Theory of the Avant-Garde Peter Burger Translation from the German by Michael Shaw Foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse Theory and History of Literature, Volume 4 m I4P' Manchester University Press University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Copyright e 1984 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Manchester University Press. Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL Printed in the United StateS of America. BritWt Lllrary Cacolopinl in Publiadon Data Biirger, Peter Theory of the avant-garde. 1. Avant-garde (Aesthetics) I. Title II. Theorie der avantgarde English 709.'4 BH301.A94 ISBN 0-7190·1453-0 ISBN 0-7190-1452 pbk The translation is based on the second edition of Theorie der Avantgarde © 1974, 1980 by Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt, West Germany, and on "Theorie der Avantgarde und Theorie der Literatur" [the introduction in this volume! and "Hermeneutik-Ideologiekritik­ tunktionsanalyse" (chapter one this volume! in Peter Qiirger, Vermittlung- Rezeption-Funktion © 1979 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, West Germany. Contents Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde by Jochen Schulte-Sasse Vll Preliminary Remarks xlviii Introduction: Theory of the Avant-Garde and Theory of Literature xlix One. Preliminary Reflections on a Critical Literary Science 3 1. Hermeneutics 2. Ideology Critique 3. Analysis of Functions Two. Theory of the Avant-Garde and Critical Literary Science 15 1. The Historicity of Aesthetic Categories 2. The Avant-Garde as the Self-Criticism of Art in Bourgeois Society 3. Regarding the Discussion of Benjamin's Theory of Art Three. On the Problem of the Autonomy of Art in Bourgeois Society 35 1. Research Problems 2. The Autonomy of Art in the Aesthetics of Kant and Schiller 3. The Negation of the Autonomy of Art by the Avant-Garde Four. The Avant-Gardiste Work of Art 55 1. On the Problem of the Category 'Work' 2. The New 3. Chance 4. Benjamin's Concept of Allegory 5. Montage Five. Avant-Garde and Engagement 83 1. The Debate between Adorno and Lulcics 2. Concluding Remark and a Comment on Hegel Postscript to the Second German Edition 95 Notes 100 Bibliography 122 Index 126 lliustrations 1. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain by R. Mutt, 1917 (Urinoir), 1917 52 2. Daniel Spoerri, Wbo Knows Where Up and Down Are? (Wer wei(3, 'fDO obe71 urul u7Iten ist?), 1964 58 3. Andy Warhol, 100 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962 62 4. Rene Magritte, The ReadyMade Bouquet, 1956 64 5. Pablo Picasso, Still Life (Nature ",orte), 1912 74 6. Pablo Picasso, Violin (Un rnolon accrocbe au mur), 1913 75 7. John Heartfield, Adolph-Tbe Superman-Wbo Swallo'WS Gold and Spouts Junk (Adolf-Der Obermenscb scbluckt Gold und redet Blecb), 1932 76 8. John Heartfield, Germany Is Still Not Lost! (Nocb ist Deutscbland nicbt 'Derloren!), 1932 77 The publisher is grateful to those who granted pennission for use of these illustrations in this text. Full citation of copyright holders is given in the cap­ tions for each illustration. Every effort was made by the publisher and the author to obtain permission for illustration 2. Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde by Jochen Schulte-Sasse I. Modernism vs. The Avant-Garde: Preliminary Demarcations A. Poggioli's Theory of the Avant-Garde and Its Limits The title of Peter Burger's book will recall to the American reader Renato Poggioli's study of 1968, which bears the same title. Al­ though Poggioli's name is now rarely mentioned, the influence of his approach can still be seen in the most recent discussions of modern­ ism, post-modernism, and the avant-garde. At least his approach is highly compatible with the discussion, at present largely determined by poststructuralist premises. For this reason, a systematic deveIop­ men t of the radical differences between the two directions of thought represented by Burger's and Poggioli's books may help determine those places where Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde could posi­ tively influence the stagnating debate surrounding modernism and the avant-garde. A rarely questioned assumption that underlies this debate is that As one who up to now has written all his publications in that strange Teutonic language Mark Twain characterized so beautifully, it has been a humiliating experience trying to express my thoughts in Twain's very own medium. Therefore, I am all the more grateful for the extensive help I received from Linda Schulte-Sasse in translating and from Lindsay Watets in editing this text. vii viii 0 FOREWORD avant-garde literature derives from the dichotomy between conven­ tional, cliched language and experimental linguistic forms that dislodge those cliches. This explanation, of course, is not unique to the study of the artistic media using language, since a similar dichoto­ my of conventionality versus originality has dominated the critique of other arts. As early as 1939, Clement Greenberg's essay "Avant­ Garde and Kitsch" was in both title and contents characteristic of this tendency within art criticism. Typically enough, Greenberg, probably America's best known art critic of the fifties and early sixties, chose this programmatic essay to introduce his book Art and Culture (1961). Poggioli is no exception to this tradition. In his view, the tendency of "avant-garde" writing to concentrate on linguistic creativity is a "necessary reaction to the flat, opaque, and prosaic nature of our public speech, where the practical end of quantitative communica­ tion spoils the quality of expressive means." Thus the hermetic, dark language of modem fiction has a social task: It functions as "at once cathartic and therapeutic in respect to the degeneration afflicting common language through conventional habits." 1 The "cult of novelty and even of the strange"2 in avant-garde art has for Poggioli definable historical and social causes in the "tensions of our bourgeois, capitalistic, and technological society."3 The "bourgeois, capitalistic, and technological society" of which Poggioli speaks did not, however, begin with the period of the historical avant-garde during the twenties, and cenainly not with the period of postmodernism in the fifties and' sixties. Poggioli's historical-social derivation of the avant-garde entangles him in a difficulty. He draws a parallel between bourgeois-capitalist society and the commercialization and dequalification of language on the one hand and the "avant-garde's" skepticism toward language on the other. If this parallel is valid, then a critical consciousness pro­ voked by the degeneration of language as it was used in the market­ place must have already existed in the late eighteenth century. If, however, a connection between bourgeois, capitalist society and skepticism toward language can be found in the late eighteenth and in the entire nineteenth century, then it becomes highly questionable whether Poggioli's setting up oflinguistic conventionality against the avant-garde can serve as a starting point for a "theory of the avant­ garde." For then the term avant-garde would have to be stretched to apply to the late eighteenth century and would become an empty slogan, no longer able to help us distinguish romanticism, symbolism, aestheticism, the avant-garde, and postmodemism from each other. FOREWORD 0 ix I will begin with the first poin t, the question whether there was a skeptical consciousness about language around the year 1800. One can in fact cite numerous remarks dating back that far arguing that the cliched character of language is a social and historical problem. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Schiller and Goethe decided to begin preliminary studies for a project on dilettantism. The notes on the project (which was never completed) state: "All dilettantes are plagiarizers. They sap the life out of and destroy all that is original and beautiful in language and in thought by repeating it, imitating it, and filling up their own void with it. Thus, more and more, language becomes filled up with pillaged phrases and forms that no longer say anything; one can read entire books that have a beautiful style and contain nothing at all."4 One could easily cull similar remarks from writers of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. These early attacks on the degeneration of language are pervaded by an awareness of the interrelation of various sociohistorical developments: bourgeois-capitalist society, mass culture,the poet's stance against this development, the consciously esoteric character of "high" literature, and the like. Rousseau in France, Karl Philipp Moritz and Schiller and the Romantics in Germany, and (somewhat later) Wordsworth and Coleridge in Eng­ land discussed the division of labor and its influence on literature; the experience of alienation in modern societies; the dequalifying effect of the instrumentalization of reason; and the domination of social interaction by exchange value, expressed by the terms "self­ interest," "interest," "amour-propre," and "economic egotism." The reason that these sociological themes immediately affected literature and aesthetic theory lies not so much in the sensitivity of great writers to sociohistorical changes, but rather in the signifi­ cance of the book market for the national economy of the eigh­ teenth centuryS and in writers' new experience of having to compete with the mass appeal of popular literature.6 These developments led to a confrontation between writer and commercialism, between originality and conformism, between autonomous "high" literature and a literature given over to the ideological reproduction