Ahead of its Time: Historicity, Chronopolitics, and the Idea of the Avant-Garde after Modernism Chrysi Andriani Papaioannou Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies January 2017 [2] The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2017 The University of Leeds and Chrysi Andriani Papaioannou The right of Chrysi Andriani Papaioannou to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. [3] Acknowledgements A significant portion of the time required for the conception and writing of this thesis has been financially supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Doctoral Award. Thank you to my supervisors Gail Day and Joanne Crawford for their continuing encouragement and guidance, particularly during those ever-so- present moments of self-doubt. This project might have never kicked off had it not been for the comradely generosity of Stathis Kouvelakis and Aude de Caunes, whom I had the privilege of meeting during the anti-cuts protests of 2010 at King’s College London: merci/ευχαριστώ. The Marxism in Culture seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and all the people who make it what it is, provided a much-needed intellectual community, while ‘up North’ staff and students from the faculty made Leeds feel a second home (special thanks are due to Amy Charlesworth, Daniel Mourenza, and Liz Stainforth). Initial ideas related to the question of chronopolitics were formulated on the occasion of the 2014 London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) at Goldsmiths: thanks to everyone who took part in the ‘Time Discipline’ discussion, helping these ‘conversations at the margins’ to materialise. During my brief time in Berlin in autumn 2014, the generous and hospitable archivists Ursula Marx and Michael Schwarz at the Walter Benjamin/Theodor W. Adorno Archiv in Akademie der Künste helped lessen the panic that overpowered me when I saw Benjamin’s indecipherable scribbles close-up. I am lucky to be surrounded by so many gifted and inspiring individuals. For their friendship and solidarity, thank you: Ana Baeza Ruiz, Alex Boican, Aude de Caunes, Katja Čičigoj, Fotini Kallianou, Michelle Outram, Tijana Stevanović, Jessica Stoll, and Philippa Thomas. For reading, commenting on, and [4] discussing chapter drafts and ideas, my sincere thanks to: Baraneh Emadian, Tom Hastings, Ian Klinke, Jenny Kneis, Matt Mahon, Tong Mao, Ben Pritchett, Jonathan Stafford, Robert Stearn, and Anna Toropova. I am indebted to my family for helping to finance my university studies and in particular my sister Eleni for providing the impetus for thinking about aesthetics some 20 years ago. Academic acknowledgements cannot but fail to capture the mysterious other half of academic life that is one’s personal life. No matter how witty or heartfelt, no acknowledgement of one’s other half can adequately express the feeling of gratitude: Simon, I cannot thank you enough. [5] Abstract In its etymology and in popular discourse, the term ‘avant-garde’ is commonly associated with a future temporality, while in art-historical discourse, it represents a tradition of modernist innovation, periodised as ‘historical avant- garde’ and ‘neo-avant-garde’. Since this historical periodisation was first established in the 1950s, the avant-garde’s futurity has been repeatedly disputed, bringing the very notion of an avant-garde into question. This thesis takes as its starting point the predicament of ‘an avant-garde after the avant- garde’ as a means to investigate the philosophico-political implications of a historical temporality marked by ‘afterness’. Writing in critical dialogue with scholarship that has articulated the avant-garde as a notion of historical time, the thesis modifies the parameters of this scholarship by foregrounding the category of historicism, and by reformulating the avant-garde as a notion that both resists and inhabits historical periodisation. As a study at the disciplinary intersection of comparative literature and critical theory, Ahead of its Time proceeds via close readings of selected theories of the avant-garde (German literary scholar Peter Bürger’s foundational Theory of the Avant- Garde in the 1970s; British art theorist John Roberts’ formulation of a ‘suspensive avant-garde’ in the twenty-first century; and the intellectual debates of the Italian circle Neoavanguardia in the 1960s), while also mobilising the critical resources available in the thought of Walter Benjamin. Through a non-linear, comparativist critical analysis that discusses these theories in, and as, a Benjaminian constellation, the thesis proposes the avant- garde as a relational, indexical category that is constitutively split between historical continuity and historical rupture. In this manner, Ahead of its Time revisits the broader question of mediation between universality and particularity, and by recasting it in temporal terms, it advocates a chronopolitics of singularity, whereby the avant-garde’s split between continuity and rupture also reveals the ethically-necessary relationship between self-determination and contingency. [6] Table of Contents Abbreviations & Bibliographical Note ............................................................................................ 8 Introduction: What’s Historical about the Historical Avant-Garde? ........................... 10 I.‘Which Avant-Garde?’ Specificity and its Discontents ........................................................ 13 II.Historicity, Time, and the Philosophical Turn in Avant-Garde Studies ...................... 25 III. The Idea of the Avant-Garde in/as a Benjaminian Constellation ............................... 36 I. Towards a Benjaminian Comparativism ........................................................................... 49 Chapter 1 ‘The World in a State of Similarity’: Walter Benjamin, Chronopolitics, Historical Difference ............................................................................................................................ 50 1.1 ............ Time Experienced/Time Measured: Historical Time in ‘On the Concept of History’ ...................................................................................................................................................... 56 1.2 Revisiting Benjaminian Chronopolitics: kairós and ‘timing’ ....................................... 63 1.3 Seeing Similarity: Benjaminian Analogy as Historical Difference ............................. 73 II. Theorising the Avant-Garde after Modernism ............................................................. 87 Chapter 2 Proleptic Avant-Garde: Historicism and Narrative Time in Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde ................................................................................................................. 88 2.1 First as Effect then as Cause: The Proleptic Logic of Bürger’s Historicism ........... 91 2.2 Leaving Adorno Behind: Afterness as Prolepsis ............................................................. 105 Chapter 3 Repeating Rupture: John Roberts’ post-Adornian Avant-Garde with and against the New ................................................................................................................................... 115 3.1 Adorno and the Avant-Garde: Re-sketching the Physiognomy ................................ 121 3.2 Reading without a Dictionary: the Essay, the Commodity, the New ...................... 129 3.3 Exceptionally New? The Suspensive Avant-Garde’s Adornian (In)fidelities ...... 137 [7] Chapter 4 Strangers to Our Times: Belatedness, Modernisation and the Auto- Allochronism of the Neoavanguardia ......................................................................................... 150 4.1 ‘No Manifesto and No Intention to Write One’: Neoavanguardia, impegno and the Italian New Left ................................................................................................................................... 153 4.2 Looking Forward (on)to Postmodernism: Historicising the Neoavanguardia 166 III. A Singular Avant-Garde ......................................................................................................... 179 Chapter 5 Afterness and Singularity: The Idea of the Avant-Garde after Modernism .................................................................................................................................................................... 180 5.1.In the Plural ................................................................................................................................... 183 5.2 Vessels and Timepieces ............................................................................................................ 190 5.3 Afterness and/in Singularity .................................................................................................. 200 Coda: Chronopolitics Out of Joint ............................................................................................... 215 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................