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The Content of the Avant-Garde: Subjectivity, Community, Revolution

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The Content of the Avant-Garde: Subjectivity, Community, Revolution The Content of the Avant-Garde: Subjectivity, Community, Revolution A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Rory J. Dufficy Western Sydney University 2015 Acknowledgments A project as lengthy and misconceived as this requires many handmaidens. I wish firstly to thank my supervisors Chris Andrews, Anna Gibbs and Ben Etherington. To the extent that a work such as this is able to provide an adequate account of the area it surveys, it is because of their varied expertise. I want to especially thank Chris, whose patience with my delays, tergiversations, and terrible editing will not be quickly forgotten. Without him this work would not exist. At the University of Western Sydney, I wish to thank Kate Fagan, who first encouraged me to study there, and who supported this work from its inception, and the remarkable administrative help provided by Melinda Jewell and Suzanne Gapps. The Writing and Society Research Centre and its academic staff, headed by Ivor Indyk, provided the perfect home for the cross-disciplinary work I was attempting. The past four Historical Materialism Australasia conferences provided many occasions to consider this work in the broader context of revolutionary thought. My fellow organisers, Gareth Bryant, Bill Dunn, Elizabeth Humphries, David McInerney, Claire Parfitt, Philip Roberts, Tadeusz Tietze, and Jessica Whyte made the routine burdens of administration feel like something important. Many friends and comrades commented on this work, in draft form or at conferences where the research was presented, or else provided invaluable references, aid and other support. I wish to thank, in particular, Mathew Abbott, Anne Boyer, Bryan Cooke, Andy Carruthers, Ben Etherington, Eddie Hopely, Gail Jones, Astrid Lorange, Sam Moginie, Knox Peden, Josh Robinson, Joel Scott, Jason E. Smith, Daniel Spaulding, Amy Stefanovic, Mark Steven, and Jessica Whyte. My parents, Paul and Carmel, and my siblings, Kate and Tom, provided, along with the occasional space to write, material and immaterial aid, love, and invaluable perspective. Finally, I wish to thank my partner, Elena, who has taught me so much, who models the kind of politics I wish to inhabit, and to whom this work is dedicated, with love. Statement of Authentication The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. …………………………………………… Rory J. Dufficy Table of Contents Introduction: The Avant-Garde and its Programme ............................... 1 Frameworks .......................................................................................... 1 Avant-Guerre ...................................................................................... 11 Après-Guerre ...................................................................................... 17 The Avant-Garde and its Theory ...................................................... 22 Contents and Phrases ........................................................................ 32 1: The Revolution of the Avant-Garde .................................................. 42 The Emergence of a Paradigm ......................................................... 42 The Future of Reaction ..................................................................... 48 A Note on the ‘Word Itself’ ............................................................... 59 Transient Revolution ......................................................................... 62 The Eagle, the Mole, and the Prefix ‘Sur’ ......................................... 66 From the Material of the Revolution to the Material of the Avant- Garde ................................................................................................. 76 2: The Material of the Avant-Garde ....................................................... 81 Manifestos, Materialism, Materials ................................................... 81 Disappearance as Signature .............................................................. 85 The Absent Totality .......................................................................... 90 The Wages of Separation .................................................................. 96 An Avant-Garde of Emergence ........................................................ 108 Against Chinese Walls ....................................................................... 111 Two Steps Back ................................................................................ 115 3: The Reserve Armies of the Avant-Garde: Debord’s New Subjects . 120 What was the Revolution? ................................................................ 120 From the Critique of Urbanism to the Urbanism of Critique .......... 126 The Cop and The Condotierre ......................................................... 129 The Avant-Garde in Reserve ............................................................ 147 4: The Ends of the Avant-Garde: Abjection as Limit and Critique ..... 153 On Process and Terminology .......................................................... 153 Lost Negation .................................................................................. 157 Accumulation and Its Others ........................................................... 163 Unemployed Negativity ................................................................... 167 Terminal Avant-Gardes .................................................................... 174 Conclusion: The Path of an Epoch ..................................................... 182 Ab ovo usque ad mala ...................................................................... 182 Under the Sign of the Sacred ........................................................... 191 Empire and the Outmoded .............................................................. 197 Envoi ................................................................................................ 203 Bibliography ........................................................................................ 205 Abstract This thesis develops a new conception of the twentieth century avant-garde, viewed through its relationship to the revolutionary politics of that century. In so doing, it stresses the importance of generating a concept that both isolates the specificity of avant-garde aesthetic production, apart from broader trends in aesthetic experimentation, and is able to account for both the initial emergence of such movements and their later reappearance in the ‘neo’-avant-garde. This requirement is met by developing three concepts, the intersection of which, and commitment to, is the unique property of the avant-garde. Preeminent here is the centrality of revolutionary social transformation to the vision of the avant-gardes, and the question of how such change is accomplished. This, in turn, requires the avant- garde to develop a concept both of the subject in whose name revolution is made, and the new community that such a revolution founds. This thesis argues that all avant-gardes, regardless of their ostensible political orientation, shared a common answer to these questions. Deploying a term developed to describe the particular orientation of the working-class movement in the early twentieth century, I describe this common answer as ‘programmatism’. It consists of revolution viewed as the steady accumulation of victories by a mass, male subject engaged in industry, envisioning a community where such labour was generalised. Using this as a heuristic, this thesis relates the emergence of an initial or ‘historical’ avant-garde with the revolutionary height of programmatism, and its greatest political victories, followed by a subsequent emergence of a ‘neo’-avant-garde marked by the decomposition of programmatism, and revolutionary moments that brought that conception itself into question. This broad theoretical panorama is illustrated by a series of close readings of distinct texts and bodies of work. The conceptual apparatus is first developed by a close engagement with previous texts that have attempted to develop a ‘theory of the avant-garde’, followed by studies of the manifestos of the historical avant-garde, of the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Guy Debord, the political writing of the Situationist International, and the feminist manifestos of Mina Loy and Valerie Solanas. These individual studies follow a broadly chronological sequence, and trace the limits of an avant-garde structured by programmatism. In mapping this sequence, the thesis concludes that, once understood in this way, the avant-garde must be seen not as an always-present potential in aesthetic production, but as an historically contingent product of a certain configuration of revolutionary politics and capitalist development. The thesis thus closes with the suggestion that new forms of aesthetic radicalism will have to abandon the particular commitments that marked the twentieth-century avant-gardes. We take our stand on the other side of culture. Not before it, but after it. – ‘The Avant-Garde of Presence’, Internationale Situationniste #8. 1 Introduction: The Avant-Garde and its Programme Frameworks In the 1860s, some years distanced from his participation (however quixotic it was) in the revolutions of 1848, Baudelaire registered with some distaste the increasing prominence of the term ‘avant-garde’: On the Frenchman’s passionate predilection for military metaphors.
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