Avant-Garde Pluralities: An Introduction
I. Possession and Etymological Imperatives at the Cabaret Voltaire
By some accounts, Hugo Ball fell into an induced “state of possession” on a mid-July evening in 1916 and needed to be “carried onto the stage” of the legendary Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland.1 In point of fact, it is debatable whether the co-founder of the Dadaist movement needed assistance because he was possessed, or simply, as he admits in his diary, because his stiff cardboard costume restricted his mobility.2 Either way, an aura of mystique still hovers about his performance, cultivated in part by the eerie black-and-white photograph of Ball in the costume he had constructed. Reproduced many times, the photograph of Ball is one of the iconic images of twentieth century avant-garde performance. While it does not convey the striking combination of red, blue, and gold with which Ball had colored his attire, the photograph does capture Ball’s haunted and distant gaze. It also captures the combination of gravity and parody in the makeshift similarity that Ball’s costume bore to priestly vestments, and to what Ball somewhat problematically described as his “high, blue-and-white-striped witch doctor’s hat.”3 That similarity is consistent with Ball’s description of himself as “a magical bishop”—a description that positioned Ball in an irreverent cross-section of mystic, occult, Christian, colonialist, and cabaret traditions. It is from within that hybrid space that Ball performed, while possessed by whatever spirits may or may not have taken hold of him.
Whether Ball was actually possessed is less important than the fact that he was dressed for battle on a not-inconsequential field of symbolic gestures and signs. In many respects, that battle had been brewing for some time. It was in large part a battle against the merchants and politicians of war, whose bellicose, nationalistic rhetoric had unleashed forces they could not control, forces that set massive troops into motion and propelled Europe into the First World War. By 1916, the numbers of dead and maimed soldiers were mounting, and the senseless toll of that war was all too evident. Against the backdrop of these larger horrific events, Ball was a seemingly trivial and absurd figure—standing there in his makeshift magical vestments on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire—even among the community of exiled artists, intellectuals, and political dissidents who had sought refuge from the war in Zurich and whose ranks included none other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself. Trivial though Ball may have appeared to be, the stakes in the battle that he took up were not. Indeed, they transcended the war itself and were significant enough to give Ball a lasting place in the annals of European cultural history. Although the Cabaret Voltaire was short-lived, Dada and its iconoclastic critique of culture spread quickly to Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, and Paris.
That historical moment, partially constructed out of improvised cardboard vestments, can rightly be identified as the birth of an avant-garde—indeed, the birth of one of the most famously irreverent avant-gardes. There were certainly other births as well. One could cite the formation of the Italian Futurists just a few years earlier, the theatrical exploits of Alfred Jarry closer to the turn of the century, or, as critics have often done, one could go back to the early nineteenth century when Henri de Saint-Simon was among the very first to speak seriously of an artistic avant-garde and was arguing that artists ought to be at the forefront of revolutionary politics.4 As important as groups like the Saint-Simonians are in the narrative history of the European avant-gardes, I want to suggest as a point of departure for this book that, while there is genuine intellectual value in considering a broad history of those births, it is a mistake to assume that figures like Saint-Simon set a precedent without which it is unthinkable to find Hugo Ball standing rigidly on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire in his makeshift magical vestments. Indeed, such assumptions are intertwined with a questionable logocentrism that is still very much prevalent in scholarship on the avant-gardes and that is perhaps best exemplified in an equally problematic assumption: namely, that in order to understand vanguardism as a phenomenon, one must trace back through an etymological genealogy to the origins of the term avant-garde itself and of the application of the term to describe particular artists. One might call this later assumption the “etymological imperative.”
Classic examples of scholarship that follow this imperative are easy to find in histories of avant-gardism from the 1960s and 1970s, such as those by Renato Poggioli, Donald Drew Egbert, and Matei Calinescu. But the force of this imperative still resonates in the recent work of literary scholars like Richard Murphy, who, in his book Theorizing the Avant-Garde, is careful to note that “the earliest use of the term ‘avant-garde’ as applied to a progressive artist group occurs around 1825, toward the later phase of the European Romantic movements, and is associated with the followers of the proto-socialists Saint-Simon and Fourier.”5 A similar tendency is evident among theater and performance studies scholars as important as Mike Sell and as established as Richard Schechner. In his introduction to Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange, for example, Sell specifically returns to Saint-Simon and early nineteenth-century bohemians, arguing that “Saint-Simonianism and bohemianism are the two most important influences on the development of the European avant-garde tradition.”6 But perhaps the more interesting example of the tendency to follow this imperative is to be found in Schechner’s prominent recent essay on 9/11 as avant-garde art, which I will be discussing at length toward the end of this book.
In the opening paragraph to that essay, Schechner literally begins his discussion by turning to the Oxford English Dictionary. Citing the French and military origins of the term avant-garde, as well as tracing its usage in English back to “the end of the fifteenth century,” Schechner notes that avant-garde is a cognate to “vanguard and van ” and “refers to being ‘ahead’ or ‘first’ in any number of circumstances.” Although there is a palpable linguistic irony—or perhaps mischievousness—in Schechner’s subordination of the 9/11 terrorists to the OED, this subordination is not unlike the tenuous linear relationship that histories of avant-gardism build between European figures like Saint-Simon and Hugo Ball. There is nothing by way of precedent set in the etymology that Schechner cites without which it is impossible to imagine the heinous events of 9/11. So at one level the obvious question that Schechner’s essay raises is simple: what critical advantage does one gain by defining the events of 9/11 as avant-garde art? This is a question that Schechner himself poses. At a more basic level, however, this question begs the more fundamental question of whether the etymology that Schechner offers—an etymology that even breaks vanguard into separate linguistic components—actually leads to a better understanding of vanguardism, not as a term but as a cultural-political phenomenon, against which the events of 9/11 can be measured. In this respect, the most basic question about Schechner’s adherence to “the etymological imperative” is whether that adherence leads to an understanding of the dynamic surrounding the events of 9/11 that not only would justify their designation as avant-garde, but that would also open the door to considerations of how this particular form and this particular historical moment of avant-gardism necessitate new and fundamental adjustments in how cultural critics define an avant-garde as such. The choice here, I would suggest, is between a stagnant, albeit broadly defined notion of the avant-gardes on the one hand, and a fluid notion on the other that is consciously provisional and tactical with guerilla-like elusiveness. The instabilities beneath the surface value and meaning of the term avant-garde facilitate this latter notion.
Those instabilities always accompany the term avant-garde, and from a critical standpoint, I would suggest that there is much more to be gained by tapping into the resulting slippage and play than in constructing a seemingly stable etymology that subtly mystifies, and ultimately restricts, the conceptual usage of avant-garde as a term. To a large extent, Sell shares this same interest even though he does not say so directly. Having paid a kind of requisite service to the etymological imperative, Sell is quick to point out how “situational, how contingent and local,” the influence of Saint-Simonianism and bohemianism are in the larger economies of material exchange that have defined the avant-gardes. He notes that “if the avant-garde is a ‘movement’, it is a movement that goes in many different directions.”7 If it is “a moment,” I would add, it is also a moment in name only. Beneath the name, it not only goes in many different directions, it also has multiple points of departure, none necessarily reliant on another. The avant-garde is always the avant-gardes, and while the constituting points of departure for one may borrow from another, one avant-garde is seldom directly contingent upon the precedents set by its predecessors. Vanguard traffic moves in pluralities. Ironically, the plural flow of this traffic is frequently at odds with the discourse coming from individual avant-gardes, and this irony returns us to this book’s point of departure: it brings us back to the peculiar and solitary figure of Hugo Ball standing on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire in his cardboard vestments and witch doctor’s hat. The point of departure of this avant-garde is a moment of linguistic panic and an attempt to corral slippage and play within an increasingly narrow and mystified etymological imperative: it is a moment of smoke and mirrors that would bury pluralities beneath a powerful illusion of unified, singular meaning.
II. Incantations, Irony, and Invulnerable Sentences: Hugo Ball’s Sound Poems
Once upon the stage, Ball recited the sound poem “Gadji Beri Bimba,” which the evening program described as a “verse without words.” Although critics have argued that “Gadji Beri Bimba” and other sound poems like Ball’s “Karawane” are “marked by a ‘senselessness’ that reflects an expressive incapacity,” that “repudiate[s] semantic content [ . . . and that] moves toward pure sound,” Ball may well have described himself as “a magical bishop” not only because of his costume, but also because his poem was not merely full of sounds, but full of sounds that performed.8 The poem was packed with sounds of incantation and magic: abracadabra sounds. It was full of sounds like “the wonderfully plaintive words” that, Ball claimed, “no human mind can resist,” and that came from “ancient magical texts.”9 Ball, again suggesting a state of possession, later said he “had no choice” but to deliver these sounds in “the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation” and in the “style of liturgical singing that wails in all the Catholic churches of East and West.”10 The cadence and style in the recitation gave the poem and the performance their gravity. The sounds themselves were indeed of the order of magical incantations:
gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori
gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini
gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsi sassala bim
o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo
gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen
bluku terullala blaulala looooo11
This sound poem went on for two additional mesmerizing verses. What force compelled Ball to adopt the priestly cadence and liturgical style is not entirely clear. The target of his lamentation and song, on the other hand, is easier to identify. He was reacting against the malleability of political discourse that allowed politicians to say one thing while doing another and to rationalize an unjustifiable war to those whose lives it ultimately ended. The sounds of “Gadji Beri Bimba” could not be appropriated for such cynical manipulations, and presumably they worked their spell against words that could. If Ball’s performance piece strove thus toward a repudiation of “semantic content,” as critics have suggested, then that repudiation was grounded in incantation—the incantation performed by those magic-laden sounds—and the incantation itself functioned as an exorcism of sorts, a battle to expel the forces that prey upon the vulnerability of words to cynical political appropriation. At the level of discourse, Ball’s sound poem fought the hypocrisy of modern “European intelligence”12 through the reduction of sound to “archetypal and magical essences.”13
However mystified, however problematic in its notions of archetype and essence, Ball’s performance of “Gadji Beri Bimba” cast a spell against cultural ideals that were all too vulnerable to the kind of appropriation that whitewashed the carnage and “slaughter” of the First World War, burying what Ball called the war’s “betrayal of man” beneath a dishonest and duplicitous rhetoric of “European glory.” Ball’s response to this dishonest rhetoric was decisive. Although it was probably not a deliberate reference, he likened the war’s political leaders to a group of demon barbers from London’s Fleet Street: “They cannot persuade us to enjoy eating the rotten pie of human flesh that they present to us. They cannot force our quivering nostrils to admire the smell of corpses.”14 Ball’s return to the sounds of incantation was in this regard part of a political-aesthetic search for a discourse that could not be compromised, appropriated, or manipulated. “It is imperative,” Ball argued, “to write invulnerable sentences. Sentences that withstand all irony.”15 Perhaps such sentences could bring political hypocrites to silence and bring an end to an unnecessary war justified by lies and deceptive rhetoric. But such sentences, if they are possible at all, would indeed be magical, since they would have to be comprised of something other than discourse as we know it.
Combating the kind of dishonest political rhetoric that fans the flames of unnecessary wars is a noble thing in any period of history, but the dream of invulnerable sentences as the weapon for that combat is a particularly modernist fantasy—especially in the opposition that Ball builds between invulnerability and irony. Ultimately, that opposition—which masks a striking etymological imperative beneath a veil of metaphysical rhetoric—relies on a contrast between a privileged singular notion of meaning and truth, on the one hand, and the multiple layers of meaning that irony unleashes, on the other hand. In this respect, it is not a matter of coincidence that the dream of invulnerable sentences coincided with a project that sought to reduce words and sounds to magical essences. For in the realm of discourse—be it the discourse of language or of the stage—invulnerability is a rhetorical posture rather than the place of fact and secure meaning that it pretends to be. It is a privileged and mystified category. It posits immediacy where there is already mediation, presence where there is already representation, and, above all, stability where there is already slippage and play.
In its most extreme manifestation, the dream of invulnerable sentences conceivably slips into fascist authoritarianism. This, at least, is what Greil Marcus maintains. He has famously argued that Ball’s call for invulnerable sentences opens “dada to the will to power” and sounds a lot “like something that should have been written by Hitler—or Lenin.”16 Playing a provocative game of double entendre, Marcus concludes that “invulnerable sentences are death sentences.” To punctuate this latter point, he adds that “‘Six million exterminated’ is an invulnerable sentence,” claiming, “you can’t argue with it.” On the contrary, “Six million exterminated” is a sentence fragment, and Marcus is gaming in the darkest realms of macabre irony. In doing so, he proves that no statement of historical fact or fiction, however horrific, is ever invulnerable and safe from manipulation or irony. If, as Marcus claims, “there is a way in which” this sentence (fragment) “is dada,” then I would suggest that it is so only in the echo that Marcus creates between it and Ball’s incantations.
Like Ball’s own performance, invulnerable sentences—and etymological imperatives—are sustained not by real magic, but by sleight of hand and by the seductive flourish of incantation. Indeed, the unity that Ball conjured forth in his performance was ultimately only a construct and representation, assembled from makeshift vestments and magic sounds that he had appropriated for that particular moment on the stage. It wasn’t real magic that transpired on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire—at least not in the paranormal sense. But it was a moment rich in irony: the irony of calling for invulnerable sentences and of seeming to strip words down to the level of pure sound, while staging an event where words and sounds are always more than they appear to be—the irony, thus, of combating irony while unavoidably producing it, and, the irony, likewise, of combating pluralities while unavoidably producing them in the ambiguities of the stage.
III. Pluralities and the Ghosts of the Avant-Gardes
One need not play along with Marcus’s dark rhetorical game in order to grasp the ironies that hover about Hugo Ball standing on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire reciting “Gadji Beri Bimba” in that combative, iconic moment in the history of the avant-gardes. It is this moment of rich irony, slippage, and play that is of interest to me—this moment that inadvertently acknowledges pluralities in the very effort to bury them beneath the misleading construct of a unified, stable discourse. There is no debate about the need to resist the deceitfulness of political doublespeak, but positing the dream of reducing sentences to invulnerable, unambiguous meaning is either equally duplicitous and manipulative, or it is simply delusional. If Hugo Ball was possessed on that July evening in 1916, I would suggest that he was possessed by the multiple layers of meaning and signification that his incantations summoned, unleashed, and ultimately failed to control. Moreover, I would suggest that in the unacknowledged pluralities that haunted that moment, the foundation for a critical discourse on the avant-gardes can be found.
I take Ball’s performance both as a point of departure and as a point of contrast for this book, because, in that moment of attempting to bury pluralities beneath the semblance of a unified discourse, his performance contains a gesture that, while not necessarily setting a precedent for subsequent avant-gardes, nonetheless recurs again and again among avant-garde artists, as well as among scholars of the avant-gardes. Ultimately, I am more interested in the pluralities that Ball sought to bury and in the gesture of trying to bury them than in the unified, singular notions of meaning that Ball wanted to construct in their stead. Likewise, I am more interested in the pluralities that an overarching “theory of the avant-garde” tends to bury than I am in promoting yet another generalized theory of the avant-garde. At the very least, I see a conceptual parallel between Ball’s gesture and the gesture of scholars who attempt to mold divergent avant-gardes within a unified theory of the avant-garde as such. At the most basic level, that conceptual parallel can be seen in the etymological imperative that is central not only to Ball’s performance of “Gadji Beri Bimba,” but to most constructed genealogies of the avant-garde(s) as well. In this regard, The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s) sides with irony and the multiple layers of meaning against which Ball struggled on that July evening in 1916. Those multiple layers of meaning—pluralities as I choose to call them—are the site and the substance of the ghosts of which I speak. Inasmuch as this book traffics in pluralities, it does so in deliberate contrast to long-established predecessors like Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde.
Pointing toward a larger conceptual strategy, the contrast here is between the construction of an overarching theory, on the one hand, and the rough negotiations within a provisionally constructed economy of critical interventions, on the other. In this contrast, the shift from “theory” to “interventions” not only calls for viewing the avant-gardes from multiple vantage points (including multiple theoretical vantage points). It also challenges the assumption that a single overarching theory can account for the diverse pluralities packed within the terms avant-garde and performance without leading to debilitating compromises or deeply problematic exclusions. Indeed, to link the avant-gardes and performance together already works in pluralities since it points toward a sphere of vanguardism that remains curiously absent from the more general theory of the avant-garde that critics like Bürger, Poggioli, and Calinescu all posited in their now-classic studies of avant-garde art and culture. Against the influential legacy of their interest in a master theory-narrative, this book pushes unrelentingly toward the numerous and the quantitatively diverse. The pluralities it embraces are multiple in kind: theories, avant-gardes, and performances. But why this emphasis on pluralities?
Some forty to fifty years after Bürger, Poggioli, and Calinescu each formulated a theory of the avant-garde, few scholars writing about avant-garde performance today fail to note at some point that it is more accurate to speak of avant-gardes than of the avant-garde. Such repeated acknowledgment of plurality merits much more than the kind of passing acknowledgment that ultimately reverts back to a more generalized theory of the avant-garde. The challenge is to act upon the passing note and to articulate the theoretical currents that feed it: to tease out of the shadows of the observed pluralities strategies that account for, but do not conceptually delimit, the individual particularities of the avant-gardes. Such is the project undertaken in this book. A key strategy of that project involves a concerted attack on conceptual paradigms that posit uniformity at the expense of multiplicity, that are premised upon unacknowledged preclusions, and that are sustained by what Theodor Adorno famously called “the magic spell” of “reconciliation under duress.”17 In this respect, the title of the book, The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s), refers to the multiple forms of vanguardism that haunt the selective ways in which critics have theorized the term avant-garde. To that end, much of this book involves a sustained critical dialogue with Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde and with the conceptual paradigms in that work that continue to have broad, accepted currency, even among those who would speak of avant-gardes rather than of the avant-garde.
IV. Peter Bürger and the Parameters of Avant-Garde Studies
Considering that the German version of Bürger’s book was first published in 1974, it may seem to be an odd point of focus almost forty years later, and yet this particular work (along with its English translation in 1984) continues to exercise an unparalleled influence on the shape of studies of the avant-gardes. Evidence of this influence is difficult to avoid. For example, when Jonathan Eburne and Rita Felski recently edited a special issue of New Literary History that addresses the question “What is an avant-garde?” not only did they argue that “for the past few decades, the study of the avant-garde has persistently circled” around issues whose “parameters” were largely set by Peter Bürger.18 They also specifically decided to begin “the revisionist project” of their special issue with a newly commissioned essay by Bürger. In that opening essay, the editors allowed Bürger to reflect upon the critical reception of his own book, which Eburne and Felski rightly identify as “one of the principle texts in the field,”19 This was not an altogether illogical point of departure for a collection of essays seeking to cultivate what Eburne and Felski call “a more variegated picture of the histories of avant-garde practice, one characterized by nonsynchrony, multiple temporalities, repetition, and difference.”20 Presumably, the thought here was that Bürger might have pressed toward a rethinking of the limitations of his own work. But given the revisionist goals of the overall project, it may have come as some surprise to the editors that Bürger used this opportunity to formulate a spirited reassertion of the original arguments he had laid out in 1974. At the very least, Eburne and Felski found themselves in the awkward situation of introducing Bürger’s article while literally arguing against it. “The subsuming of all avant-garde movements within a single development narrative,” they argue, “allots an excessive importance to the avant-garde’s European origins, while condemning all subsequent forms of radical art to repetition, belatedness, and bad faith.”21 This comment not only takes aim at the underlying assumptions of Bürger’s article, it applies equally to Theory of the Avant-Garde as well. While I strongly agree with this critique, I must note that it was purchased at an ironic price. Eburne and Felski’s project resulted not only in an acknowledgment of the lasting influence of Bürger’s book, but also in the placement of a reiteration of Bürger’s original arguments at the center of one of the most current debates about the avant-gardes.
As for Bürger’s spirited defense of his own work, there is a kind of partisan tit-for-tat in his response to critics like Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster that, while at times losing sight of the larger issues of “nonsynchrony” and “multiple temporalities” that concern Eburne and Felski, nonetheless evinces a crucial, if somewhat intuitive, understanding that studies of the avant-gardes are as much about the contested field of avant-garde studies as they are about the avant-gardes themselves. In this respect, Bürger’s response to his critics lends credence to other essays in the special issue of New Literary History, such as Mike Sell’s article “Resisting the Question, ‘What is an Avant-Garde?’” Indeed, my own return to Bürger in this book is an emphatic echo of Sell’s argument that “we cannot answer the question, ‘What is an avant-garde?’, until we better comprehend [ . . . ] the history of the field of avant-garde studies itself.”22 The two go hand-in-hand. Echoing this same sentiment, The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s) is thus based upon two assumptions: first, that to speak of the avant-gardes necessitates speaking of how the avant-gardes have been received and conceptualized in cultural criticism, and second, that in order to rigorously examine this reception, one must dive headlong into the pivotal controversies and debates that have shaped studies of the avant-gardes as a field.
Although there is much I disagree with in Bürger’s specific “theory of the avant-garde,” at a much more fundamental level, his decision to engage his critics coincides with my own conviction that studies of the avant-gardes ought to provoke a clear sense of the divisions that are still very much at play in the field of avant-garde studies. If that field is contested, it is contested, I would suggest, because historically the avant-gardes have inclined toward contestation at political, social, and cultural levels. While work on the avant-gardes need not be avant-garde itself, it will tend—if it pursues its subject rigorously—to court disagreement and debate, because the avant-gardes tend to be embedded in controversy and provocation. It is hard to imagine how work on the avant-gardes—work that not only takes the political and cultural provocations of vanguards seriously but that also takes the work of other scholars seriously—can avoid being spirited and partisan. At one level, then, I would suggest that even the concepts of nonsynchrony and multiple temporalities are not mere matters of history and historiography. They are signs of how one particular faction of cultural critics—and I include myself among them—theorizes the histories of the avant-gardes. In this regard, the answer to Eburne and Felski’s question “What is an avant-garde?” will always be tied to the disputes that the avant-garde provoked and that hover about the history of its reception.
With regard to Bürger and the legacy of his work, that history is marked by a profoundly influential yet false dichotomy—a dichotomy between theory and history—that resurfaces with precise clarity in the article he contributed to New Literary History. Accusing his critics of being “theory-phobic,” Bürger claims they would have him write “a history of the avant-garde” rather than follow the dictates of theory. He notes that his critics frequently argue that Theory of the Avant-Garde “forces the differences and contradictions within the avant-garde movements into unifying categories,” and while conceding that “there are, of course, differences between futurism, Dada, surrealism and constructivism”—differences that “a history of the avant-garde movements would have to represent”—Bürger suggests that “theory” cannot be bothered with such differences since it “pursues other goals,” and thus “needs to undertake generalizations that are set at a much higher level of abstraction than the generalizations of historians.”23 Unfortunately, the appeal to necessary abstraction and generalization is not as clear-cut as Bürger seems to suggest. For the abstraction is itself a kind of magical sleight of hand. Even if one sets Bürger’s highly reductive view of the work of historians aside momentarily, his response still begs the question of why the theorist needs to generalize differences and contradictions into unifying categories, rather than theorizing the significance of difference and contradiction as key paradigms for understanding the avant-gardes. But something more than issues of difference and contradiction is at stake here.
The unifying categories that Bürger posits have everything to do with the multiple histories of the avant-gardes because those categories are not mere theoretical abstractions. They are historiographic constructs intended to frame scholarly understanding of the histories of the avant-gardes in particular ways. The most widely disseminated among those categories is Bürger’s distinction between what he calls “the historical avant-garde” and what he largely dismisses under the category of “the neo-avant-garde”—categories that he reaffirms in his article for New Literary History. If one is to speak of the enduring influence of Bürger’s work, of its foundational place in current studies of the avant-gardes, or, to follow Eburne and Felski, of the “parameters” that his work has set for subsequent studies of the avant-gardes, then one must look to categories like these. Turning a critical eye toward Bürger at this particular moment—almost four decades after the publication of Theory of the Avant-Garde—is not only warranted because he has once again entered the scholarly fray but because he never really left. Few writers have exercised as much direct and indirect influence on studies of the avant-gardes. This is not only true across the spectrum of disciplines where studies of the avant-gardes routinely share Bürger’s anti-theatrical bias.24 It is also true in the field of theater and performance studies, where many of his key concepts are simply taken for granted, considered so foundational that they elude critical scrutiny. An important example of the extent of this influence can be found in the uncritical borrowing of historical categories developed by Bürger in Theory of the Avant-Garde and later deployed by Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatic Theatre (1999, 2006).
V. The Postdramatic Aesthetic Structures and the Historiographies of the Avant-Gardes
An immensely provocative and influential work in its own right, Lehmann’s study plots the decline of the dramatic literary text as the focal point in theater, a decline that coincides with the late twentieth-century rise of postdramatic theatrical forms. This transition from the dramatic to the postdramatic follows an arc that roughly begins in the 1970s, according to Lehmann, and continues on into the twenty-first century. It is preceded by “the historical avant-garde” in the early part of the twentieth century and “the neo-avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s.”25 Among the more noteworthy aspects of the “prehistory” of the postdramatic that Lehmann posits in the early part of his book are the two categories “historical avant-garde” and “neo-avant-garde,” which he borrows from Bürger without attribution, and which I will be critiquing at length later on. The point here is not to be a round-about stickler for proper citation, but rather to note that the absence of attribution is actually an indication of just how widely disseminated and accepted Bürger’s terms are—even in a study that would seem to involve a more nuanced understanding of those terms. I will look momentarily at some of the other examples of this wide dissemination, but first I want to focus attention on how Lehmann’s work does and does not press beyond the historiography implicit in Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde.
For Lehmann, recourse to Bürger’s categories is an absolute yet unproblematized necessity. Indeed, while he argues that a discussion of the postdramatic “has to have recourse to the historical avant-gardes because here the conventional dramaturgy of unity was first disrupted,” he adds in passing that this crucial necessity “cannot involve adding to the rich scholarship on this epic.”26 At the most basic level, this latter caveat is simply an open acknowledgment of how Lehmann has decided to limit his focus. But so too is it a tacit concession. It brushes over the decision not to contest the historiographic categories Bürger posited in the 1970s, categories that were contested in scholarly debates almost immediately following Theory of the Avant-Garde’s original publication,27 As I will be arguing later in this book, not only have Bürger’s categories shaped scholarly discourse on the avant-gardes into a reaffirmation, among other things, of Eurocentric aesthetic sensibilities, but, in the case of Lehmann’s subsequent reliance on Michael Kirby’s work, they also easily facilitate the transition of that discourse into a largely apolitical and formalistic analysis of avant-garde performance.
Regardless of whether one accepts or challenges the assumptions governing categories like “the historical avant-garde” or “the neo-avant-garde,” avant-garde gestures tend to be socio-political formulations as much as they are aesthetic formulations, and to limit one’s focus to a formalistic analysis of avant-garde gestures ultimately delivers a skewed, if not altogether sanitized, image of the avant-gardes. This is a point that Richard Schechner has emphatically rehearsed in some of his more recent writings on the avant-gardes. Although I question Schechner’s own embrace of Bürger’s categories, his assessment of twentieth-century vanguardism—particularly, his assessment of those avant-gardes that were influenced by European traditions—is very much in line with the notion that among the avant-gardes the aesthetic and the political walk hand-in-hand. Schechner’s comments are worth quoting, if only because the disruption he associates with the avant-gardes contrasts so markedly with Lehmann’s focus on the disruption of “the dramaturgy of unity”:
But it is true that the “historical avant-garde,” in both its artistic and political incarnations—from, say, futurism and Dada to surrealism and the Situationists; from Alfred Jarry to Antonin Artaud to the Living Theatre; from Trotsky to Mao, Che Guevara to Frantz Fanon—strongly advocated disruption, overthrow, and anarchy—a revolutionary cathartic as prelude to a new world order.28
Here “disruption” is akin to political subversiveness—theater and performance as activism, placed on a par with “anarchy.” Disruption is, in this respect, a potential prelude to “revolution” and “a new world order.” Pushing a bit beyond the contrast between Schechner and Lehmann, however, I would suggest it is not enough to state that it was with the “historical avant-gardes” that “the conventional dramaturgy of unity was first disrupted,” or even to state that the “historical avant-garde” advocated “a revolutionary cathartic.” There is a pressing need to consider the ideological foundations of categories like “the historical avant-garde” and “the neo-avant-garde” themselves, and in particular, there is a need to consider how the historiography encouraged by these categories flattens the always-contested social, political, and cultural terrains of the avant-gardes, implying a uniform and linear sense of history, where in fact the histories of the avant-gardes are uneven, divergent, and frequently at odds with one another, both in terms of aesthetics and politics.
At a metaphorical level, one might legitimately argue that the critical shift away from the historiography advocated by Bürger is a shift from a dramatic sequential narrative toward a postdramatic historiographic sensibility, and herein lies what I would call Lehmann’s somewhat coincidental significance for this project. If the privileging of a formalistic analysis over a historiographic analysis has an immediate consequence for Lehmann’s handling of the avant-gardes, I would suggest that this consequence lies in the lost opportunity not only to reconsider the historical categories Bürger posited in 1974, and that Lehmann takes for granted, but to do so in a manner that runs parallel with the structural forms Lehmann associates with the postdramatic. The opportunity here is to recognize the conceptual link between the structures of the histrionic and the historical. Under the general heading of “Postdramatic theatrical signs,” for example, Lehmann identifies a “retreat of synthesis,” “a de-hierachization of theatrical means” (i.e., “parataxis”), and the embrace of “simultaneity”—all of which are also characteristics of avant-garde performance, and, more importantly, all of which are potential conceptual models for understanding the disparate histories of the avant-gardes, or, to recall our earlier discussion, for cultivating what Eburne and Felski call “a more variegated picture of the histories of avant-garde practice, one characterized by nonsynchrony, multiple temporalities, repetition, and difference.”29
What I will be pointing toward throughout this book is a historiography of the avant-gardes that does not reconcile their differences into a greater unacknowledged synthesis or subordinate one avant-garde to another in some implied linear history or generalized theory, but rather acknowledges the simultaneous, often competing, frequently incompatible, and individually autonomous avant-gardes. Indeed, this emphasis is perhaps best foreshadowed in Lehmann’s particular interest in postdramatic theater’s “deforming figuration,” a strategy he describes as a “renunciation of conventionalized form,” and which Lehmann ultimately explains by turning to Deleuze and Guattari’s well-known discussions of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus. Lehmann notes:
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have come up with the key term “rhizome” for realities in which unsurveyable branching and heterogeneous connections prevent synthesis. Theatre, too, has developed a multitude of rhizomatic connections of heterogeneous elements.30
Toward the end of this book, I will be developing this notion further, but I want to state in advance of my subsequent discussions of the rhizome that I see no problem with Lehmann’s embrace of it as a model for the aesthetics of postdramatic theatre. But inasmuch as Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize the rhizome as a model for understanding social structures, I would suggest that it also has equal relevance for understanding how avant-gardes are configured historically in relation to one another.
VI. Paul Mann and the Discursive Economy of the Avant-Gardes
Considering the larger objectives of this book, Lehmann’s problematic embrace of Bürger’s historical categories is much less important than finding conceptual models that point toward alternatives to those categories. Moving in that direction, I want to acknowledge a not always visible, yet ever-present interlocutor in my larger critique of Bürger. When it comes to poststructuralist approaches to the avant-gardes, few scholars are on a par with Paul Mann, whose self-described “overheated and distasteful little book,” The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, has influenced my work here in more ways than I can say.31 Although he does not address the issue of pluralities that is at the forefront of my own concerns, the theoretical foundations of my book and its ultimate focus on avant-garde pluralities are indebted to Mann’s compelling analysis of the avant-gardes as a discursive economy.
Critics have made much of the dialectic of resistance and recuperation that Mann posits as the force moving that discursive economy, a dialectic in which the former cannot exist without the latter any more than the latter can exist without the former. As Robert Radin noted in one of the few sympathetic considerations of Mann’s work, “Mann historicizes some of the ‘classical’ avant-gardes—impressionism, dada, futurism, abstract expressionism, pop—showing how each movement inscribes a similar set of questions, questions rooted in the binary opposition conformity/resistance. Over and over again he makes the point that the avant-garde does not represent the second term in this opposition, but rather is the means by which discourse is produced.”32 Mann is certainly not the first to challenge the long-held assumption that an aesthetics of resistance defines the avant-gardes. In fact, one of the more insightful moments in Radin’s reading of Mann comes when he notes that in The Pleasure of the Text Roland Barthes foreshadows much of Mann’s argument. This not only true with regard to Barthes’s association of the avant-gardes with a “language” that, however “restive,” always (already) succumbs to “recuperation.” It is also true with regard to what Barthes calls “the great semiological ‘versus’ myth” that serves as the motor behind anti-art gestures33—the myth, in other words, of opposition. What interests me in Radin’s discussion of Mann and Barthes is not so much the question of whether “the avant-garde represents a real antithesis or is always only a bourgeois formation.”34 It is rather the general sense that the term avant-garde points toward a specific kind of language and/or discursive economy.
At any number of levels, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of this shift toward an understanding of the avant-gardes as constituting a discursive economy. First and foremost, the parallels between the structures of language and the structures of avant-garde expressions demand a consideration of how the discourse of the avant-gardes, like language itself, is open to slippage and play, as well as a consideration of how this openness gives space to unexpected avant-garde expressions. Among the more significant implications of this shift is the consequent loss of a clear referent for the term avant-garde itself and for the accompanying discourse of the avant-gardes, a loss that not only accounts for the ever-changing and diverse forms of the avant-gardes in history but that also opens the door to the various forms of avant-garde pluralities that I consider throughout this book. Indeed, the absence of a clear referent results in historical instances like the one that I discuss in my opening chapter, in which competing factions of the early European avant-gardes vied for control of a common avant-garde discourse, and, ironically, for the presumed advantage that this discourse conveyed as a rhetorical strategy for expelling rival avant-gardists. Here the “‘versus’ myth” played out in particularly vicious and personal ways, in simulated and actual legal battles between Tristan Tzara and André Breton. While this early twentieth-century struggle between Parisian Dadaists and emerging Surrealists is noteworthy because of calculated and literal attempts by figures like Breton to manipulate the language of vanguardism for their own agendas, the contradictory avant-gardes that continued to operate beneath Breton’s appropriation of the “‘versus’ myth” highlight a slippage that surfaces time and again, not only in the discourse of the avant-gardes but also in the corresponding academic discourses that construct the histories and theory/ies of the avant-gardes.
Breton’s manipulations of the “‘versus’ myth” may be surprising in their transparency, but such manipulations in academic discourse on the avant-gardes frequently obtain widespread acceptance because they are more subtle in the constructed oppositions that they enforce. Nowhere does this prove more true than in what is perhaps the most widely disseminated construct from Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde that I mentioned in my earlier discussion of Han-Thies Lehmann, i.e., the distinction between what he calls “the historical avant-garde” and “the neo-avant-garde.” Lehmann’s uncritical appropriation of those terms is but a small example of one of most established historiographic constructs shaping current histories of vanguardism. To get some sense of how established this distinction between the “historical” and “neo” avant-gardes has become among scholars, one need only look at publications like Günter Berghaus’s Theatre, Performance and the Historical Avant-Garde (Palgrave, 2006) and David Hopkins’s edited volume Neo-Avant-Garde (Rodopi, 2006), and there are many other examples as well. I develop a substantial critique of these two categories over the course of the second, fifth, and seventh chapters of this book, but I want to preface that critique with some preliminary reflections on how Bürger’s distinction between the categories subtly reproduces the “‘versus’ myth” that Barthes describes in The Pleasure of the Text. Anyone familiar with Bürger’s work knows that his use of the categories “historical avant-garde” and “neo-avant-garde” has less to do with documenting avant-garde gestures in different historical moments than it does with positing a distinction between an ostensibly genuine avant-garde (“the historical”) and its subsequent imitators (“the neo”). Here the “‘versus’ myth” and the myth of originality converge.
VII. On The Selective History of the Historical-and Neo-Avant-Gardes
That this distinction between “the historical” and “the neo” reproduces the “‘versus’ myth” can be seen in the spirited defenses of “the neo-avant-garde” by prominent critics such as Benjamin Buchloh. His book Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry (MIT, 2003), for example, explores a rich collection of experimental artists and gives the lie to Bürger’s reductive dismissal of the post-war avant-gardes as mere repetitions of the European avant-gardes from the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, Buchloh’s earlier review of Bürger’s book takes Bürger to task for constructing a “fictitious moment of [ . . . ] origin.” That fiction, Buchloh argues, is embedded in “a binary opposition”: the opposition of “the [supposedly] ‘genuine’ original versus the ‘fraudulent’ copy.”35 Much of Buchloh’s criticism pivots on presenting a compelling case that there is nothing fraudulent or repetitive about the “neo-avant-garde.” Yet, what is surprising about Buchloh’s reading of Bürger is that, for all the insightfulness of his critique, the end result is not a rejection of the operative binary of the “‘versus’ myth” but rather a recuperation of the very categories that produced the problem in the first place. Although he effectively counters Bürger’s dismissal of “the neo-avant-garde” and is far less restrictive in his understanding of “the historical avant-garde,” Buchloh still conceptualizes the avant-gardes within distinct and uniform categories of history. The pluralities of the avant-gardes are actually a lot messier.
What categories like “the neo-avant-garde” obscure beneath the rhetoric of historical specificity are the mechanisms—indeed, the negotiations—of hybridity that are always the substance of avant-garde expressions, always an indication of the uneven historical trajectories in which the avant-gardes participate and reside, as well as the rough signs of avant-garde pluralities. In the second chapter of this book, I argue that it is not enough to note that the so-called “neo-avant-garde” was never about reproducing earlier gestures of the European avant-gardes. The moments of what I call American “hybrid vanguardism” in the second chapter’s discussions of Black Mountain College are in this respect less about recuperating “the neo-avant-garde” than they are about the pluralities of avant-gardism more generally. While the post-war American avant-gardes are certainly better characterized for their hybridities than dismissed for their ostensible repetitiveness, the larger point is that the so-called “historical avant-garde” was always already embedded in the pluralities of hybrid vanguardism as well—a point that I develop from a global perspective in chapter five. Placed against the backdrop of this notion of hybridity, the binary “original/repetition” emerges as a construct of a deeply problematic discursive economy that not only replicates the “‘versus’ myth” of the avant-gardes, but also, as I point out in chapter five, reinforces Eurocentric cultural prerogatives as well. Yet these are not the only cultural prerogatives reinforced by Bürger’s, or even Poggioli’s, Theory of the Avant-Garde.
VIII. Avant-Gardes and the Gendered Genealogies of the Artist as Producer
Constructing categories such as “the historical avant-garde” and “the neo-avant-garde” are by no means the only way in which Bürger’s theory reinforces a highly selective narrative history of the avant-gardes. In many respects, these categories are secondary to his more general thesis that avant-garde expression is manifested in a critique of the institution of art. Yet this thesis is also the product of what I will be arguing in chapter three is a highly problematic historiography. Much of that historiography overlaps with the theories of Bürger’s predecessor, Renato Poggioli, whose own book Theory of the Avant-Garde is no less problematic than Bürger’s in the genealogies that it constructs. A consideration of the gendered underpinnings of Bürger’s and Poggioli’s theories offers a compelling illustration of this very point. As I argue in chapter three, it is not merely the institution of art that reflects a gendered bias. The vanguard critique of that institution itself perpetuates the bias as well—at least as it has been conceptualized in the theories propagated by Poggioli and Bürger.
There is perhaps no better example of this critique of the institution of art than the radical questioning of the role of the artist as producer. The classic example of this questioning is, of course, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (that infamously inverted urinal). Yet when one considers the historical foundations critics have proposed for this questioning, its selective and gendered underpinnings quickly become apparent. This is especially true in the genealogy constructed by Poggioli. A pivotal link in that genealogy is the debt that, according to Poggioli, the avant-gardes owe to early nineteenth-century romanticism. “The hypothesis of historical continuity between romanticism and avant-gardism now seems irrefutable,” Poggioli argues in Theory of the Avant-Garde. He then concludes, “there is not the shadow of doubt that the latter would have been historically inconceivable without the romantic precedent.”36 Within the slippage and play of the discourses of the avant-gardes, such sweeping assertions of historical uniformity and genealogical continuity are subject to more than the mere shadow of doubt. The real question is what such claims obscure in the shadows that they themselves generate. Mike Sell, for one, has questioned the underlying orientalism that accompanies genealogies like the one constructed by Poggioli;37 it is certainly hard to get around the Eurocentrism of Poggioli’s claim. But even within the cultural boundaries of Europe, his argument is questionable in terms of its gendered assumptions. It is those assumptions that I address in the third chapter because of their visible currency within scholarship on the avant-gardes.
A key aspect of the continuity that Poggioli proposes lies in a rejection of institutionalized culture by the avant-gardes—a rejection of the “academic public” and “professional culture” by romantics and avant-gardists alike. This same argument is echoed in Bürger’s claim that the “historical avant-garde” is defined by its critical rejection of the institution of art. A pivotal example of such rejections can be found in challenges to the traditional notion of the artist as producer.38 What I would suggest is striking about this genealogy is not that there has been little question of the inseparable link Poggioli proposes between romanticism and vanguardism but rather that there has been little questioning of what the feminist critique of romanticism might mean for the avant-garde as it is conceptualized by theorists like Poggioli and Bürger. That critique has radically destablized scholarly understanding of romanticism, leaving the asserted continuity between romanticism and avant-gardism on very shaky ground. This point is all the more striking when one considers that the questioning of the role of the artist as producer and the feminist critique of romanticism converge in one of the most enduring works of romantic literature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a work that has also had amazing currency in avant-garde circles.
As I argue in chapter 3, Shelley’s work has enjoyed a particular appeal among avant-garde artists like Andy Warhol and the members of The Living Theatre, both of whom produced experimental adaptations of the Frankenstein narrative that include a substantial reflection on the role of the artist as producer. But as I note in my discussions of Warhol and The Living Theatre, the actual history of Frankenstein as a literary text begins with the erasure of Shelley as its author. This erasure was not part of a critical gesture challenging the role of the artist as producer, as was the case, for example, when Marcel Duchamp signed “R. Mutt” on that inverted urinal, when Warhol claimed artistic ownership of the film Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, or when Julian Beck claimed authorship of the published script of The Living Theatre’s collectively created version of Frankenstein. On the contrary, the original, anonymous publication of Frankenstein was one of the limited opportunities for Shelley, as a woman, to have her work taken seriously in the early nineteenth century. The larger point here is that the ties linking the avant-gardes to romanticism are not merely bound to the long history of rejecting institutionalized culture. They also link seemingly standard tropes of the avant-garde, such as gestures that question the role of the artist as producer, to a culture of male privilege that historically has maintained a restricted and gendered economy.
What becomes clear in chapter three’s more detailed discussions of Warhol’s and The Living Theatre’s adaptations of Frankenstein is that the discourses of the avant-gardes never occur in isolation. They are always situated within a network of overlapping discursive economies that constantly intersect with and interrupt avant-garde expressions. It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which such interruptions run against the grain of the teleological rhetoric of the term avant-garde itself: that is, against the idea of the avant-garde as an unfolding linear continuity. Indeed, I would suggest that an indispensable strategy for theorizing the avant-gardes beyond the lure of their own rhetoric is to seek out instances where those moments of interruption unsettle the seemingly established theoretical paradigms of avant-garde expression and open them to the pluralities of concurrent and multiple significations. Such instances are not difficult to find, particularly when one recognizes that as a discursive economy the avant-gardes are given to the same kinds of slippages in signification that literary theorists and poststructuralist critics began exploring in language and literature a few years prior to Bürger’s 1974 publication of Theory of the Avant-Garde.
IX. Reading Avant-Gardes Against the Grain
Even at this historical juncture, which many might describe as “post-theory,” the need for this strategy is nonetheless pressing. The tendency among critics has been to see the broad theoretical implications of avant-garde gestures without bringing the implications of critical theory to bear on the conceptual foundations of avant-garde gestures themselves. Arguments, for example, that the avant-gardes challenge the institution of art, that they question the role of the artist as producer, or even that they initiate innovation through a rejection of textual authority are consistently based upon a largely uncritical but ever-present embrace of a generalized notion of intentionality that critics implicitly ascribe to the avant-gardes. This is also true of studies as deeply versed in poststructuralist thinking as Mann’s Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde. Indeed, for all its radical rethinking of the theory-logic of the avant-gardes, Mann’s book is nonetheless committed to a project of explicating the dialectical dynamics that keep the avant-gardes moving—and, I might add, that keep them moving with the same kind of uniform singularity posited by Bürger. Rather than exploring the interruptions and ruptures that highlight the unruly, uneven, and frequently irreconcilable pluralities of the avant-gardes, Mann keeps their rhetoric and their accompanying intentionality intact. What is lacking in theories of the avant-gardes is thus a strategy that consistently reads avant-garde works against the grain—not merely against the grain of the rhetoric of the avant-gardes but also against the grain of the implied or even expressed intent of avant-garde artists.
The latter half of this book addresses that lack from an increasingly global perspective. One of the consequences of this shift to a global perspective is the slippage it generates in the very idea of “the cutting edge”—a slippage I discuss at length in chapter five, where I note that the avant-gardes never move into an empty space but are always entangled in the rough edges of cultural exchange and appropriation. Although much of the argument in chapter five is focused on cultivating a sense of avant-garde pluralities by countering the Eurocentric conceptions of the avant-gardes and by acknowledging their transnational foundations, one of the significant examples of the avant-gardes’ rough edges can be found in the debates about cultural exchange and appropriation that erupted around Peter Brook’s production of The Mahabharata in the late 1980s. Indeed, that production is of particular importance, as I argue in chapter four, because it provides a near-textbook example of how one might read the works of the avant-gardes against the expressed intent of the artists who produced them, or, in the case of Brook, against the expressed intent of their directors. What is of interest to me in that chapter is not what Brook says he attempted in The Mahabharata, but rather what the production does against the grain of Brook’s assertions about it. Working within the discourse of critical theory, the chapter thus seeks a parallel between what Roland Barthes called “the death of the author” and what I call “the death of the director.” Just as Barthes famously argued that the death of the author removes “the limit on the text” and liberates it from the restrictive notion of a “final signified,”39 so too does “the death of the director” open any given performance to multiple significations.
Moving from what Barthes calls “the death of the author” to what I call “the death of the director” is a logical extension of a widely disseminated argument from critical theory. But the point of this extension goes well beyond a rehabilitation of Brook’s production of The Mahabharata from the passionate debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s, debates that centered largely on Brook himself and on his presumed intentions. The extension points toward a central theoretical issue in the debates about the avant-gardes. If “the death of the author” removes the limits “on the text,” and if, correspondingly, “the death of the director” opens performances up to multiple significations, what kind of limits are removed—what kind of pluralities open up—one might legitimately ask, with the often-announced death of the avant-garde? Of course, unlike Barthes’s announcement of “the death of the author,” announcements of the avant-garde’s death have historically aimed not to remove limits but rather to impose them, and to impose them in a uniform, terminal sense. Eulogies for the avant-garde tend to be restrictive, invested in a “final signified,” and committed not to plurality, or to the avant-gardes, but to a uniform sense of the avant-garde. I want to suggest, as a point of contrast, that those eulogies can be read against the grain of this intent. I would suggest that juxtaposing the eulogies with Barthes’s pronouncement of “the death of the author” might precipitate just enough slippage so that “the death of the avant-garde” flips and becomes a sign for the no-longer restricted, for the plural and for the diverse—a sign, in short, for the avant-gardes.
Exploring the unlimited spaces and pluralities of the avant-gardes necessitates conceptual models that, first of all, preserve the decentered nature of vanguardism rather than subsuming diversity beneath constructed uniformity. As I point out in chapter six, it is only with the presumption of uniformity that the restrictive rhetoric of eulogies for the avant-garde can function. Yet such presumptions are consistently based upon a hasty generalization, and, I might add, upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the experimental character of the avant-gardes. While eulogies may legitimately lament the demise of a particular avant-garde, the demise of the one is in no way tantamount to the demise of the many. Rather than conceptualizing the avant-gardes with such sweeping terminal uniformity, I want to build upon my earlier discussion of Lehmann and suggest here—as I do in greater detail in chapter six—that one of the most powerful alternatives to this problematic logic can be found in the conceptual model of the rhizome that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explore in their book A Thousand Plateaus. What is of particular interest in their discussion of that now famous metaphor of non-linear thinking is that the decentered rhizomatic structures they posit as an epistemological model also provide an ideal model for conceptualizing how one avant-garde may decline or die without endangering the whole of the avant-gardes. Beyond this model, however, I would suggest that the very notion of the death of the avant-garde is based largely upon a problematic glorification of success over experimentation.
Inasmuch as the avant-gardes are associated with experimentation, instances of demise, failure, and even defeat are arguably signs not of the death of the avant-garde but, ironically enough, of its continuing vitality. They are part of the experimental process. Some experiments succeed; others fail. Most importantly, the avant-gardes are constituted not in the successes or the failures—not in the rise or the decline—but in the experimental gestures leading potentially to either outcome. In this respect, eulogies for the avant-garde are arguably signatures of a concept of vanguardism that is only partially theorized, and, as I explain in chapter six, they are signatures of a history of the vanguards that is only half-written. The central argument of chapter six is thus not only that the death of the one does not equal the death of the many, but also that the history of the vanguards will always be half-written and half-theorized until it is also written from the perspective of the unsuccessful and the vanquished. It is this call for a history of the vanquished vanguards that serves as a segue into the book’s final chapter and that chapter’s implicit consideration of how one might understand the political dimensions of the theoretical parallels between Barthes’s death of the author and the frequent pronouncements of the death of the avant-garde.
X. Afterlife and Vanguard Ghosting
At one level, it really doesn’t matter whether one speaks of the individual death of a specific avant-garde or of the categorical death of the avant-gardes as such. Announcing the death of any or all of the avant-gardes as a conclusion rather than as a beginning—as a limit rather than as a release—begs the question of whether there is an afterlife to the avant-gardes. For Barthes, the death of the author is an opening. So too, I would suggest, is the death of an avant-garde. But here, I am speaking of a very different kind of death, one that opens up possibilities of unexpected, surprising, and haunting moments of signification: the kind of death that liberates the avant-gardes as a discursive economy. I am speaking of a very different kind of historiography as well: one that is not only open to “a more variegated picture of the histories of avant-garde practice,” or to moments of “nonsynchrony, multiple temporalities, repetition, and difference,” but is also open to historical grafting, non-linear recontextualizations, and temporal parataxis. To be blunt, it is a historiography open to the stealing of one historical moment for the purposes of another. To speak in this regard of an afterlife is, of course, a figurative gesture, and one perhaps articulated from within the discourse of the avant-gardes and from within the logic of collage. But it is this kind of figurative gesture that can serve as a lens for focusing attention on the coded political signs that circulate within the discursive economy of the avant-gardes and that haunt it from outside the boundaries of intention, habit, and convention. What shall we make of those moments when new historical and political contexts seize or take possession of previous avant-garde gestures, compelling them, as it were, to speak in defiance of etymological imperatives or to speak as Hugo Ball did in the retooled anachronisms of an “ancient cadence of priestly lamentation”?
One could speak of the appearance of those coded political signs as moments of guerilla appropriation of discourse (harkening back to battles between Tzara and Breton), but there is too much that is calculated in appropriation. In the final chapter of this book, I am more interested in moments that unexpectedly give voice to the restless victims of history and that seek redress for them. I call these moments “vanguard ghosting” because the voices they facilitate are always only vaguely present and always plausibly deniable, like ambiguous allusions and provocative equivocations that are both present and absent at the same time and that, nonetheless, have everything to do with how discourses perform. As I point out in my discussions of Julian Beck’s idiosyncratic reading of Artaud and The Living Theatre’s subsequent productions of The Brig, a political/aesthetic sensitivity to vanguard ghosting is a pivotal element in how avant-gardes read and conceptualize culture. So too, I would argue, is vanguard ghosting a potentially pivotal strategy for critics who would shift understanding of the avant-gardes in radical directions that move beyond the trappings of intent and convention, in directions that are as boldly experimental in the political connections they accommodate as they are non-linear in the historiographies they construct. Moreover, vanguard ghosting is a pivotal strategy for critics who would conceptualize avant-garde works in ways that preserve the pluralities of the avant-gardes, and in ways that do not lose sight of them as elements within a functioning discursive economy of signs.
The notion of avant-garde pluralities that unfolds over the course of the seven chapters of this book is inseparable from the sense of the avant-gardes as a discursive economy that I have discussed in this introduction. It is also inseparable from my unending fascination with how discursive economies perform. In this respect, the notions of performance that I examine in this book are also multiple. Just as one can speak of the languages of the stage, so too can one speak of the discourses of performance and of the various economies in which those discourses function. One can speak as intelligently of the discourses of performance as one can of the performances of discourse, and I would suggest that the avant-gardes are remarkable not only in their abilities to speak of and to both discourse and performance, but also in their abilities to activate both in ways that are radical in terms of experimentation and political orientation. Whether one speaks of hybridities and hybrid vanguardism; of genealogies and gendered exclusions; of the death of the author, the director, and the avant-garde; of rough edges and rhizomes; or of the vanquished vanguards and vanguard ghosting, the avant-gardes have proven time and again to be inexhaustible in their abilities to disrupt conventional understandings of the discourse that ostensibly defines them. It is in the provoked slippage of the discourses of the avant-gardes where the avant-gardes perform.