Random
When the Establishment is Infinitely more Avant-Garde than the Avant-Garde, is it not time to Reconsider Our Notion of the Avant-Garde?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOsgqG5OOlM&
This might be a good time for us to re-visit Chris Bachelder’s 2004 essay, “A Soldier Upon a Hard Campaign,” which was written about the problems of integrating satire and politics into one’s writing, without continually being upstaged by the world.
I found it poignant that Animal Face-Off was airing just as Bear v. Shark was sliding quietly out of print. It seemed to mean something, but I wasn’t sure what. I suppose I couldn’t figure out if the TV show made the book more or less urgent and necessary. Probably less, I decided. The lag time between absurdist, futuristic satire and American reality was something like two years in this case.
The essay also contains the following maxim about the nature of art which has stuck with me ever since I first read it. I was just thinking about it the other day, in fact. It goes: “Beauty without Conviction is a beer commercial; Conviction without Beauty is a pamphlet.”
So, if this was my Expository Writing class, the essay question would be something like: Using the Norton anti-virus commercial and Bachelder’s discussion of satire as our critical sources, let us work outward toward a more general discussion of the nature of the avant-garde in literature. When randomness, absurdity, and anti-narrative are the standards of the mainstream (and what is advertising if not mainstream desires and values served back to the mainstream in their purest forms?) what does the cutting edge look like? Can the avant-garde seek to invert those values by embracing “classical” values and forms such as linear storytelling in a realist mode, or should we seek to break out of the dialectic entirely? What might that breaking-out look like?
5 pages, double-spaced. Rough draft due Tuesday; final draft due a week from Tuesday. Or whatever’s on your mind right now, left in the comments here. Whichever.
Tags: Chris Bachelder, future of the avant-garde, Protect your chicken from Dokken
This is the kind of conversation that gave rise to the New Formalist poets in the 1980’s. I suspect this won’t be a popular observation on the HTMLGiant boards, but its implications are worth considering.
This is the kind of conversation that gave rise to the New Formalist poets in the 1980’s. I suspect this won’t be a popular observation on the HTMLGiant boards, but its implications are worth considering.
i’m actually writing an essay on the contemporary avant-garde for one school i’m applying to transfer to, and make an argument very similar to the above. it’s a very bad essay, and i’m having trouble articulating what you’ve written here. but yeah, i feel like some kind of synthesis is necessary. reminds me of that clancy martin interview that gigantic ran last week.
i’m actually writing an essay on the contemporary avant-garde for one school i’m applying to transfer to, and make an argument very similar to the above. it’s a very bad essay, and i’m having trouble articulating what you’ve written here. but yeah, i feel like some kind of synthesis is necessary. reminds me of that clancy martin interview that gigantic ran last week.
Define “infinitely.” Just kidding, but does this commercial really feel INFINITELY more avant-garde than avant-garde or just like a co-opting of avant-garde technique? The purpose here, in sticking with the beer commercial/pamphlet model, is to fake beauty for the sake of selling an antivirus software. Taking into account the relatively mundane nature of the product, it seems almost a given that someone somewhere would have said, “wait…let’s do something fucked (Hello, Super Bowl!).”
I’ve always been sort of against this idea that there are two separate classes of artists whose memberships are static and mutually exclusive: “if the mainstream does this, then what are all those avant-garde kids gonna do?” And I don’t know that it’s really anyone’s job to prepare a response every time an ad exec has his finger somewhere near the pulse. If Burger King’s using your technique then, sure, it’s no longer “avant-garde” by definition, but is that why you were using it?
Define “infinitely.” Just kidding, but does this commercial really feel INFINITELY more avant-garde than avant-garde or just like a co-opting of avant-garde technique? The purpose here, in sticking with the beer commercial/pamphlet model, is to fake beauty for the sake of selling an antivirus software. Taking into account the relatively mundane nature of the product, it seems almost a given that someone somewhere would have said, “wait…let’s do something fucked (Hello, Super Bowl!).”
I’ve always been sort of against this idea that there are two separate classes of artists whose memberships are static and mutually exclusive: “if the mainstream does this, then what are all those avant-garde kids gonna do?” And I don’t know that it’s really anyone’s job to prepare a response every time an ad exec has his finger somewhere near the pulse. If Burger King’s using your technique then, sure, it’s no longer “avant-garde” by definition, but is that why you were using it?
also, justin, how do you think this is bound up with the ethics-as-art idea you discussed in your latest creative writing 101 post? i.e. if economic stability is a factor, do we still get sameness-through-difference? is that ethical standpoint affected? separately (or maybe not), are we collapsing advertising and “the mainstream”?
also, justin, how do you think this is bound up with the ethics-as-art idea you discussed in your latest creative writing 101 post? i.e. if economic stability is a factor, do we still get sameness-through-difference? is that ethical standpoint affected? separately (or maybe not), are we collapsing advertising and “the mainstream”?
You know what’s worse? Beauty without humor. You can come up with all the poetic images you want, but without humor the writing becomes intolerable to read. I find that a lot of contemporary ficition is infatuated with the image at the expense of saying anything remotely lucid or funny. That’s a problem.
You know what’s worse? Beauty without humor. You can come up with all the poetic images you want, but without humor the writing becomes intolerable to read. I find that a lot of contemporary ficition is infatuated with the image at the expense of saying anything remotely lucid or funny. That’s a problem.
i almost feel like, at times it seems like one of the functions of the avant-garde, like the far left in politics, is for elements to be appropriated by the mass culture, in order that we might have a better mass culture. of course, artists themselves i think hate this idea.
but, if what i said is true, the avant-garde would obviously have to operate counter to the establishment, no matter what they’re doing, sure. they have to serve their dialectical purpose. it’s like when the earth reverses poles or something.
but i don’t think anyone can or should manufacture this situation. it should, hopefully, happen organically (that’s how it works in my mind anyway). so i don’t think it’s anything to be concerned about.
i almost feel like, at times it seems like one of the functions of the avant-garde, like the far left in politics, is for elements to be appropriated by the mass culture, in order that we might have a better mass culture. of course, artists themselves i think hate this idea.
but, if what i said is true, the avant-garde would obviously have to operate counter to the establishment, no matter what they’re doing, sure. they have to serve their dialectical purpose. it’s like when the earth reverses poles or something.
but i don’t think anyone can or should manufacture this situation. it should, hopefully, happen organically (that’s how it works in my mind anyway). so i don’t think it’s anything to be concerned about.
This is ALL absolute–ABSOLUTE–bollocks. The ‘cutting edge’ wouldn’t pose any questions. Get some real work.
This is ALL absolute–ABSOLUTE–bollocks. The ‘cutting edge’ wouldn’t pose any questions. Get some real work.
yeah, i guess this is just the way the avant-garde maintains itself, and how the dialectic is carried out. very good point.
yeah, i guess this is just the way the avant-garde maintains itself, and how the dialectic is carried out. very good point.
thx yo, but i don’t really know what i’m talking about since i hardly know anything about the contemporary avant-garde. also, i said like three times in one sentence, so.
thx yo, but i don’t really know what i’m talking about since i hardly know anything about the contemporary avant-garde. also, i said like three times in one sentence, so.
i agree with this. i think the fact that commercials are now surreal is a victory for surrealism. surrealism is like the robert redford character in “the candidate.” the outsider who speaks the truth and doesn’t seem to stand a chance ends up winning and then says, “what now?” to which i say, “be happy.”
i agree with this. i think the fact that commercials are now surreal is a victory for surrealism. surrealism is like the robert redford character in “the candidate.” the outsider who speaks the truth and doesn’t seem to stand a chance ends up winning and then says, “what now?” to which i say, “be happy.”
what i do know of the contemporary avant-garde is that a lot of it appears to be an exploration of the mundane, crude mediocrity championed by corporate & middle america. these guys, for instance: http://rhizome.org
so maybe television will be back to the brady bunch before you know it, albeit a hyper-ironic, overly-plasticized version, something like todd solondz maybe, but even pervier and more fetishistic. just shooting in the dark with that, who knows?
i’ve noticed this too: it seems like every once in a while someone is just going the other way and everyone’s like, what the hell is that joker doing? and then the whirlpool comes round & they see him & they’re like, oh, he was just going the other way.
also re: matt – loves that analogy
what i do know of the contemporary avant-garde is that a lot of it appears to be an exploration of the mundane, crude mediocrity championed by corporate & middle america. these guys, for instance: http://rhizome.org
so maybe television will be back to the brady bunch before you know it, albeit a hyper-ironic, overly-plasticized version, something like todd solondz maybe, but even pervier and more fetishistic. just shooting in the dark with that, who knows?
i’ve noticed this too: it seems like every once in a while someone is just going the other way and everyone’s like, what the hell is that joker doing? and then the whirlpool comes round & they see him & they’re like, oh, he was just going the other way.
also re: matt – loves that analogy
I think, like, that, like, your use, like, of the word ‘like’, like, is, like, very avant-garde. I mean, like, your views, like, on the functions of the avant-garde, like, sound like so much more, like, new and profound and, like, thought-provoking, and at the same time ironic and, like, existentially questionable, I think.
I think, like, that, like, your use, like, of the word ‘like’, like, is, like, very avant-garde. I mean, like, your views, like, on the functions of the avant-garde, like, sound like so much more, like, new and profound and, like, thought-provoking, and at the same time ironic and, like, existentially questionable, I think.
That’s a fascinating thought, actually, that the matriculation of culture from the fringes to the mainstream gives the fringe a real locus of power: to be the starting point, the epicenter of whatever the next big-t Thing is. But that still leaves the original question: What’s Next?
That’s a fascinating thought, actually, that the matriculation of culture from the fringes to the mainstream gives the fringe a real locus of power: to be the starting point, the epicenter of whatever the next big-t Thing is. But that still leaves the original question: What’s Next?
I should mention that I only saw the Norton commercial because it appeared between segments of the episode of Modern Family I was watching on hulu while I was eating breakfast. And I only decided to watch MF because I’d been under the mistaken impression that the red-headed gay guy on the show was Kevin Allison from The State. It’s not, but I’ve got to say- Modern Family had me laughing out loud consistently for the full 23 minutes or however long it is. I thought it was really smart, and surprising, which is NOT the way I expect to feel about a new ABC sitcom. It was a really fascinating experience, at the meta-level, to be challenged by my own delight at something I had gone in basically intending and expecting to not enjoy.
I should mention that I only saw the Norton commercial because it appeared between segments of the episode of Modern Family I was watching on hulu while I was eating breakfast. And I only decided to watch MF because I’d been under the mistaken impression that the red-headed gay guy on the show was Kevin Allison from The State. It’s not, but I’ve got to say- Modern Family had me laughing out loud consistently for the full 23 minutes or however long it is. I thought it was really smart, and surprising, which is NOT the way I expect to feel about a new ABC sitcom. It was a really fascinating experience, at the meta-level, to be challenged by my own delight at something I had gone in basically intending and expecting to not enjoy.
Kyle, this is what I was thinking about also. Unsurprising we are on the same page, yet again. If we’ve taken the trip in one direction to the end of the line, isn’t it time to go back the other way? Or, is there a new way that hasn’t been traveled at all yet?
Kyle, this is what I was thinking about also. Unsurprising we are on the same page, yet again. If we’ve taken the trip in one direction to the end of the line, isn’t it time to go back the other way? Or, is there a new way that hasn’t been traveled at all yet?
Mmm, my instinct is that it is bound up inextricably with the concerns of the other post. But before I could attempt to answer your questions I’d need you to clarify what you’re asking, because I’m not really getting what you’re asking me. Economic stability is always a factor in everything. And though I try not to be an essentialist, if I had to pick one essentializing factor that transcends all other factors I would have to side with the traditional Marxists and argue that economics–specifically income-class–is that factor. Almost every other potentially essentializing attribute (race, gender, nationality, ability) will–if you explore it deeply enough–reveal itself as derivative of a class issue.
Mmm, my instinct is that it is bound up inextricably with the concerns of the other post. But before I could attempt to answer your questions I’d need you to clarify what you’re asking, because I’m not really getting what you’re asking me. Economic stability is always a factor in everything. And though I try not to be an essentialist, if I had to pick one essentializing factor that transcends all other factors I would have to side with the traditional Marxists and argue that economics–specifically income-class–is that factor. Almost every other potentially essentializing attribute (race, gender, nationality, ability) will–if you explore it deeply enough–reveal itself as derivative of a class issue.
i watch hulu while eating breakfast too. tend not to venture outside of stewart/colbert though. maybe i should. anyway, i know those tv writers are damn good sometimes. hate it when people say books don’t have to compete with television. seems obvious that they do.
btw, have you seen that commercial for hulu that played during the superbowl? shit is insane: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m71m-LBqFQ
also, you know, david lynch got away with so much doing twin peaks, coincidentally, also on ABC, in 1990. which is also when the simpsons started getting successful and we were shifting gears, electing clinton, etc.
i watch hulu while eating breakfast too. tend not to venture outside of stewart/colbert though. maybe i should. anyway, i know those tv writers are damn good sometimes. hate it when people say books don’t have to compete with television. seems obvious that they do.
btw, have you seen that commercial for hulu that played during the superbowl? shit is insane: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m71m-LBqFQ
also, you know, david lynch got away with so much doing twin peaks, coincidentally, also on ABC, in 1990. which is also when the simpsons started getting successful and we were shifting gears, electing clinton, etc.
This is an interesting discussion for critics. But for writers? I don’t know. I get uneasy over the idea that writing should do one thing or another, or look like one thing or another. Isn’t it usually more organic than that?
I’ve read a lot of bad writing where it seems like the writer is really self-consciously trying to make a statement about aesthetics, or is trying really hard to “be” one thing or another. Whereas most of the writing I tend to like feels like an honest expression of someone’s consciousness. Like, I can’t imagine Thomas Bernhard writing any differently than Thomas Bernhard writes. We could talk about what his aesthetics represent, but is it really a choice he’s making? (or made. I realize he’s now dead, and thus can’t tell me I’m wrong.)
This is an interesting discussion for critics. But for writers? I don’t know. I get uneasy over the idea that writing should do one thing or another, or look like one thing or another. Isn’t it usually more organic than that?
I’ve read a lot of bad writing where it seems like the writer is really self-consciously trying to make a statement about aesthetics, or is trying really hard to “be” one thing or another. Whereas most of the writing I tend to like feels like an honest expression of someone’s consciousness. Like, I can’t imagine Thomas Bernhard writing any differently than Thomas Bernhard writes. We could talk about what his aesthetics represent, but is it really a choice he’s making? (or made. I realize he’s now dead, and thus can’t tell me I’m wrong.)
Satire can’t be avant-garde and vice versa. Avant-garde is a means to its own end, not a means to be satirical or metaphorical or allegorical or political or moral or religious or to get someone to buy something.
a beer commercial carries the conviction of getting people to buy beer. beauty without conviction is nature. conviction without beauty is a beer commercial.
Satire can’t be avant-garde and vice versa. Avant-garde is a means to its own end, not a means to be satirical or metaphorical or allegorical or political or moral or religious or to get someone to buy something.
a beer commercial carries the conviction of getting people to buy beer. beauty without conviction is nature. conviction without beauty is a beer commercial.
oh, sorry! i’d just woken up and wasn’t articulating myself well. i meant that if the art in question is economically co-opted, is there any dilution of the work’s concern with ethics?
i’m not sure i agree with you re: economics as foundational, though i sort of do, but that’d take us way off-topic.
oh, sorry! i’d just woken up and wasn’t articulating myself well. i meant that if the art in question is economically co-opted, is there any dilution of the work’s concern with ethics?
i’m not sure i agree with you re: economics as foundational, though i sort of do, but that’d take us way off-topic.
i don’t see how that ad is “avant-garde”
i don’t see how that ad is “avant-garde”
damien hirst
takeshi murakami
&y warhol
damien hirst
takeshi murakami
&y warhol
are you saying those artists refute what I’m saying?
are you saying those artists refute what I’m saying?
yes, definitely
how
yes, definitely
how
they all blur the lines of distinction between commercialism & art. they all worked with concepts and allegories (oftentimes political or moral/religious). they all became filthy rich poking fun at commercialism while also participating in it. & they’ve all been called avant-garde at one time or another.
i think satire can most definitely be called avant-garde and vice versa. & if it isn’t, then we’re all headed back to a kind of sincerity that was never taken seriously by thinking people and thinking people have been saying we’re going to return to sincerity for, like, forever.
they all blur the lines of distinction between commercialism & art. they all worked with concepts and allegories (oftentimes political or moral/religious). they all became filthy rich poking fun at commercialism while also participating in it. & they’ve all been called avant-garde at one time or another.
i think satire can most definitely be called avant-garde and vice versa. & if it isn’t, then we’re all headed back to a kind of sincerity that was never taken seriously by thinking people and thinking people have been saying we’re going to return to sincerity for, like, forever.
this whole debate reminds me of simon critchley’s “infinitely demanding,” which i admittedly have only read summarized in some of critchley’s articles.
like basically for him there’s some self-reflexive center, and then some reactionary fringe group which maintains what critchley calls an “interstitial distance” (though that term is never really defined) from the center. the maintenance of this fringe group depends on its “infinite giving” in terms of political action, i.e. its perpetual change and reaction to the center. i actually think his argument is better applied here.
this whole debate reminds me of simon critchley’s “infinitely demanding,” which i admittedly have only read summarized in some of critchley’s articles.
like basically for him there’s some self-reflexive center, and then some reactionary fringe group which maintains what critchley calls an “interstitial distance” (though that term is never really defined) from the center. the maintenance of this fringe group depends on its “infinite giving” in terms of political action, i.e. its perpetual change and reaction to the center. i actually think his argument is better applied here.
actually, i don’t really mean that sincerity was never taken seriously. was just rolling with an idea.
actually, i don’t really mean that sincerity was never taken seriously. was just rolling with an idea.
You don’t think developing one’s style involves making aesthetic choices? Bernhard is incredibly stylized. I can’t imagine it happened by accident.
You don’t think developing one’s style involves making aesthetic choices? Bernhard is incredibly stylized. I can’t imagine it happened by accident.
beauty without conviction is compelling and seductive
conviction without beauty is pragmatism
beauty without conviction is compelling and seductive
conviction without beauty is pragmatism
The fact that Diesel is doing the avant-garde better than writers now reveals what Jameson and Jeff Koons have been telling us/showing us for longer: that the poles are weakly arbitrary and all is inevitably commodity in a web of marketplaces, obvious and obscure. Along with this comes more sophisticated communication, pathways of proliferation, heightened availability and saturation; in short, as said above, surrealism – albeit with significant US music cultural resonance more so than the paranoiac-critical as Dali might want – features in ads. Perhaps all of this phenomena asks us to reconsider the avant-garde moreso as an aesthetic: anti-taste, anti-beauty, anti-consistency, anti-gloss, treating reaction to the mythical “establishment” not as inculcated in a specific political plan but rather to detail sensations and phenomena otherwise glossed-over, forgotten, repressed or obscured. I agree with many above that the avant-garde must adapt, as the advance-guard it is resistance to the establishment and so with popular media becoming more avant-garde perhaps the concertedly avant-garde has a more startling point of departure. Hardcore avant-gardists should be emboldened by this, not in crisis. The question remains though: where in the world could the avant-garde be now?
The fact that Diesel is doing the avant-garde better than writers now reveals what Jameson and Jeff Koons have been telling us/showing us for longer: that the poles are weakly arbitrary and all is inevitably commodity in a web of marketplaces, obvious and obscure. Along with this comes more sophisticated communication, pathways of proliferation, heightened availability and saturation; in short, as said above, surrealism – albeit with significant US music cultural resonance more so than the paranoiac-critical as Dali might want – features in ads. Perhaps all of this phenomena asks us to reconsider the avant-garde moreso as an aesthetic: anti-taste, anti-beauty, anti-consistency, anti-gloss, treating reaction to the mythical “establishment” not as inculcated in a specific political plan but rather to detail sensations and phenomena otherwise glossed-over, forgotten, repressed or obscured. I agree with many above that the avant-garde must adapt, as the advance-guard it is resistance to the establishment and so with popular media becoming more avant-garde perhaps the concertedly avant-garde has a more startling point of departure. Hardcore avant-gardists should be emboldened by this, not in crisis. The question remains though: where in the world could the avant-garde be now?
i’m with oliver here. i don’t see how the commercial is avant garde, even for a commercial (though i found it funny enough). puts me in mind a little of dfw’s joe isuzu essay. it’s a metaphor, right? it’s a goofy metaphor, but goofy metaphors aren’t anything new (satyricon, gulliver’s travels, gargantua and pantagruel), and dragging a metaphor out across an entire work — a metaphysical conceit — isn’t either (all of donne). i might be convinced that these kinds of metaphors for the sake of commerce are new-ish, though, but advertising as we now know it is pretty new too.
also having trouble with the conflation of avant garde and satire. they can go together, but they don’t necessarily have to.
plain old self-consciousness hasn’t been avant garde since at least don quixote.
i’m with oliver here. i don’t see how the commercial is avant garde, even for a commercial (though i found it funny enough). puts me in mind a little of dfw’s joe isuzu essay. it’s a metaphor, right? it’s a goofy metaphor, but goofy metaphors aren’t anything new (satyricon, gulliver’s travels, gargantua and pantagruel), and dragging a metaphor out across an entire work — a metaphysical conceit — isn’t either (all of donne). i might be convinced that these kinds of metaphors for the sake of commerce are new-ish, though, but advertising as we now know it is pretty new too.
also having trouble with the conflation of avant garde and satire. they can go together, but they don’t necessarily have to.
plain old self-consciousness hasn’t been avant garde since at least don quixote.
Corey, yes, that’s what I really want to know. The question you asked.
Corey, yes, that’s what I really want to know. The question you asked.
The trick is to “develop one’s style” (which does involve choices, deliberation and intent) without “trying” “too hard” to ________ (“do” whatever), overdoing it, working an idea to death. It’s subtle.
And not all style is “developed”, me thinks. One can (attempt to) make choices on a subconscious or organic level. Choices can be randomized (deliberately? hmm, sticky point). Intent? One thing can be intended, another actually accomplished (humor fails, for example.)
It’s complicated.
The trick is to “develop one’s style” (which does involve choices, deliberation and intent) without “trying” “too hard” to ________ (“do” whatever), overdoing it, working an idea to death. It’s subtle.
And not all style is “developed”, me thinks. One can (attempt to) make choices on a subconscious or organic level. Choices can be randomized (deliberately? hmm, sticky point). Intent? One thing can be intended, another actually accomplished (humor fails, for example.)
It’s complicated.
just can answer this better than me, but i don’t think he was actually suggesting that the ad is avant-garde; that would be absurd given the very definition of the word; but the ad utilizes some things once considered to be avant-garde, and since it does, where do we go from there? but personally, not being part of any such thing, i don’t have an answer to that question.
just can answer this better than me, but i don’t think he was actually suggesting that the ad is avant-garde; that would be absurd given the very definition of the word; but the ad utilizes some things once considered to be avant-garde, and since it does, where do we go from there? but personally, not being part of any such thing, i don’t have an answer to that question.
Well yeah, sure, there’s style, but even that I think is somewhat organically derived, ideally. I mean it’s derived over a period of time, with a lot of work, putting pressure on your own prose, etc. But to sit down and consciously say, “I’m going to write this way because it seems like the direction the avant-garde should be going and I want to be part of the avant-garde.” That seems like a recipe for all kinds of awfulness (not to mention pretentiousness).
I know that’s not what you suggested, Justin, and that I’m creating kind of a straw man. But there are people that seem to think that way, and I don’t like reading their words. Not even a little.
I bet if Bernhard were alive, and sent an email, it would read like one of his novels.
Well yeah, sure, there’s style, but even that I think is somewhat organically derived, ideally. I mean it’s derived over a period of time, with a lot of work, putting pressure on your own prose, etc. But to sit down and consciously say, “I’m going to write this way because it seems like the direction the avant-garde should be going and I want to be part of the avant-garde.” That seems like a recipe for all kinds of awfulness (not to mention pretentiousness).
I know that’s not what you suggested, Justin, and that I’m creating kind of a straw man. But there are people that seem to think that way, and I don’t like reading their words. Not even a little.
I bet if Bernhard were alive, and sent an email, it would read like one of his novels.
yeah, agree with raymond. see DFW’s “e pluribus unum.”
yeah, agree with raymond. see DFW’s “e pluribus unum.”
the new issue of adbusters discusses this in-depth. it breaks down a levi’s ad photographed by a once “indepedent” artist who now uses such indepedent thought to direct other independent thinkers into a more mainstream mode…..
i may be off topic, but the idea of the government (and government agencies) trying to flourish the avante garde and bring it onto (not only, but essentially) American grounds and use it for their needs, you have to ask why — it is because under normal circumstances the avant-garde is to propagate thought not directly linked to the world we live in now, then forcing even the artists to think outside the structures which house them. Even if the structures have machinations within them built and installed not to help them but to keep the structure ever-building (an ever creating machine). Now, not all artists will fall prey to the usages other people have for the avant garde — though when they use the avant garde techniques, or commit themselves to that artistic mode, they are attempting to communicate a message by un-communicating it in hopes that whomever receives this message will adapt it to their specific perception of the world, which will then, perhaps, open up their minds to the many materials which make up their surrounding structures.
But the problem becomes, you are leaving it up to the person to already know what they do not know. This is where the government, the Establishment, continues using avant-garde techniques to not necessarily cause the public to be stupid, oh by no means, but they are masking the many truths of their machines by freeing the mind to think about everything but what is exactly in front of them.
Look at every revolutionary movement — the poets/artist/writers in those movements always had an element of reality, not only an element, that was their base. And whatever extrapolations were used, it was always a reality-based depiction of their surroundings, instead of the expansive abstract mental-scape the avant-garde seems to be moving in.
I will say again, the point of art is to communicate. (I know, a big thing to say, the *point*, but I stand by my statement). We’ve moved from orality being the center, to Gutenberg creating the press, to us being a paper-oriented people, and we’re moving into a digital oriented people — all from the seed of needing to communicate better. And the artistic backlash from that is the abstract, but when the abstract techniques are used to damage the very people who are usually making attempts to free others…. damn we got a problem.
…. this didnt start out to be this long…
the new issue of adbusters discusses this in-depth. it breaks down a levi’s ad photographed by a once “indepedent” artist who now uses such indepedent thought to direct other independent thinkers into a more mainstream mode…..
i may be off topic, but the idea of the government (and government agencies) trying to flourish the avante garde and bring it onto (not only, but essentially) American grounds and use it for their needs, you have to ask why — it is because under normal circumstances the avant-garde is to propagate thought not directly linked to the world we live in now, then forcing even the artists to think outside the structures which house them. Even if the structures have machinations within them built and installed not to help them but to keep the structure ever-building (an ever creating machine). Now, not all artists will fall prey to the usages other people have for the avant garde — though when they use the avant garde techniques, or commit themselves to that artistic mode, they are attempting to communicate a message by un-communicating it in hopes that whomever receives this message will adapt it to their specific perception of the world, which will then, perhaps, open up their minds to the many materials which make up their surrounding structures.
But the problem becomes, you are leaving it up to the person to already know what they do not know. This is where the government, the Establishment, continues using avant-garde techniques to not necessarily cause the public to be stupid, oh by no means, but they are masking the many truths of their machines by freeing the mind to think about everything but what is exactly in front of them.
Look at every revolutionary movement — the poets/artist/writers in those movements always had an element of reality, not only an element, that was their base. And whatever extrapolations were used, it was always a reality-based depiction of their surroundings, instead of the expansive abstract mental-scape the avant-garde seems to be moving in.
I will say again, the point of art is to communicate. (I know, a big thing to say, the *point*, but I stand by my statement). We’ve moved from orality being the center, to Gutenberg creating the press, to us being a paper-oriented people, and we’re moving into a digital oriented people — all from the seed of needing to communicate better. And the artistic backlash from that is the abstract, but when the abstract techniques are used to damage the very people who are usually making attempts to free others…. damn we got a problem.
…. this didnt start out to be this long…
I think the last point in your original post is really interesting – if we think about the avant-garde, or ‘modernisms’ as not a recent thing, but something that’s been going on as long as art/writing/music has existed – thinking of romanticism as a reaction against neoclassicism (or vice versa) for example – that artists have been trying to ‘make it new’ for as long as there has been art, then I think you’re right that maybe whatever is next for the avant-garde may little resemble what we now take to mean avant-garde, but I’m not sure realism is the answer either. As much as we’re in an everything-goes period, realism’s still the dominant mode, so I doubt that a complete return to ‘traditional’ storytelling is going to be it (but who knows?) but I think you’re onto something, that perrhaps we’ve nearly exhausted what we’ve come to understand as avant-garde (the things you listed – randomness, absurdity, and anti-narrative). That discounts the artist, a bit, in suggesting that writing that is random, absurd, or anti-narrative can’t be good (I still love this stuff) but that it might not be as significant if we think about it in terms of newness.
I wonder, too – forms exhaust themselves, or at least I suspect they do – like jazz hit it’s height in the 70s (in my opinion) and while jazz isn’t dead, there hasn’t been the kind of innovation in that form for thirty years (similar to the ‘where is today’s joyce’, where is today’s Coltrane?) Maybe the same can be said of rock music, and maybe we’re about to see the same thing with hip-hop – anyway, my point is that maybe writing is in a similar stage right now – that while we want there to be something big on the horizon, and surely there will be, it might not have the same impact as modernism, or surrealism. Or it might be years before we see something as important. So in the mean time we all try to do our part by writing what we write, but I think it’s a learning process of discovering what’s relevant for us as writers first, developing our own personal aesthetics, and hoping to see something emerge.
I do think it’s a victory for surrealism that, after nearly a 100 years, most people ‘get’ it. I think advertising is often more ahead of the curve aesthetically than it gets credit for, but I think it’s cool that advertisers are confident that people will understand them. But few movements have the impact that surrealism did, though, so I’m not sure we’ll really be able to say what was important until after it’s happened.
As for writing – I’m really surprised that we haven’t seen more interesting stuff done with new media. I’m sure i’ve talked about this before, but as much as people want to do new things with words, I think we’ve barely tapped the potential of the internet (as a network) as a medium for exploring new ways of authoring. I know there’s ton of hypertexts out there, and occasionally stuff like the Apostrophe that really does something new, but I think we’ve yet to really get there.
well, I think any attempt to break away from this dialectic would be an illusion, and I think the return to classical forms would be a mistake. the return to a realist mode of storytelling would be reactionary rather than revolutionary. that’s exactly what the metafictionists were doing: in believing they could escape the movement of realism, they were replicating it. what intended to fragment classical forms of “reality” became instead the model of a new, “postmodern” form of reality, no less representational.
as soon as an avant-garde says “I am located here,” it is no longer cutting edge, or else is cutting edge in a purely vain sense.
well, I think any attempt to break away from this dialectic would be an illusion, and I think the return to classical forms would be a mistake. the return to a realist mode of storytelling would be reactionary rather than revolutionary. that’s exactly what the metafictionists were doing: in believing they could escape the movement of realism, they were replicating it. what intended to fragment classical forms of “reality” became instead the model of a new, “postmodern” form of reality, no less representational.
as soon as an avant-garde says “I am located here,” it is no longer cutting edge, or else is cutting edge in a purely vain sense.
Sorry to be so incoherent – one point I meant to add is that I think we’re in a period where individual innovation is just that – individual – rather than seeing a particular predominant aesthetic or mode what we’re instead seeing is a lot of individual, or small groups, creating stuff that is interesting and avant-garde, but not necessarily a part of some larger aesthetic mode. Or maybe individually interesting in a much larger context – in the way that maybe Villette or the Moonstone or Tristram Shandy contain innovations but were themselves not necessarily representative of larger innovative movments as much as they are outliers in the context of victorian, or 18th c english novels)
Maybe somebody needs to compose a manifesto?
i’m actually planning on maybe writing my term paper exploring the question of why the avant garde loves manifestos so much.
so if somebody writes one about whatever the fuck is going on here, lemme know.
i’m actually planning on maybe writing my term paper exploring the question of why the avant garde loves manifestos so much.
so if somebody writes one about whatever the fuck is going on here, lemme know.
wouldn’t a breaking out of the dialectic resemble something like deleuze and guattari’s ‘rhizome’? and wouldn’t a progression of the dialectic include and transcend, i.e. be a synthesis of, both modernism and post-modernism?
given that i don’t understand d&g’s rhizome (which is not to say that it isn’t viable), and being a fan of the elegant power and simplicity of the newtonian maxim, ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,’ i’m inclined to think along the lines of the dialectic, while recongizing it is a simplifying model (and yet simplicity, when not merely a truism, can yield much power).
at the sheerly conceptual level, an architectonic synthesis of pomo and modernism might resemble what samuel r smith’s essay, “postmodernism is dead—now what?” (at http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No1_polisci_smith.html), calls the network age. how that might manifest in literature i think has already been epitomized by ben marcus, most notably in ‘the age of wire and string’, and what i call ‘network subrealism’ or netsub, and to see another example, particularly the transition from postmodernism to netsub, check out derek white’s ‘marsupial’. in my thinking, netsub seems a likely candidate as the third movement of the modern-postmodern thesis-antithesis. modernism’s hierarchical structuration and postmodernism’s impulse to decentralize seem to come together in netsub’s desire to reconstruct, not another hierarchy, but a decentralized system of nodal entities. netsub rearranges the relations between the elements of ordinary reality to give rise to new configurations of reality, or subrealities; and this is achieved to a large extent by the fact that each node of a network is defined by and helps codefine the nodes to which it is related or connected. “NetSub is a literature of reality (directly) and systems (indirectly), and an exploration of how each self-contained, internally consistent system is a reality unto itself,” which is taken from my essay “Network Subrealism: Sketch of an emerging literary trend” in Puerto del Sol. justin, if you want an essay, i can have it to you by whenever, except it’s 15 pages, single-spaced.
whether or not it’s the big new thing (since it’s already 15 years old) or the next avant-garde (depending on how that’s defined, i.e. anti-mainstream and something other than what’s already been done?), i think it’s rich unexplored territory, both in literary terms and conceptually (as the basis for a new thesis from which the next dialectic might spring), or even linguistically (as an exploration of language and the internal codependence of its parts) and am excited to see how or even if it unfolds. at this stage it still has that dazzle of novelty and new-born fresh scent, but as the lustre fades and gives way to the next big thing, with each riding wave of successive generations, i think there might still remain something worth its weight.
wouldn’t a breaking out of the dialectic resemble something like deleuze and guattari’s ‘rhizome’? and wouldn’t a progression of the dialectic include and transcend, i.e. be a synthesis of, both modernism and post-modernism?
given that i don’t understand d&g’s rhizome (which is not to say that it isn’t viable), and being a fan of the elegant power and simplicity of the newtonian maxim, ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,’ i’m inclined to think along the lines of the dialectic, while recongizing it is a simplifying model (and yet simplicity, when not merely a truism, can yield much power).
at the sheerly conceptual level, an architectonic synthesis of pomo and modernism might resemble what samuel r smith’s essay, “postmodernism is dead—now what?” (at http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No1_polisci_smith.html), calls the network age. how that might manifest in literature i think has already been epitomized by ben marcus, most notably in ‘the age of wire and string’, and what i call ‘network subrealism’ or netsub, and to see another example, particularly the transition from postmodernism to netsub, check out derek white’s ‘marsupial’. in my thinking, netsub seems a likely candidate as the third movement of the modern-postmodern thesis-antithesis. modernism’s hierarchical structuration and postmodernism’s impulse to decentralize seem to come together in netsub’s desire to reconstruct, not another hierarchy, but a decentralized system of nodal entities. netsub rearranges the relations between the elements of ordinary reality to give rise to new configurations of reality, or subrealities; and this is achieved to a large extent by the fact that each node of a network is defined by and helps codefine the nodes to which it is related or connected. “NetSub is a literature of reality (directly) and systems (indirectly), and an exploration of how each self-contained, internally consistent system is a reality unto itself,” which is taken from my essay “Network Subrealism: Sketch of an emerging literary trend” in Puerto del Sol. justin, if you want an essay, i can have it to you by whenever, except it’s 15 pages, single-spaced.
whether or not it’s the big new thing (since it’s already 15 years old) or the next avant-garde (depending on how that’s defined, i.e. anti-mainstream and something other than what’s already been done?), i think it’s rich unexplored territory, both in literary terms and conceptually (as the basis for a new thesis from which the next dialectic might spring), or even linguistically (as an exploration of language and the internal codependence of its parts) and am excited to see how or even if it unfolds. at this stage it still has that dazzle of novelty and new-born fresh scent, but as the lustre fades and gives way to the next big thing, with each riding wave of successive generations, i think there might still remain something worth its weight.
in philosophical terms, breaking out of a dialectic is described as a “transcendental illusion”
in philosophical terms, breaking out of a dialectic is described as a “transcendental illusion”
also, I read about your essay on derek white’s blog and almost used “subrealism” in the college transfer essay I mentioned above, then caught myself.
also, I read about your essay on derek white’s blog and almost used “subrealism” in the college transfer essay I mentioned above, then caught myself.
ok. i don’t know if i agree with what you’re saying, but i think my definition of avant-guarde is wrong or is very different than others here.
i suppose i just prefer art, avant-guarde or not, that is not about, nor ‘against’ anything, but is something just for the sake of itself, like nature. I am most comfortable enjoying art that has no intention of persuding me to consider a thing differently than I already do. That’s what nonfiction is for. but rather shows me something the way nature shows me things, unconvictionally. therefore, i don’t care about this whole discussion.
ok. i don’t know if i agree with what you’re saying, but i think my definition of avant-guarde is wrong or is very different than others here.
i suppose i just prefer art, avant-guarde or not, that is not about, nor ‘against’ anything, but is something just for the sake of itself, like nature. I am most comfortable enjoying art that has no intention of persuding me to consider a thing differently than I already do. That’s what nonfiction is for. but rather shows me something the way nature shows me things, unconvictionally. therefore, i don’t care about this whole discussion.
terrible idea
terrible idea
glenn beck is the new avant garde
glenn beck is the new avant garde
Matt, the argument that we’re more individual now is naiive. Noticing how there are fewer manifestoes and less aesthetic movements – spurious argument in of itself – does not constitute greater individualism on the part of artists. Certainly, one could say there is more room for individualisms that might develop styles and movements if we were to believe your argument, but that certainly does not make us more individualistic. On the contrary, we could just as well say that judging by the lack of manifestoes, collective politico- artistic activities and designated movements that it seems as if less artists are distinguishing themselves from each other. Either way, a collective will always be a sum of its parts and of its own individual tenor, let’s not be altogether presumptuous and rule THIS out shall we? And manifestoes, well thankfully Walter Benjamin happened and the problems of tendentious literature have been eruditely articulated, so again, a manifesto as we know it is an anachronism but we should not rule out a critical field that is velocity, expansion, development, embellishment and intensity for the artwork.
Keith n b: I speak out of ignorance to Netsub beyond your post, but to me this is just more structuralism, albeit sophisticated in its conception of meshworks of realities related to one another by nodes, connecting the previously incommensurable. But the realities here are only viable as extensive nodal meshworks simply because they are already on a virtual plane of consistence that renders them nodal within a context, meta within a whole. This is not to say these virtualities aren’t real or true, I am simply saying Netsub sounds like the nothing-new, it is the structuralist enumeration of a virtual phenomena. And anyway, as a literal conjugation of modernism and postmodernism, on the one hand Netsub is a decentralised model of fragementary, interrelated narratives that Lyotard would dance on his own grave over, and on the other hand in its interest in constructions of the new that are inextricably the ordinary world (whatever that is, problematic too) and the created world and the chain of these relationships, it is ineluctably Modernist.
Unfortunately, I feel like I like alec’s continuity of realism inherent in his argument has the most potential, although I abhor, for the most part, realism per se. It is the greatest fiction. But the renovation and transmutation of what we call reality or our relationship to it, from that stems and extends all of the metafictions, all of the transgressions, all of the new movements, all of the dialectics. Keith’s Netsub tries to affirm the impossible with a wonderful, complex fictional logic, which I do appreciate. But perhaps fiction must always wear its trace failures in representing the world. And when one constructs something THEY don’t believe is real – whatever textuality it might be – then it must either be immaculately constructed or suffer failure in comparison to the world as we know it, and all its vicissitudes, and all its ambiguity. So I say keep the avant-garde, but like you say of denial of dialectics is a kind of monism, we in fact need to continually reconsider where the avant-garde is at this moment in time, not just this year but today, otherwise it ceases to be a dialectic. How can the guard advance if they have no idea where they are or who they’re fighting? This is the problem with postmodernism and its hyper-real representation, and I’m not making the obvious modernist-postmodernist political argument here, I’m saying that postmodern art’s problem is timeliness, trying to apprehend the fractures of NOW. I know that my fiction is of the world but is the creative production of something else, from it, entwined with it, eroding it and embellishing it. So I guess my avant-garde methodology is that fiction be dialectical, that your creation, by virtue of its very existence, be in contestation with other notions of reality. Every creative act is an affront and a concordance in differing measure.
Matt, the argument that we’re more individual now is naiive. Noticing how there are fewer manifestoes and less aesthetic movements – spurious argument in of itself – does not constitute greater individualism on the part of artists. Certainly, one could say there is more room for individualisms that might develop styles and movements if we were to believe your argument, but that certainly does not make us more individualistic. On the contrary, we could just as well say that judging by the lack of manifestoes, collective politico- artistic activities and designated movements that it seems as if less artists are distinguishing themselves from each other. Either way, a collective will always be a sum of its parts and of its own individual tenor, let’s not be altogether presumptuous and rule THIS out shall we? And manifestoes, well thankfully Walter Benjamin happened and the problems of tendentious literature have been eruditely articulated, so again, a manifesto as we know it is an anachronism but we should not rule out a critical field that is velocity, expansion, development, embellishment and intensity for the artwork.
Keith n b: I speak out of ignorance to Netsub beyond your post, but to me this is just more structuralism, albeit sophisticated in its conception of meshworks of realities related to one another by nodes, connecting the previously incommensurable. But the realities here are only viable as extensive nodal meshworks simply because they are already on a virtual plane of consistence that renders them nodal within a context, meta within a whole. This is not to say these virtualities aren’t real or true, I am simply saying Netsub sounds like the nothing-new, it is the structuralist enumeration of a virtual phenomena. And anyway, as a literal conjugation of modernism and postmodernism, on the one hand Netsub is a decentralised model of fragementary, interrelated narratives that Lyotard would dance on his own grave over, and on the other hand in its interest in constructions of the new that are inextricably the ordinary world (whatever that is, problematic too) and the created world and the chain of these relationships, it is ineluctably Modernist.
Unfortunately, I feel like I like alec’s continuity of realism inherent in his argument has the most potential, although I abhor, for the most part, realism per se. It is the greatest fiction. But the renovation and transmutation of what we call reality or our relationship to it, from that stems and extends all of the metafictions, all of the transgressions, all of the new movements, all of the dialectics. Keith’s Netsub tries to affirm the impossible with a wonderful, complex fictional logic, which I do appreciate. But perhaps fiction must always wear its trace failures in representing the world. And when one constructs something THEY don’t believe is real – whatever textuality it might be – then it must either be immaculately constructed or suffer failure in comparison to the world as we know it, and all its vicissitudes, and all its ambiguity. So I say keep the avant-garde, but like you say of denial of dialectics is a kind of monism, we in fact need to continually reconsider where the avant-garde is at this moment in time, not just this year but today, otherwise it ceases to be a dialectic. How can the guard advance if they have no idea where they are or who they’re fighting? This is the problem with postmodernism and its hyper-real representation, and I’m not making the obvious modernist-postmodernist political argument here, I’m saying that postmodern art’s problem is timeliness, trying to apprehend the fractures of NOW. I know that my fiction is of the world but is the creative production of something else, from it, entwined with it, eroding it and embellishing it. So I guess my avant-garde methodology is that fiction be dialectical, that your creation, by virtue of its very existence, be in contestation with other notions of reality. Every creative act is an affront and a concordance in differing measure.
this is how i wish i’d worded my response. i agree with everything here.
the definition of ‘avant-garde’ seems synonomous with ‘anti-establishment,’ but it seems to me that this can only be a characterization, not like…a ‘genre.’ which is what i was trying (failing) to get at.
is the avant-garde avant-garde for the sake of avant-garde? or do avant-garde techniques arise when an author wants to say something in a way it has not yet been said? i feel like this question is a new post entirely.
this is how i wish i’d worded my response. i agree with everything here.
the definition of ‘avant-garde’ seems synonomous with ‘anti-establishment,’ but it seems to me that this can only be a characterization, not like…a ‘genre.’ which is what i was trying (failing) to get at.
is the avant-garde avant-garde for the sake of avant-garde? or do avant-garde techniques arise when an author wants to say something in a way it has not yet been said? i feel like this question is a new post entirely.
if netsub, as you said, is both structural and post-structural, modernist and pomo, then are you saying it is an amalgam of both but not an actual synthesis–in the same way that a mixture of two gases is not a compound, i.e. in the former, two gases occupy the same space but retain their singular identities, whereas in the latter they are transformed to give rise to a new element? so then netsub would include both, but transcend neither? that’s an interesting argument. if you’re game for further dialogue on the topic, click on my name and shoot me an email. otherwise thanks for the thoughts.
if netsub, as you said, is both structural and post-structural, modernist and pomo, then are you saying it is an amalgam of both but not an actual synthesis–in the same way that a mixture of two gases is not a compound, i.e. in the former, two gases occupy the same space but retain their singular identities, whereas in the latter they are transformed to give rise to a new element? so then netsub would include both, but transcend neither? that’s an interesting argument. if you’re game for further dialogue on the topic, click on my name and shoot me an email. otherwise thanks for the thoughts.
meaning, any opposition to binary thinking creates its own binary: binary and non-binary? i like to think of that as incestual logic, but it’s hard to deny.
meaning, any opposition to binary thinking creates its own binary: binary and non-binary? i like to think of that as incestual logic, but it’s hard to deny.
i guess what i mean by incestuous logic is that the system is treated as a part of the system itself. it becomes a self-reflexive operator. but the multiplication sign can’t multiply itself, it needs something to operate on. it’s like a man having sex with his grandmother, who then becomes pregnant with and gives birth to his mom. not only is it impossible, but who would want to do that. there seems to be an ulterior circular logic going on, for example…
i guess what i mean by incestuous logic is that the system is treated as a part of the system itself. it becomes a self-reflexive operator. but the multiplication sign can’t multiply itself, it needs something to operate on. it’s like a man having sex with his grandmother, who then becomes pregnant with and gives birth to his mom. not only is it impossible, but who would want to do that. there seems to be an ulterior circular logic going on, for example…
my name is bob.
my name is bob.
which isn’t to say i’m against circular logic, i think many systems expand by self-reference and circularity, but it’s being treated as linear logic. as in the assertion that relativism is absolutist in it’s statement that everything is relative. i’m sure analytic philosophy addresses this in some way, but i don’t know how.
which isn’t to say i’m against circular logic, i think many systems expand by self-reference and circularity, but it’s being treated as linear logic. as in the assertion that relativism is absolutist in it’s statement that everything is relative. i’m sure analytic philosophy addresses this in some way, but i don’t know how.
Corey – I appreciate your well-put reaction to my comment. “Naiive” stings a bit, but hey, it’s the internet. First, my manifesto comment was a joke. Second, I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, but my comment was to suggest that if there is a predominant aesthetic right now (avant-garde or otherwise) I’m not sure I can identify it in the same way we might broadly label particular artists or writers as ‘surrealist’. That’s not to suggest that there’s not huge variety in the individual surrealists, or modernists, or pick-your-favorite ist, or that we don’t have aesthetic movements happening RIGHT NOW, only that I know very few artists who readily associate themselves with one, and given what I see happening in what we might broadly call the avant-garde, that there’s not an easy way to categorize those artists. I would argue that at least in my experience, which by necessity is limited to a subset of contemporary writers, that people ARE all over the map aesthetically. Whether that makes them ‘more individualistic’ can definitely be argued, but I don’t see writers falling into any broad aesthetic mode. And I’m not arguing this hasn’t always been the case – obv ‘modernism’ encompasses a huge range of aesthetic style – just that I don’t think there’s a one clearly definable avant-garde right now.
Yaya for you Justin. It’s about time someone agreed with me. How can you call rehashing 80 year old experiments ‘avant-guard’? When the experimental becomes mainstream, art and culture separate. Art becomes a gated community and culture just a billboard. Am I the only one tired of reading the same old ‘avant-guard’ rehashed over and over? A new wave, a true avant-guard,a truly radical movement would be trying to reconnect poetry and writing to an audience of readers so that it can have some impact on the world again.
Yaya for you Justin. It’s about time someone agreed with me. How can you call rehashing 80 year old experiments ‘avant-guard’? When the experimental becomes mainstream, art and culture separate. Art becomes a gated community and culture just a billboard. Am I the only one tired of reading the same old ‘avant-guard’ rehashed over and over? A new wave, a true avant-guard,a truly radical movement would be trying to reconnect poetry and writing to an audience of readers so that it can have some impact on the world again.
Matt, I see what you’re saying, it does seem like a lot of writers that float around this website and populate satellite presses/journals/blogs to this one are writing what might be coined avant-garde, and yet, as you say, few have bothered to describe what at times seems to interrelate in a way that might be collectively named.
And Keith, literature nor reality are compounds, one could say their textualities, virtual and actual, are in consistent negotiation. And postmodernism, isn’t it bound up in a dialectical opposition to modernism? Netsub is thereby – even if we are to speak your way and allow philosophy or theory to describe terms as having their own positive or negative charge, own reactivity (which is inevitably representational if you ask me) own distinct characteristics that could describe Mod and PoMod as elemental chemicals and therefore indissoluble as units, mixable but also singular – a structural attempt at conjugating two supposedly distinct “gases” as you put them, which are not in fact singularly distinct. You cannot conjugate and produce offspring from the already-fucking.
Where are you? I ask this earnestly, because to assert your model your M and PM have to be in an abstract void with no relationship to the artwork, to cultural phenomena or even to each other, and any notion that it apprehends current or potential phenomena within a theory relies on immense reduction, representational calculation and static articulations of the ever-mobile, ever-elusive to make it work. I say this with all respect due to what is a fascinating model of meta-narratology. Also, Netsub strikes me as fascinating in its conception of a proliferating relationship between reality as we knew it before the creative act, and then the meshwork developed by the creative act, its particle and that particle’s relationship to reality. It is a revitalised, very postmodernist notion of metafiction and the development of reality. But it is not an alchemical assertion of a new order that is a new compound simultaneously the off-springing of the modernist and postmodernist, it is most certainly within horizons of the postmodernist. Doesn’t Lyotard say much the same of the emergence of the new, I’m out so I don’t have ‘The Postmodern Condition’ with me, that the properly new is impossible a la the modernists and instead the new is always a construction of fragments of what has come before? So like Netsub, we can look at the ‘new’ as constituted of elements singled out, as well as a new construction.
And Matt, the surreal finds its way interestingly into debates on the avant-garde, doesn’t it. I think the surreal is a different kind of opposition, if we’re to speak again of a generalised satellite of small press writers and bloggists then I think in part its sometimes surrealism might be due to frustration with popular fiction – literary or otherwise – and its reliance on very specific apprehensions of reality that would call any deviance ‘magic realism’, if not the avant-garde. Some wonderful authors still writing have broken through, McCarthy or Pynchon for example. But that isn’t the avant-garde is it, really. Surrealism is inextricably a part of comedy now, it’s a success story and the movement itself has permeated many facets of our aesthetic understandings. Its resistance against grand narratives over spatiality and temporality is perhaps enduringly relevant, as we can see by this fiction. But it’s an adjective now more than anything, I’m frankly bored by its psychoanalytic ‘rigour’.
Matt, I see what you’re saying, it does seem like a lot of writers that float around this website and populate satellite presses/journals/blogs to this one are writing what might be coined avant-garde, and yet, as you say, few have bothered to describe what at times seems to interrelate in a way that might be collectively named.
And Keith, literature nor reality are compounds, one could say their textualities, virtual and actual, are in consistent negotiation. And postmodernism, isn’t it bound up in a dialectical opposition to modernism? Netsub is thereby – even if we are to speak your way and allow philosophy or theory to describe terms as having their own positive or negative charge, own reactivity (which is inevitably representational if you ask me) own distinct characteristics that could describe Mod and PoMod as elemental chemicals and therefore indissoluble as units, mixable but also singular – a structural attempt at conjugating two supposedly distinct “gases” as you put them, which are not in fact singularly distinct. You cannot conjugate and produce offspring from the already-fucking.
Where are you? I ask this earnestly, because to assert your model your M and PM have to be in an abstract void with no relationship to the artwork, to cultural phenomena or even to each other, and any notion that it apprehends current or potential phenomena within a theory relies on immense reduction, representational calculation and static articulations of the ever-mobile, ever-elusive to make it work. I say this with all respect due to what is a fascinating model of meta-narratology. Also, Netsub strikes me as fascinating in its conception of a proliferating relationship between reality as we knew it before the creative act, and then the meshwork developed by the creative act, its particle and that particle’s relationship to reality. It is a revitalised, very postmodernist notion of metafiction and the development of reality. But it is not an alchemical assertion of a new order that is a new compound simultaneously the off-springing of the modernist and postmodernist, it is most certainly within horizons of the postmodernist. Doesn’t Lyotard say much the same of the emergence of the new, I’m out so I don’t have ‘The Postmodern Condition’ with me, that the properly new is impossible a la the modernists and instead the new is always a construction of fragments of what has come before? So like Netsub, we can look at the ‘new’ as constituted of elements singled out, as well as a new construction.
And Matt, the surreal finds its way interestingly into debates on the avant-garde, doesn’t it. I think the surreal is a different kind of opposition, if we’re to speak again of a generalised satellite of small press writers and bloggists then I think in part its sometimes surrealism might be due to frustration with popular fiction – literary or otherwise – and its reliance on very specific apprehensions of reality that would call any deviance ‘magic realism’, if not the avant-garde. Some wonderful authors still writing have broken through, McCarthy or Pynchon for example. But that isn’t the avant-garde is it, really. Surrealism is inextricably a part of comedy now, it’s a success story and the movement itself has permeated many facets of our aesthetic understandings. Its resistance against grand narratives over spatiality and temporality is perhaps enduringly relevant, as we can see by this fiction. But it’s an adjective now more than anything, I’m frankly bored by its psychoanalytic ‘rigour’.
Corey – In response to your first paragraph – I wasn’t referring in any way to the writers that ‘float around this website and populate satellite presses/journals/blogs to this one are’. When I said that my POV was coming from a limited number of contemporary writers, I was referring to just that – a limited number of contemporary writers, but didn’t mean to imply that my pool of contemporary writers was limited to those posting here. I was referring to what I think, at least for the last 30 years, is a lack of a predominant aesthetic (in English language literature, at least), at least in terms of what exists outside of narrative realism. You sound like you’ve got something in mind, though, that you DO feel like there’s something out there (perhaps that I’ve missed) that represents a contemporary avant-garde – so to whom are you referring? I know in the poetry world there are poets who would align themselves with conceptual or procedural poetry, but I’m not sure we can adequately judge the impact of those writers. Maybe a few of them. Part of what I’m saying is that we really don’t know yet – that the impact of whatever is going on now isn’t really going to be known for another generation. In prose, at least, if there are writers aligning themselves with some named aesthetic, I’m not sure who they are – can you elaborate? (like give me some names and what they’re calling themselves and I’ll check them out)
Obv that last question is meant in the spirit of examples outside of the current discussion of NetSub. As admirable as the handful of writers being categorized in that way are, that the majority of ‘innovative/experimental/avant-garde/etc’ writers (English language, at least) do not fall broadly into categories.
point by point: to equate reality with textuality is an extremely anthropocentric position. when i speak of reality within the netsub framework, i should have specified that i am speaking merely of the empty logical form of reality, which i propose is internal consistency, drawing from hume, kant, ernst mach. if we want to speak of reality beyond that simple model, then we’ll need a bag of mushrooms and a couple of straight-jackets. secondly, my limited understanding of the dialectic is that of: thesis –> antithesis –> synthesis. so of course pomo is bound up with mod, in the same way that the antithesis is bound up with its thesis, and yet by its very opposition is distinct from it. theoretically, the next step is a synthesis of mod and pomo, which by definition would both transcend and include each; and the synthesis itself would then serve as the thesis of the next dialectical movement. if you want to say that mod and pomo are two profoundly messy and diverse-within-themselves eras of time upon which we slap the reductive constructs called mod and pomo, then fine, i very much agree, but also then don’t talk about a mod-pomo dialectic if you are not willing to consider them within the light of the dialectical movement. thirdly, in terms of the mixture-compound analogy, i was simply following the characteristics you elucidated in your previous comment and tried to view them in terms of a dialectic proper and improper, which was erroneous on my part because i was conflating two entire movements with just a few characteristics. and lastly a question: if the ‘new’ was thematised by mod, and made impossible by pomo, then are we forever stuck in pomo? temporality itself has now become problematic. or as matt said above are we simply oscillating throughout time between realism and antirealism?
in terms of where i’m at, my background is physics and some philosophy, so i’m pretty much ignorant of literary theory and literature as a whole. my approach to netsub was mostly along the lines of a scientist drawing tentative conclusions from the data presented (as well as bringing some preconceived ideas to the table). i’m still learning much of this stuff as i go. it’s very likely netsub is simply an extension or an extended version of pomo, as you say; honestly my understanding of mod and pomo is not much better than a best-of-hits compilation with catch-phrases from the liner notes. first and foremost netsub is a literary theory, never meant to coin a new social or economic order (neither of which i know anything about) as mod and pomo are sometimes used as an interpretative lens for. whether or not we are in the network age, as samuel r smith proposes, i think network cognition is going to factor more and more in the arts. one of my main intentions behind writing the essay (aside from being intrigued and fascinated and wanting to play with everyone else in the sandbox) was to start a conversation, all the while knowing that my extremely limited knowledgebase would probably generate some inaccuracies (which is where any criticism, such as your own, is helpful and informative), but hopefully overall the essay would serve as a catalyst for thinking about some of these recent and emerging literary texts that are little fireballs of language and logic.
point by point: to equate reality with textuality is an extremely anthropocentric position. when i speak of reality within the netsub framework, i should have specified that i am speaking merely of the empty logical form of reality, which i propose is internal consistency, drawing from hume, kant, ernst mach. if we want to speak of reality beyond that simple model, then we’ll need a bag of mushrooms and a couple of straight-jackets. secondly, my limited understanding of the dialectic is that of: thesis –> antithesis –> synthesis. so of course pomo is bound up with mod, in the same way that the antithesis is bound up with its thesis, and yet by its very opposition is distinct from it. theoretically, the next step is a synthesis of mod and pomo, which by definition would both transcend and include each; and the synthesis itself would then serve as the thesis of the next dialectical movement. if you want to say that mod and pomo are two profoundly messy and diverse-within-themselves eras of time upon which we slap the reductive constructs called mod and pomo, then fine, i very much agree, but also then don’t talk about a mod-pomo dialectic if you are not willing to consider them within the light of the dialectical movement. thirdly, in terms of the mixture-compound analogy, i was simply following the characteristics you elucidated in your previous comment and tried to view them in terms of a dialectic proper and improper, which was erroneous on my part because i was conflating two entire movements with just a few characteristics. and lastly a question: if the ‘new’ was thematised by mod, and made impossible by pomo, then are we forever stuck in pomo? temporality itself has now become problematic. or as matt said above are we simply oscillating throughout time between realism and antirealism?
in terms of where i’m at, my background is physics and some philosophy, so i’m pretty much ignorant of literary theory and literature as a whole. my approach to netsub was mostly along the lines of a scientist drawing tentative conclusions from the data presented (as well as bringing some preconceived ideas to the table). i’m still learning much of this stuff as i go. it’s very likely netsub is simply an extension or an extended version of pomo, as you say; honestly my understanding of mod and pomo is not much better than a best-of-hits compilation with catch-phrases from the liner notes. first and foremost netsub is a literary theory, never meant to coin a new social or economic order (neither of which i know anything about) as mod and pomo are sometimes used as an interpretative lens for. whether or not we are in the network age, as samuel r smith proposes, i think network cognition is going to factor more and more in the arts. one of my main intentions behind writing the essay (aside from being intrigued and fascinated and wanting to play with everyone else in the sandbox) was to start a conversation, all the while knowing that my extremely limited knowledgebase would probably generate some inaccuracies (which is where any criticism, such as your own, is helpful and informative), but hopefully overall the essay would serve as a catalyst for thinking about some of these recent and emerging literary texts that are little fireballs of language and logic.
Thanks Keith. It doesn’t sound to me that your education in literary theory is limited, and I like what you’re doing. And yes, I agree, the logical next point is a synthesis of mod and pomod, but, perhaps you’ve located something more critical that the terms fail to apprehend, that being transition. I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the most exhilirating moments in philosophical endeavour have been the enlightenment becoming the romantic period, the romantic period becoming modernism, modernism becoming postmodernism. Isn’t it frightening that we’ve lost sight of the primary movement of your concept, synthesis in dialectic between creative practice and critical practice, the modernists thought one the one hand that the creative act should BE the critical act, and on the other, that art could live without the critical act (in differing measure, in different movements) and postmodernists are willing to undermine the integrity of the creative act, nothing is safe from problematisation, to the point where no significance lies in any creative act. So, for me, thesis and antithesis must be synthesised in enduring dialectics, their threat to one another should remain and should be continually renovated. I’m not sure that this is the same as your particular meta-fictional synthesis, but your notions certainly engage with many of the gaps we are left with at a time of much creative variation and little critical apprehension or engagement. Thanks again. I would be interested in reading your essay.
Thanks Keith. It doesn’t sound to me that your education in literary theory is limited, and I like what you’re doing. And yes, I agree, the logical next point is a synthesis of mod and pomod, but, perhaps you’ve located something more critical that the terms fail to apprehend, that being transition. I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the most exhilirating moments in philosophical endeavour have been the enlightenment becoming the romantic period, the romantic period becoming modernism, modernism becoming postmodernism. Isn’t it frightening that we’ve lost sight of the primary movement of your concept, synthesis in dialectic between creative practice and critical practice, the modernists thought one the one hand that the creative act should BE the critical act, and on the other, that art could live without the critical act (in differing measure, in different movements) and postmodernists are willing to undermine the integrity of the creative act, nothing is safe from problematisation, to the point where no significance lies in any creative act. So, for me, thesis and antithesis must be synthesised in enduring dialectics, their threat to one another should remain and should be continually renovated. I’m not sure that this is the same as your particular meta-fictional synthesis, but your notions certainly engage with many of the gaps we are left with at a time of much creative variation and little critical apprehension or engagement. Thanks again. I would be interested in reading your essay.
Oh, and not to continue this debate unnecessarily, but just one thing I wanted to contend is that postmodernism and modernism are as dialectically constrasted as thesis and antithesis. It isn’t as simple as that. For some postmodernists, it is an extreme extension of modernism, cogent to the fragmentariness of the present, to postmodernity. And, antithesis is the basis of modernism’s forward thrust (and quite obviously not simply the property of modernism, we cannot continue to base our analysis of deconstructive, obliterating concepts with Dada as its emblem) just think of The Wasteland, and then Duchamp’s urinal. Certainly thesis is the ever-present obverse where it is not for postmodernism, but we can say that in methodology modernism is more reactionary and antithetical, whereas postmodernism, although endowed to infinite with antithetical interventions, is in fact in methodology – reflective of fragmentariness, cultural bias, commercialised – thetical of inertia in intervention, of the artwork’s agency. And then you can see the friction this might have with postmodernism for others, those for whom postmodernism is radical modernism in postmodernity, defying montage with pastiche, waste with kitsch, and so on. Hopefully, you can see then how although dialectically inextricable like thesis and antithesis, they are not opposed so cleanly, not opposing methodologies, dialectics is to be in contention with, a framework of contention, in debate, and does not necessarily separate terms into opposites. Certainly they oppose, to different degrees, but do not render each other poles. I guess this is my argument. And I say all this wanting to forget about the terms, because they do force analysts into compartments, into meaningless calculation, into discursive myopia. We should be considering what this synthesis within network operations of reality really means, and its ramifications for critical and creative practices, not what the conjugation of modernism and postmodernism means. We can explore this in a far more minor way, why not sentiment (thesis) and histrionic instability (antithesis) in Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods: camp as subversive kitsch (synthesis)? Or, montage (thesis) and multimedia pastiche (antithesis): from Eisenstein to Peter Greenaway and Matthew Barney and a new cinematic vocabulary (synthesis)? These to me have condensations of your idea, with thesis and antithesis located in modernism and postmodernism respectively (although the film example has perhaps a continuity between montage and pastiche that couldn’t necessarily be cleanly called thesis and antithesis, although they are certainly modernist and postmodernist methodologies, pastiche being a radical kind of extension) and enact what’s fascinating about your Netsub model, of the new emerging from one gas undermining the other though cohabitating with it in the artwork, though I’m not sure if your model in my understanding posited a clean or fraught relationship between the two elements in the artwork. So yeah, you see what I’m saying, but what these sophisticated networks mean for meta-narratology and the simultaneity of worlds, now that’s fascinating. Do you see this in Borges and Calvino? Or are their meta-fictions and their proliferation of them not quite there with that notion of nodally-based interrelations and cohabitations?
Oh, and not to continue this debate unnecessarily, but just one thing I wanted to contend is that postmodernism and modernism are as dialectically constrasted as thesis and antithesis. It isn’t as simple as that. For some postmodernists, it is an extreme extension of modernism, cogent to the fragmentariness of the present, to postmodernity. And, antithesis is the basis of modernism’s forward thrust (and quite obviously not simply the property of modernism, we cannot continue to base our analysis of deconstructive, obliterating concepts with Dada as its emblem) just think of The Wasteland, and then Duchamp’s urinal. Certainly thesis is the ever-present obverse where it is not for postmodernism, but we can say that in methodology modernism is more reactionary and antithetical, whereas postmodernism, although endowed to infinite with antithetical interventions, is in fact in methodology – reflective of fragmentariness, cultural bias, commercialised – thetical of inertia in intervention, of the artwork’s agency. And then you can see the friction this might have with postmodernism for others, those for whom postmodernism is radical modernism in postmodernity, defying montage with pastiche, waste with kitsch, and so on. Hopefully, you can see then how although dialectically inextricable like thesis and antithesis, they are not opposed so cleanly, not opposing methodologies, dialectics is to be in contention with, a framework of contention, in debate, and does not necessarily separate terms into opposites. Certainly they oppose, to different degrees, but do not render each other poles. I guess this is my argument. And I say all this wanting to forget about the terms, because they do force analysts into compartments, into meaningless calculation, into discursive myopia. We should be considering what this synthesis within network operations of reality really means, and its ramifications for critical and creative practices, not what the conjugation of modernism and postmodernism means. We can explore this in a far more minor way, why not sentiment (thesis) and histrionic instability (antithesis) in Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods: camp as subversive kitsch (synthesis)? Or, montage (thesis) and multimedia pastiche (antithesis): from Eisenstein to Peter Greenaway and Matthew Barney and a new cinematic vocabulary (synthesis)? These to me have condensations of your idea, with thesis and antithesis located in modernism and postmodernism respectively (although the film example has perhaps a continuity between montage and pastiche that couldn’t necessarily be cleanly called thesis and antithesis, although they are certainly modernist and postmodernist methodologies, pastiche being a radical kind of extension) and enact what’s fascinating about your Netsub model, of the new emerging from one gas undermining the other though cohabitating with it in the artwork, though I’m not sure if your model in my understanding posited a clean or fraught relationship between the two elements in the artwork. So yeah, you see what I’m saying, but what these sophisticated networks mean for meta-narratology and the simultaneity of worlds, now that’s fascinating. Do you see this in Borges and Calvino? Or are their meta-fictions and their proliferation of them not quite there with that notion of nodally-based interrelations and cohabitations?
Oh, and Matt, I feel like on the one hand the lack of aesthetic collectives is a bad thing, but on the other that the avant-garde – not avant-garde methodologies – is an excuse for tendentious literature, bad politics, and generalisation. This is what I meant about the avant-garde as more of an adjective now, an adjective that pertains to much of the work I love, certainly if something ceases to resemble the new I wonder where I’ve read it before. In terms of this satellite of authors, I’m an Australian lit student who’s happened upon this website and know none of these writers personally or even have read them very well, but going by my online reading I guess I’m talking about writers like Blake Butler, Lily Hoang and Tao Lin. It was this literary environment I mistakenly thought you were speaking of, and many avant-garde styles seem to be to be going on here, although aesthetically they are unique from one another, except for what might potentially be expressed as visible structural constraints on the prose. In the past thirty years, the lack of avant-garde aesthetic collectives I think is partly lamentable since it is the communal bolstering of like-minded experimentation which better proliferates and better publishes writers of this kind for a larger audience. Editors choose work because they think it will please the larger proportion of a readership. If something strikes them as unusual – unusual because they haven’t read it as commonly elsewhere – then it is more difficult to reconcile with notions of a larger readership. We need communal efforts to prove these people wrong, aesthetic movements are brands and brands sell/proliferate. But brands betray the individual – artwork and author. So it’s a never ending problem, isn’t it.
Oh, and Matt, I feel like on the one hand the lack of aesthetic collectives is a bad thing, but on the other that the avant-garde – not avant-garde methodologies – is an excuse for tendentious literature, bad politics, and generalisation. This is what I meant about the avant-garde as more of an adjective now, an adjective that pertains to much of the work I love, certainly if something ceases to resemble the new I wonder where I’ve read it before. In terms of this satellite of authors, I’m an Australian lit student who’s happened upon this website and know none of these writers personally or even have read them very well, but going by my online reading I guess I’m talking about writers like Blake Butler, Lily Hoang and Tao Lin. It was this literary environment I mistakenly thought you were speaking of, and many avant-garde styles seem to be to be going on here, although aesthetically they are unique from one another, except for what might potentially be expressed as visible structural constraints on the prose. In the past thirty years, the lack of avant-garde aesthetic collectives I think is partly lamentable since it is the communal bolstering of like-minded experimentation which better proliferates and better publishes writers of this kind for a larger audience. Editors choose work because they think it will please the larger proportion of a readership. If something strikes them as unusual – unusual because they haven’t read it as commonly elsewhere – then it is more difficult to reconcile with notions of a larger readership. We need communal efforts to prove these people wrong, aesthetic movements are brands and brands sell/proliferate. But brands betray the individual – artwork and author. So it’s a never ending problem, isn’t it.
corey, your dialectic comment has illuminated many vague notions i had and expanded well beyond them. i wasn’t being modest when i said my knowledge of literary theory is extremely limited. until a few weeks ago the only thing i knew about lyotard was that his name reminded me of women’s leggings. given your references to him and his wikipedia entry, which mentions micronarratives and ‘the multiplicity of communitites of meaning’ i’m swaying toward the opinion, your remark, about netsub being a transition from pomo into whatever’s next, rather than a beast with its own legs. this is all fascinating stuff and i appreciate your sensitive rendering of complex material, which i’m concerned might be lacking in the essay. anyhow, shoot me an email and i’ll send you a copy: keithb (((at))) marlboro (((dot))) edu. i’d be interested in continuing this discussion.
corey, your dialectic comment has illuminated many vague notions i had and expanded well beyond them. i wasn’t being modest when i said my knowledge of literary theory is extremely limited. until a few weeks ago the only thing i knew about lyotard was that his name reminded me of women’s leggings. given your references to him and his wikipedia entry, which mentions micronarratives and ‘the multiplicity of communitites of meaning’ i’m swaying toward the opinion, your remark, about netsub being a transition from pomo into whatever’s next, rather than a beast with its own legs. this is all fascinating stuff and i appreciate your sensitive rendering of complex material, which i’m concerned might be lacking in the essay. anyhow, shoot me an email and i’ll send you a copy: keithb (((at))) marlboro (((dot))) edu. i’d be interested in continuing this discussion.
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