Comments on: When the Establishment is Infinitely more Avant-Garde than the Avant-Garde, is it not time to Reconsider Our Notion of the Avant-Garde?

By: 9 1/2 Lives, Or Not | HTMLGIANT

9 1/2 Lives, Or Not | HTMLGIANT — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 05:30:35 +0000

[...] The question is, has surrealism been appropriated via 8 1/2 or did Fellini appropriate surrealism in 8 1/2? Perhaps the battle that began with 8 1/2 has carried itself out to the point where commercials are now more surreal than art films, as discussed in Justin Taylor’s post, When the Establishment is Infinitely more Avant-Garde than the Avant-Garde, is it not time to Recons… [...]

By: clueless aesthetic rebellion vs. absolutism « Very Postmodern

clueless aesthetic rebellion vs. absolutism « Very Postmodern — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:54:24 +0000

[...] Those things that form a rebellious undercurrent need to be consistently refined and revised in order to have any relevance, but the worry then becomes does a fringe/avant-garde appear and define itself purely for the sake of the name? And what value can that possibly have? Putting yourself in opposite to a mainstream current based on your passion to oppose the mainstream current seems hopeless with regards to establishing anything resembling a true counterculture or avant-garde. It amounts to little other than a glorified teenage angst. Punk Rock already happened. Repeating the motions does not form a progression but a stasis. [...]

By: keith n b

keith n b — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:19:03 +0000

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.

By: keith n b

keith n b — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:19:00 +0000

By: Corey Izod

Corey Izod — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:12:55 +0000

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.

By: Corey Izod

Corey Izod — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:12:00 +0000

By: Corey Izod

Corey Izod — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:52:54 +0000

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?

By: Corey Izod

Corey Izod — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 01:52:00 +0000

By: Corey Izod

Corey Izod — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:01:53 +0000

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.

By: Corey Izod

Corey Izod — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:01:00 +0000