Random House, 1968), 187-251: .
12· Marcel Jean, ed., The Autobiography of Surrealism (New York: V1kmgPress,
1980),30-31.
13- Fer~inand Alquie, The Philosophy of Surrealism, trans. Bernard Waldrop (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 68-83. •
1
4• Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. Richard MiUer (N~w York: HifJ
(d
100
Wa~g, 19_76),3. Barthes's description of the conditions of logothe sis-self-m~la-
t ~ articulation, ordering and theatricaJization (3-6}-could also be used to desc~be
he mvention of the avant-garde "language" though here perhaps it is some function
of culture itself that must be assigned the ;ole of logothete.
~ 15· Michel Foucault "The Subject and Power" in Wallis, 424; "lntelJectual~ and
ower," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practic~: Selected Essays and Interviews,
147
C
148 / Notes for pages 19-29

ed. Donald F. Bou~hard (lth:ica: Cornell University Press, 1977), 208
~6. Jean Baudnllard (with Sylv~re Lotringer) Forget Fo ·
Be1tchman, Lee Hildreth and Mark Polizzotti (New' York: Semi;~a~(/t), trans. Phil
28. X e• 1987), 127-
SEVEN NOTES ON DISCOURSE
1. Brian_O'Doh~rty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gall s

(Santa Momca: Lap1s Press, 1986), 87-88. ery Pace
2. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 4 .
. ~-. ~~ur Kro~er, "The Disembodied Eye: Ideology and Power in the A e of
Nihilism, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory VII.1-2 (Winter-s' rin
1983), 197; see also Arthur Kroker and David Cook, The Postmodern Scene•
mental Cu~ture and Hyper-Aesthetics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986). · cre-
g Ix
4. David J:Ield,_Introdu~tion_ to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas
(Ber~eley: Un!~ers1ty of California Press, 1980), 261. See Jurgen Habermas, "The
Pubbc Sphere, trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique 3 (Fall
1974), 49-53.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," Prisms, trans. Samuel
Weber and ~hierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 25.
6. Frednc Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 76.
7. Cited in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract
Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 201.
8. Bruce Glaser, "Questions to Stella and Judd," ed. by Lucy R. Lippard, in
Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1968), 157-58.
9. Cf. Max Kozloff: "Stella demonstrates ... that the more reductionist the
material, the more conceptual is its nature. Far from becoming physically provocative
it becomes rhetorically provocative." "Critical Schizophrenia," in Gregory Battcock,
ed., The New Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 130.
IO. Serge Guilbaut, "The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America," Oc-
tober 15 (Winter 1980), 77.
11. Edward Lucie-Smith, Late Modern: The Visual Arts since 1945 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1969), 128. Klein's advocates might find this dematerializa-
tion of his work objectionable.
12. Christopher Butler, After the Wake: An Essay on the· Contemporary Avant-
Garde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 68.
13. The quotation is from Barrett Watten, "On Explanation," in Total Syntax
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 214.
14. See Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 75-76.
Compare Carey Lovelace's review of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 1985 Next
Wave Festival: in the seventies "one of the complaints in the art world was th~t
serious art wasn't getting out to a larger public; in the 'Sos, one of the worries is that it
is." High Performance 29 (1985), 20-27. .
15. Diane Macdonell, Theories of Discourse: An Introduction (Oxford: Basd
Blackwell, 1986), 39. .
16. Cf. Derrida's analysis of the way in which the idea of the center !s both
impossible and irreducible and cannot simply be negated, e.g., "Structure, Sign and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278-93.
17. Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intel-
►
Notes for pages 29-35 I 149

ligentsia," in Reflection~, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 177.
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
I. Perhaps by the utopi~n soci~ist Henri de Saint-Simon in his Opinions lit-

teraires, philosophique_set mdus~rielles (1825); p~rhap~ by one of Saint-Simon's
disciples, Olindes ~odngu~s, who m the s~me year, ~n.a ~.i~ogu_eentitled L'Artiste, le
savant et l'industr1el,appbed the_term to men of VISlon m science, commerce, and
the arts who would l~ad the way mto the society of the future; perhaps in 1855 when
Courbet "mounted his one-man show on the doorstep of the Exposition Universelle"
(Kramer); perhap~ as late as 1~63 '"'.hen Nap~leon III consented to the Salon des
Refuses. See for instance Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism,
Avant-Garde,Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press,
1987), 101; Russell, 17; Hilton Kramer, The Age of the Avant-Garde:An Art Chronicle
of 1956-1972(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), ix; Shattuck, 24.
2. Robert Hughes, "The Rise of Andy Warhol," Wallis, 53.
3. Robert Hughes, "The Decline and Fall of the Avant-Garde," in Gregory Batt-
cock, ed., Idea Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 194.
4. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip
Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 1; also printed in Wallis, 253ff.
5. Leslie Fiedler, The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, vol. II (New York: Stein
and Day, 1971), 454-61.
6. Kramer, ix, 18, 3-4. See also Clement Greenberg, "Counter-Avant-Garde," Art
International 15 (May 20, 1971), 16-19.
7. Judith Russi Kirschner, "The Possibility of an Avant-Garde," Formations 2.2
(Fall 1985), 81- 103. I have relied on this article for much of the following survey. Her
argument closely follows Burger's at several key points, especially in its desire to
historicize the avant-garde.
8. Jonathan Miller, "Jokers in the Pack," TLS (August 6, 1964), 703; Douglas
Davis, Artculture: Essays on the Postmodern (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 16;
Richard Gilman, "The Idea of the Avant-Garde," Partisan Review 29 (Fall 1972), 382-
96;James S. Ackerman, "The Demise of the Avant-Garde: Notes on the Sociology of
Recent American Art," Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 (October
1969), 37_1-84; Suzi Gablik, "Art under the Dollar Sign," Art in America 69 (De-
cember 1981), 13-19, and Has Modernism Failed? (New York: Thames and Hudson,
1984),54-55 and passim; Nikos Hadjinicolaou, "On the ideology of avant-gardism,"
Praxis 6 (1982), 44-56; Thomas Crow, "Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual
Arts," in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin, eds., Modern-
ism and Modernity (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,
1983), 215-64; Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art (New York: Macmillan,
1972), 219; Roland Barthes, "Whose Theater? Whose Avant-Garde?" in Critical
Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 69;
Charles Newman, The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985), 46, 48; Burger, passim; Andreas
Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bl~mington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 3; Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "The
Aponas of the Avant-Garde," in The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics
and the Media, ed. Michael Roloff (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974), 24-25 and
~assim;Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modern-
1stMyth~ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 151-70. We will return to many of
th~se wnters and issues during the course of this study. Kirschner mentions Barthes,
Gilman, Ackerman, Gablik, Hadjinicolaou, Crow, Bilrger, and Krauss in her essay;
150 / Notes for pages 35-62
she also refers to studies by Harold Rosenberg, Michael Kirby, and A .
Oliva (82-88). chme Bonit
11
9. "Decline," 185,187,194. Cf. Shock: By 1979theideaofth a
gone[;] ... by 1976 'avant-garde' was a useless concept: social ; a?nt-garde had
behavior had rendered it obsolete" (365-66); "By the end of the 19 ~a •ty and actual
gestures that could be caHed art had given the coup de grdce to th/iJ' the Varietyof
necessity on which the very conception of an avant-garde was based" ~a of historical
IO. "Les Levine Replies," in Battcock, Idea Art, 196. 400>.
11. "The Changing Guard," TLS, August 6, 1964, 676.
12. Cited by M~urice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Rich d
(New York: Macmdlan, 1965), 67. ar Haward
13. J. E. Blosche, Dada Prophetic (1919), quoted in Hans Richter D d .
Anti-Art_, trans. David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 19~. a a. Art and
14. Richard Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism •
Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, trans. Ralph~ Rohb~n
(New York: Wittenborn, 1967), 44-45. an eim
PERIOD
I. Andrea P.A. Belloli, ed., A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French
Landscape (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984); Charless
Moffett et al., The New Pain~ing:Impressionism 1874-1886 (San Francisco: The Fm~
Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986). See also T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern
Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1984).
2. See reviews by Louis Enault in Le Constitutionel, April IO, 1876, and by
Marius Chaumelin in Le Gazette [des etrangers], April 8, 1876; Eisenman, 53.
3. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
1969), 242.
4. Marianne W. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory: 1909-1915 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1968), xxvii. We might add Pasolini to this list of critics. In his film Salo, which
adapts Sade's 120 Days of Sodom in part to allegorize the collapse of fascist power,
many of the chateau's interiors are hung with what appear to be third-rate futurist
paintings. The film's decor, which thereby identifies fascism, sadism, and futurism,is
suggestive but not entirely accurate, since futurism was never the official art of the
fascist state, which in a ludicrously misguided effort to disguise Italy in the trappings
of its former glory usually preferred a sort of degenerate neo-roman style.
5. R. W. Flint, Marinetti: Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1972), 11; Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1977), 200.
6. Giovanni Lista, Futurism, trans. Charles Lynn Clark (New York: Universe
Books, 1986), 62.
7. Marianne Staniszewski notes that whereas the critical effort to distinguish
avant-garde from modem has "gained currency" in recent years, this effort i~~n.der-
mined by the exhibition policy of museums like MOMA, where many exh1b1tions
were "hybrid and had contradictory agendas" ("Capital Pictures," File 28 (1987),2o).
Perhaps the relationship between critics and curators has also been profitable:_put
simply, the hybrid nature of the exhibitions inspires new sorting efforts by the cnticS,
and new critical arrangements suggest new themes for exhibitions. C.. 1
8. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Art and Culture: r,t1ca
Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). .. the
9. Buchloh, "The Primary Colors the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of
Neo-Avant-Garde," October 37 (Summer 1986),42-43, n. 4.
Notes for pages 67-89 I 15I
ECONOMIES
1
_Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge
& Kegan P'aul, 1~84),_31. . .
_ BOrger ep1tom~zes the v1~w that th~ new 1s completely belied as a critical
2
ory by its stake m commodity production.
categ_ Rosenberg, "Th . _eAva~t-Gar d e, ". D.ts~overmg
. _the Present: Three Decades in
3
A t Culture, and Poltt,cs (Chicago: Umvers1ty of Chicago Press, 1973), 86.
r ' . Rosenberg, "What's N~w: Ritual Revolution," Art on the Edge: Creators and
4
Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 251_. .
5 . Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkhe1mer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
6. Theodor W. Adorno, "Culture Industry Reconsidered," New German Critique
(Fall1975), 12.
7 . "Intellectuals and Power," 212. Similar charges are leveled in Newman's Post-
Modern Aura.
8. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982),
io6. See also Hans Haacke, Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works, 1970-1975 (New
York:New York University Press, 1976), 14-36.
9. For Jameson this sort of move from historical to topological modeling would
likely seem a symptom of postmodernism. See "Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984), 53-92.
10. Interview with Jameson, Diacritics 12.3 (Fall 1982), 76.
ANTI
1. In many genealogies the term "anti-art" leaps fully grown from the brow of
Marcel Duchamp, who, typically, is said to have abandoned it after discovering how
much the bourgeoisie loved it. See, for instance, Ursula Meyer, "The Eruption of
Anti-Art" in Battcock, Idea Art, I 17-18.
2. Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, trans. Robert Brain, R. W. Flint,
J.C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 88.
3. Cited in Rosa Trillo Clough, Futurism: The Story of a Modern Art Movement, A
New Appraisal (New York: Philosophical Library, 1961), 57-58.
4. Adorno, "Commitment," in Andrew Arato and Eike Gerbardt, The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1982), 300-318.
5. It is a central piece of avant-garde lore that even the authorship of the name
dada washotly contested. See Richter, 31-32.
6. See for instance Roger Shattuck's introduction to Nadeau's History of Sur-
realism.
7- Michel Sanouillet, "Dada: A Definition," in Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E.
Kuenzli, Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt (Madison: Coda Press and The
Universityof Iowa, 1979), 20 .
8. Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity-An Incomplete Project," in Hal Foster, ed.,
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 11.
. 9. Cited in Yve-Alain Bois, "The Antidote," October 39 (Winter 1986), 143. One
mights~y th~t criticism itself is the pharmacologist. .
IO. Cited m Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twent1eth
Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 285.
D 11· Mel Gordon, "Dada Berlin: A History of Performance (1918-1920)," The
rama Review 18.2 (1974), I 19.
B 12· ~or disi:upting the performance of one of his plays. See Nadeau, 66-67 a nd
reton s NadJa, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 196o), I8-i9.
r
152 I Notes for pages 89-115
Breton tempered the charge in his second surrealist manifesto.

13. And.re Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R
Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 47. ·
THE GERM OF CONSENT
I. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: Pan
Books, 1971), 217.
. 2. Futurism als~ _cameto speak of complementarismo dinamico, "a moderniza-
tion of the vague ongmal term complementarismo congenito in the painters' technical
manifesto" (Martin 133).
3. Pie~e Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New
York: Viking Press, 1971), 69. Clearly Duchamp was also willing to work. In the case
of the Large Glass the sort of anti-work that enabled months of neglect to be
incorporated into the project as "dust breeding," or that allowed the breaking in-
transit of the unfinished Glass to constitute its completion "by chance," was accom-
panied by much painstaking calculation and effort. But Duchamp was interested in
the demystification of labor as much as in the demystification of inspiration.
4. George H. Myers, Jr., Alphabets Sublime: Contemporary Artists on Collage
and Visual Literature (Washington, D.C.: Paycock Press, 1986), 16.
5. Klaus Staeck, "Beware Art! Photomontage as Political Intervention," in Doug-
las Kahn and Diane Neumaier, eds., Cultures in Contention (Seattle: The Real Comet
Press, 1985), 251, 257. See also Kahn, John Heart.field:Art and Mass Media (New
York: Tanam Press, 1985).
6. Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?, trans. Christopher S. Wood
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 6o.
7. The title of a 1989 exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
8. Craig Owens, review of Krauss's Originality of the Avant-Garde, "Analysis
Logical and Ideological," Art in America 73 (May 1985), 31; see also Perloff 2500.
9. Ron Silliman, "For L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E," Bruce Andrews and Charles
Bernstein, eds., The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=EBook (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1984), 16.
CRISIS
1. It is important to emphasize that the society described here is not a smooth,

flawless, seamless, perfect machinery: as Deleuze and Guattari remark,
in order to function . . . a social machine must not function welf . . . The dysfunctions are
an essential element of its very ability to function, which is not the least important aspect of
the system of cruelty. The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a dishar-
mony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the
contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender,
and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased
doubting itseU: while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism's
natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks
down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.
The avant-garde is an element of this functional dysfunctioning; the real threat is

posed by its death, the moment when the system's meta-order imposes itself_without
mediation, when breakdown itself breaks down. See Gilles Deleuze and Febx Guat-
tari, Anti-Oedipus:.Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem,
and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 151.
2. Jonathan Crary, "The Eclipse of the Spectacle," in Wallis, 293.
3. "The Post-Modern is given both its energizing and enervating force by the
----- Notes for pages IIJ-137 I 153
·Mllationof discourse, a market which ~oes not reach equilibrium
irv•:ty common to all systems clogged with transactions leavin ' ~ut only _that
satle d" (34) ' g a11maJorquestions
unresolve · .
4 Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical A . l .
.. rohns Hopkins University Press, 1982),66-6 7.
. re rtlcu atlon (Bal-
umo Cf. · J' Forget roucau
r It·. "When one t alks so much about power ·r b .
5· be found anywhere" (60). ' 1 s ecause1tcan
no longer .. . .
6. Gregory. Lukow, Anmversanes of Defeat: Post-VietnamRe • • .
f C . . " .I. I w· v1s1omsm and the
Commodificat1on o " ymc1sm, ourna ( mter 1986),61; emphasisdeleted
7· Cf· Newman:
·
The End Game Strategy,though by now tedi'ous1·n th ·
h b e extreme
mayprove m retrospect to ave een necessary to open up the game again" ( ). '
99
POST
I. Fredric Jam~son, "Postm~de~ism, or the CulturalLogic of Late Capitalism,"
65 Unless otherwise noted all citations from Jameson in this chapter are taken from
.
this article.
2• Linda Hutcheon, "Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism," TextualPractice
1.1(Spring1987),13, 10.
3. Fredric Ja~eso~, Foreword to Lyotard, The PostmodernCondition,xii.
4. Alice Jardme m Hal Foster, ed., Discussions in Contemporary Culture,
NumberOne (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987),167.
5. Foster, Recodings, 13-32, 15.
6. David Plotke, "Language and Politics Today," Poetics Journal 1 (January
1982),46-48.
7. Leo Steinberg, "Some of Hans Haacke's Works Considered as Fine Art,"
UnfinishedBusiness, ed. Brian Wallis(Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1986),8-19.
8. BenjaminH. D. Buchloh, "Hans Haacke: Memoryand InstrumentalReason,"
Art in America 76.2 (February 1988),96-109, 157.
9. RosalynDeutsche, "Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real Estate and the Mu-
seum," Wallis, UnfinishedBusiness, 21.
IO. Catherine Lord, "Hans Haacke: Where the ConsciousnessIndustry is Con-
centrated,"in Kahn and Neumaier, 207.
11. Fredric Jameson, "Hans Haacke and the Cultural Logic of Postmodernism,"
Wallis,UnfinishedBusiness, 43.
12. Hans Haacke, "Museums, Managers of Consciousness," Wallis, Unfinished
Business,6o.
13. Hal Foster, "Subversive Signs," Recodings, 99-100. Further quotationsfrom I
Fosterin this section come from the same essay.
14. CarolSquiers, "Diversionary (Syn)tactics: Barbara Kruger Has Her Waywith I
Words,"ARTnews (February 1987),84. , ,, .
15. See for instance Andy Grundberg's "When Outs Are In, Whats Up? m The
SundayNew YorkTimes, "Arts and Leisure," July 26, 1987. ..
16. MichelFoucault, Power/Knowledge:Selected Interviews and Other Wntmgs,
1972-1977,ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall,John Mepham,and I
KateSoper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980),142. . ew
17, Walliset al., Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Ob1ect(N
York:Ne~ Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986),33-34. .
18· DavidJoselit, "Investigating the Ordinary," Art in Amenca (May1985), 154·
19, Art in America (May 1988),160. • tlantic
20
. · VictorBurgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodermty(A
Highlands,N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1986),200· S hutze and
21·. Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication,~rans.Bernard c
CarolineSchutze, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e),•988), 133·
- 154 / Notes for pages 137-145
22. See for instance Robert Hughes in Time (March 9, 1987), 90; Jack KrolJ in
Newsweek (March 9, 1987), 64-66; Hilton Kramer, "The Death of Andy Warhol," The
New Criterion (May 1987), 1-3; Arthur C. Danto, "Who Was Andy Warhol?"
ARTnews (May 1987), 128-32.
23. Time's report on the auction (May 9, 1988) was published in the "Living"
section: at this stage barely ironic. It might also be worth noting that Sotheby's
catalogue for this colJection has been reviewed alongside critical works on Warhol
and catalogues of posthumous retrospectives: predictably, colJecting and producing
assimilate one another. See Brian WalJis, "Absolute Warhol," Art in America (March
1989), 25-31.
24. The quotations are from Calvin Tomkins, The Scene: Reports on Post-Modern
Art (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 48; and Diana Crane, The Transformation of the
Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940-1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 78.
25. ARTnews (January 1987), 133.
26. See John Miller, "Baudrillard and His Discontents, Artscribe International
(May 1987), 48-51.
27. Quotation from Gary Indiana's interview with Peter Nagy, The Village Voice
(April 14, 1987), 91; requoted as the title of an essay-talk by Thomas Crow in
Discussions, 1.
28. Catherine Francblin, "Interview with Jean Baudrillard," Flash Art 130 (Oc-
tober-November 1986), 54. Something of the reaction to Baudrillard's Australian
campaign can be glimpsed in the volume Seduced and Abandoned: The Baudrillard
Scene, ed. Andre Frankovits (Australia: Stonemoss, and New York: Semiotext[e],
1984). Like the White Columns show, this book simulates the reopening of critical
possibility in the blank analytical space of Baudrillard's theory. See also Baudrillard,
The Evil Demon of Images (Sydney, Australia: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1987),
especially the introductory material framing some of the institutional background of
Baudrillard's Australian roadshow.
29. ARTnews (September 1987), 18.
AFTERLIFE
1. Francblin, Flash Art interview, 55.

2. Cited as epigraph to W. S. Merwin, The Lice (New York: Atheneum, 1969);
translation modified.
- 154 I Notes for pages 137-145
22. See for instance Robert Hughes in Time (March 9, 1987), 90; Jack Kroll in
Newsweek (March 9, 1987), 64-66; Hilton Kramer, "The Death of Andy Warhol," The
New Criterion (May 1987), 1-3; Arthur C. Danto, "Who Was Andy Warhol?"
ARTnews (May 1987), 128-32.
23. Time's report on the auction (May 9, 1988) was published in the "Living"
section: at this stage barely ironic. It might also be worth noting that Sotheby's
catalogue for this collection has been reviewed alongside critical works on Warhol
and catalogues of posthumous retrospectives: predictably, collecting and producing
assimilate one another. See Brian Wallis, "Absolute Warhol," Art in America (March
1989), 25-31.
24. The quotations are from Calvin Tomkins, The Scene: Reports on Post-Modern
Art (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 48; and Diana Crane, The Transformation of the
Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940-1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 78.
25. ARTnews (January 1987), 133.
26. See John Miller, "Baudrillard and His Discontents, Artscribe International
(May 1987), 48-51.
27. Quotation from Gary Indiana's interview with Peter Nagy, The Village Voice
(April 14, 1987), 91; requoted as the title of an essay-talk by Thomas Crow in
Discussions, 1.
28. Catherine Francblin, "Interview with Jean Baudrillard," Flash Art 130 (Oc-
tober-November 1986), 54. Something of the reaction to Baudrillard's Australian
campaign can be glimpsed in the volume Seduced and Abandoned: The Baudrillard
Scene, ed. Andre Frankovits (Australia: Stonemoss, and New York: Semiotext[e],
1984). Like the White Columns show, this book simulates the reopening of critical
possibility in the blank analytical space of Baudrillard's theory. See also Baudrillard,
The Evil Demon of Images (Sydney, Australia: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1987),
especially the introductory material framing some of the institutional background of
Baudrillard's Australian roadshow.
29. ARTrtews (September 1987), 18.
AFTERLIFE
1. Francblin, Flash Art interview, 55.

2. Cited as epigraph to W. S. Merwin, The Lice (New York: Atheneum, 1969);
translation modified.

Mann - Theory-Death of The Avant-Garde

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Mann - Theory-Death of The Avant-Garde

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Luigi Russolo. Revolutie. 1911/12. Oil on canvas. 150 x 230cm.

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

© 1991 by Paul Mann

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

therefore disturbed gli~pse of_the centripetal c~rrents of even the most

The sta!~§__QfJ_he.oryin....ar..t,of art in cultural discourse; the status of

It might be useful to start with a survey of the questions most commonly

g / THE THEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE

. ts as well as by critics. For members of any given movementdefi ..

. As with definition, so with chronicle: to write a history of the avant-garde

The question is important because it focuses attention on the problem of

the other hand a viable distinction can ·be maintained

-Only against artistic tradition or against culture more broadly con-

CAN THE AVANT-GARDE ALIGN ITSELF EFFECTIVELY WITH

Surrealism provides a reference point. At first the surrealists d • .

ls THE AVANT-GARDE DEAD?

[Yve-Alain]Bois: One of the reasons I was always so impressedby what I'

. In RogerShattuck's account of the so-calledbelle epoque, AlfredJarry's

16 / THE THEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE

forcefully not by Ubu, the spirit of epatisme-not so much by any need

To engage in a close analysis of these sentences, which begin in declarative

sample o~ 'pataph~sical excep~ion, one regulatory system-but not merely

It is no longer a matter of inventing another theory of the avant-garde;

effectiveness of a theory is likewise measured not so much by either its

d. course of the avant-garde as such as a dialectical structure to which one

I. And yet to describe avant-garde discourse as 'pataphysical is alread

The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledgethey

superstructural allegory of basic economic processes; it is a vital ec .

Public discussions,Habermas argues, grewout of a specificphase of the dev 1

For present purposes it is necessary to underscore three points in the

Just as culture sprangup in the marketplace,in the trafficof trade, in communica-

Bo~rgeois culture a_rosefrom and returns to communication, but a communi-

4. Clyfford Still to his dealer, Betty Parsons:

There is mo~e~er~ than the usual conte~pt !or

Seven Notes on Discourse I 25

5. If art sometimes operates through tacit collusion with discourse

at the piano) on descriptive reiteration is "defeating":

performance.Whatwasthe pointat whichtheyrealizedth .

In this logic a point can only be made once. Or can it? Ob •

Todayth~ p_r~vailingattitude is that discourses are local inst~nc.es_,of.a_po:wef-.

7. "Intellectual currents can generate a sufficient head of water for the

space where the critic will (re)produce something that can be

Is it strange that these obituaries have not been accompanied by any

who have been working along these margins, apparently u d

Schneemann, Carl Stone, Survival Research Laboratory H os1er, Carolee

absurdly to produce from within cultural paradigmsthat no longerhavethe

Can we review a few of these obituaries without indulging in either relish

effe~t~ to despise .. That it does so by means of a profi_tablealliance with the

Death by compromise: we will witness this judgment again and again.

36 / THE THEORY-DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE

We can sift this obituary discourse to discover a few of its patterns:

Night of the Living Dead I 37

In a sense ,!he avant-garde is ~LS..Q f~__g_!LJl...J:.ant

Why are we subjected to so many histories of th

Is the avant-garde advanced or traditional? Revolutionary or reactionary?

sends out its avant-garde is itself. The avant-garde is the vanguard of th

e ened by romariticisiii-an·a left gapmg throughout the century, a space that

Poggioli's account of the early avant-garde might serve as one example of

The availability in Paris of a political discourse rooted in anarchism and the

by the artistic wing of this social ~?.~-l!'!~~t. wa~~.~~~O~£~nied_b art's

to promote reputations blocked by rejection at the Salon, and therefore as a

Theessenee of the new art was itsh insistentindeterminacy

One could object ~o the notion _that either resistance to instrumentalist

by the artistic wing of this social ~?.~-l!'!t. wa.~~~O~£~nied_b art's