revolutionary pathos, negation, and the suspensive avant-garde john roberts

7/27/2019 Revolutionary Pathos, Negation, and the Suspensive Avant-Garde John Roberts

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Revolutionary Pathos, Negation, and the Suspensive Avant-Garde

John Roberts

New Literary History, Volume 41, Number 4, Autumn 2010, pp. 717-730

(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2010.0037

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New Literary History, 2010, 41: 717730

Revolutionary Pathos, Negation, and theSuspensive Avant-Garde

John Roberts

The recent debate on the avant-garde and the visual arts hastended to biurcate around two distinct positions: those whothink that the avant-garde (constructivism, productivism, Dada,

surrealism) is a purely historic category that has now been superseded,and those who think that the avant-garde is still very much an unfnishedproject. However, these two positions are themselves internally divided.In the frst category there are those who mourn the passing o the avant-garde, as well as those who have no wish to see it return in any orm

whatsoever and are thereore certainly dismissive o any claims that itsideals might still be with us. The ormer might be construed as a kind

o Romantic atalism, and the latter as a kind o cultural nihilism thatoten avors either a return to some version o classicism or a reviveddeense o postmodernism. In the second category, by contrast, thereare, on the one hand, those who see the avant-garde as a continuingplaceholder or a revolutionary and postcapitalist cultural program, and,on the other hand, those who view it more pragmatically as a categorythat, ar rom being dead, remains vitally alive through its constantrearticulation and readaptation under very dierent social and politi-cal circumstances. Indeed, the very notion o something as historically

transormative as the avant-garde coming to an end beore its implica-tions are developed and worked through is, rom this latter point o

view, vulgarly historicist; just as modernism didnt end in 1900, so thepost-Soviet historic avant-garde didnt end in 1935.

This antihistoricist position has had a huge inuence on the devel-opment o the category o the neo-avant-garde since the early 1990s,

when Hal Foster published his essay Whats Neo About the Neo-Avant-Garde?1 Foster quite rightly attacks the mixture o Romantic atalismand endism that characterizes Peter Brgers Theory of the Avant-Garde

(1974),2 the frst major appraisal o the critical legacy o the avant-gardein the light o postwar modernism. The weakness o Brgers historicismlies in his overidentifcation o the critical ate o the art o the 1920sand 1930s with its conditions o production, as i the critical horizons


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new literary history718

and ideals o the art o the period could only be articulated in relationto their immediate social and political horizons. Brger, then, tends tosee the art produced in the name o the avant-garde ater the 1950s as aalling away rom these horizons into pastiche or social irrelevance, giventhe socially antipathetic conditions or avant-garde practice in the West.

Now, to be air to Brger, there is no constructivism and productivismwithout the revolutionary transormations which they are a response to,and product o. And in this sense there is no avant-garde without the

world historical transormations o the Russian Revolution. This is agiven: the avant-garde as a distinct set o social and cultural ideals (ratherthan a name given by late nineteenth-century French commentators to

that which is notionally advanced artistically) is indivisible rom therupture o the Russian Revolution. But to assume that the avant-gardedies with the Stalinist and Nazi counterrevolution and, thereore, thatit is overwhelmingly a ailed project (a term avored by advocates andcritics o the avant-garde alike) holds the avant-garde ransom to socialand political orces that were outside o its control, as i the avant-garde were responsible or its own counterrevolutionary destruction.Consequently, how art theory mediates this notion o ailure is crucialto the way in which avant-garde art ater the 1950s is able to construct

an aterlie or itsel under advanced capitalism. This is why Brgerssense o an ending is not strictly coterminous with the counterrevolu-tion itsel, as i or him authentic practice and thinking ends in 1935.Rather, or Brger, in its mediation o its own ailure, the renewal anddevelopment o the avant-garde in the orm o the neo-avant-garde hasto cope with the unprecedented power o the postwar art institution,and its absorption and repressive toleration o the radical transgressionso art. The outcome is that the aterlie o the ailure o the historicavant-garde is now positioned as internal to the structures o the art

institution, separatein the language o the Frankurt Schoolromthe collective participation in, and transormation o, the lieworld itsel.

This notion that the ideals o the avant-garde ail with the counter-revolution and its liberal adaptation in the postwar art institution is anabiding theme o Thierry de Duves Kant After Duchamp (1996),3 butalso o Jacques Rancires recent neo-avant-gardism,4 a view that sitscomortably with both writers anti-Hegelianism, anti-Marxism, and an-archist inexions. But the avant-garde was not afailedproject at all, i byailure we mean an outcome that leaves no exploitable artistic resources,

no intellectual and cultural supplement. I the avant-garde was a seto practices that was determined by the immediate social and politicaldemands o the Russian Revolution, it was also a project that exceededthese demands, insoar as its emancipatory claims about art and social


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719suspensive avant-garde

lie existed ar in advance o what was conceivable in the Soviet Union inthe 1920s and early 1930s. In this sense its ailure is precisely its open-ended success: in operating at some distance rom the instrumental andpractical requirements o revolutionary transormation, it put in placethe parameters or a number o research practices and questions on art,labor, value, and the public sphere that survived the counterrevolution.I the avant-garde ails in the Soviet Union, it ails constructively.

This is dierent rom saying, as in Brger, that despite the ailure othe avant-garde, some o its strategies managed to survive in a weakenedorm in the postwar art institution. Rather, the avant-garde survives be-cause o the substantive questions the ailure o the Soviet avant-garde

puts to art and the art institution. Indeed, it is precisely because o thear-reaching questions it asks o itsel that the Russian avant-garde re-mains the overarching model o all avant-garde practice, irrespective o

whether new art is directly indebted to it or not. For what it provides isa sense o the avant-garde as a category reective on its own conditionso possibility. Thus, or example, when the Soviet avant-garde too eas-ily accommodates itsel to the Partys positivistic adaptation o the newmachino-technical culturewhen productivism enters the actory systemand actively subordinates itsel to the discipline o actory management

and the labor processthe theoretical gains rom these experimentsar outweigh any a priori dismissal o such non-artistic collaborations.What productivism learns rom these orays is that arts possible role inthe qualitative transormation o the relations o production is severelyconstrained under the actory system and the law o value, and that artcannot thereore dissolve or ameliorate the alienation o labor insidethis system so readily, even in avorable revolutionary conditions.5 Rather,arts value lies in the way that it harnesses its ree labor to the critique othe division between intellectual labor and manual labor, artistic labor

and productive labor, in conditions o ree exchange. This is why BorisArvatov, the leading productivist theoretician in the Soviet Union in the1920s, soon realized the limitations o this orm o actory intervention-ism, arguing or a productivism that extended the interdisciplinary andcollaborative horizons o the avant-garde into environmental design,architecture, and street dramaturgy.6

It is at this point o sel-reection and sel-critique within the space othe avant-garde itsel that Fosters antihistoricism becomes relevant. Es-sentially, the avant-garde is recovered as a heuristic category, or research

program, that, in the spirit o Imre Lakatoss philosophy o science, stillhas an unsurpassable central core o experimental potential, preciselybecauseo the programs contradictions and hiatuses.7 Thereore, despitethe Soviet avant-gardes precipitous historical identity, and despite the


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delimited social and political circumstances or the development o itscore program, the Soviet avant-garde nevertheless is still able to put themost demanding and relevant questions to art and its institutions: Whatis an artist? What is an artwork? What constitutes value in art? What partis artistic labor able to play in the emancipation o productive laborgenerally? What are the progressive possibilities and limitations o artsrelationship to nonaesthetic reason?

Fosters heuristic defnition o the neo-avant-garde, thereore, hasentered into a working alliance with the widespread rise o new ormso sociability and praxis in art since the mid-1990s, what I have calledelsewhere the rise o secondary Productivism.8 This is the idea that

the neo-avant-garde, as an adaptation o some o the key precepts o thecritical program o the avant-garde, shares a pragmatic sense o art asa shiting testing ground or various social interventions, experimentalorms, and transormative actions and events, with the participatory,interdisciplinary, and nonartistic collaborations o the new art. Mucho this has a digital basis, in which activist modes o art and orms ocommunal interaction are grounded in the network possibilities o thenew media technologies, generating a exible and mobile model oavant-garde interventionism that is no longer based on the primary idea

o productivism as the transormation o the relations o production in-side the actory, but on a digital extension o Arvatovs interdisciplinarymodel to multiple social locations. The indeterminacy, nomadism, andinterrelationality o the new digital artistic practices converge, technicallyand aectively, with the new orms o computer-based production in the

workplace to create a productivism o ow and tactical improvisationacross a range o social and cultural sites.9 Indeed, these new orms osociability, exchange, and digital praxis have come to fll out this notiono the neo-avant-garde as a space or social experimentation in exactly

the antihistoricist ashion demanded by Foster (although, it has to besaid, as the participatory and collaborative mandate o the new art hasexpanded, the use o the nomenclature neo-avant-garde has tended torecede, as i what counts or artists is not the act o naming itsel, but thecritical spirit o the program). Yet there is a clear sense in which mostcontemporary artisprecisely neo-avant-gardist in these terms, insoar asit rearticulates the break o the historic avant-garde with the painterlymodernist object in avor o a defnition o art as interdisciplinary, mul-tidisciplinary, multiarious postobject work; an ensemble o techniques

and practices that at all time exceeds the bounded aesthetic limits othe discrete modernist object.


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Aesthetic Reason and Nonaesthetic Reason

However, i Foster and the new participatory art recalibrate the cat-egory o the avant-garde through a heuristic deense o arts sociallyexperimental possibilities, this is won at the cost o the pathos o Brgersaccount o the avant-garde. The neo-avant-garde may provide new re-search conditions or the avant-garde, but the questions posed by thisresearch program are inseparable rom the revolutionary process thatoriginally defned and structured its possibilities. The critique o Brger,thereore, carries with it certain intractable historical problems. Whatdefnes the avant-garde in its neo-avant-garde orm is the act that it is

a counterrevolutionary, post-Thermidorian category, all the way down.Political deeat is constitutive o its program o readaptation. There isno way, then, o avoiding the historical realities o what is actually lostto the production o art in any neo-avant-garde mediation and exten-sion o its continuities. Whatever continuities the neo-avant-garde mayestablish with the core program o the historic avant-garde cannot gainsaythe act that what the Soviet avant-garde managed to accomplish wasas a result o the public institutions, political mobilization, and socialnetworks established by the Russian revolutionary process. Admittedly,

Foster and other deenders o the neo-avant-garde acknowledge this, orsomething like it, but these emancipatory aims are not built into thecategory as a limit-horizon o the research program, or as a conditiono its continuing possibility. Consequently, the category o the neo-avant-garde tends to oat reely rom its counterrevolutionary ormation andhistory, as i contemporary art is able to choose all the best bits o theavant-garde legacy without all the other messy political stu getting in the

way. Although the neo-avant-garde is not exactly defned positivisticallyas a neutral research program in the manner o the hard sciences, this

writing tends to assume that the experimental possibilities o the newart are reely available or can be pursued without the political preceptsthat shaped the historic avant-gardes core program.

This is why, in those practices that derive their thinking rom theneo-avant-garde, there is a general desire to be ree o revolutionarypathos altogether, as i the gap between the actual and the ideal werean unnecessary and ussy excrescence on the legacy o the avant-garde.This is partly a maniestation o the continuing philosophical inuenceo postmodernism (the avant-garde is best thought o, i at all, as wholly

separate rom any grand narrative o universal human emancipation),but also the result o the easy alliance that the new art makes between aresidual cultural nihilism (history has no determining eects on agency inthe present) and the notion that ater modernism, ater postmodernism,


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art is a reely available democratic technique: everything is possible cul-turally, and artists and their nonartistic allies can play a progressive role.

This intoxicating mix o voluntarism and afrmative praxis has becomehegemonic in the extensive reaches o the new art beyond the ofcialchannels o the art world, and is certainly inuential in those socialpractices that operate inside the public gallery and museum system.Relational aesthetics and postrelational aesthetics, the new community-based and participatory orms o art practice, and the widespread ormso digital interactivity and intervention, all subscribe in various ways tothe new ethos: art is no more and no less than an ensemble o diverseartistic and nonartistic practices and skills that fnd their expression as

socially constituted moment o exchange between producer and audi-ence in a continuum o other socially constituted exchanges.10 In theseterms, the new democratic ethos has tended to identiy arts participa-tory advance with arts general expansion into the realm o nonartisticpractices and nonartistic knowledges, or what we can call nonaestheticreason.11 Indeed, it is the interdisciplinary relationship between art andnonaesthetic reason that marks out and determines the new arts pos-sible social advance and transormative capacities.

Now this, o course, is where the neo-avant-garde practices o the

moment share their key precepts with the core program o the historicavant-garde: arts utility lies, in the image o Walter Benjamins amousnotion o the author as producer, in its capacity to address or intervenein real-world problems, be they practical or ideological.12 But or mucho the contemporary neo-avant-garde (participatory orms o art associal praxis, activist and digital orms o exchange and intervention),the notion o the artist as producer becomes indivisible fromthe activ-ist and technician. Benjamins concept o the producer was certainlycoextensive with the notion o the artist as activist and technician, but

he also amously resisted the notion that the artists skills were simplyinterchangeable with those o nonaesthetic practices. For to dissolve theunction and utility o the artist into that o the activist or technician isto remove the singularly critical unction o his or her place as a pro-ducer in arts advanced relations o production: his or her capacity toproduce noninstrumental thought experiments without direct utilityand, as such, to reinvest aesthetic reason with universal emancipatorycontent: ree, unalienated labor.

The new participatory and social-activist orms o neo-avant-garde ac-

tivity orget this act, pushing art directly into the realm o nonaestheticreason in order to secure what they hope will be arts maximum utilityor eectiveness. All this does, however, is submit the artist to the dominantinstrumental interests o the culture in the name o a let or democratic


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utility, weakening the undamentally decisive role o aesthetic reasonunder capitalism: arts embodiment o noninstrumental orms o laborand cognition as a negation o dominant modes o (in)attention andtheir circuits o power and knowledge. To deend arts powers o nega-tion, then, is to reuse to submit art prematurely, in Hegels language,to its absolute or ideal conditions o emancipation beore these absoluteconditions are historically achievable. In turn, thereore, the unwilling-ness on the part o the new art to ully assimilate the post-Thermidoriancondition o the neo-avant-garde dissolves the revolutionary pathos at-tached to any working understanding o the avant-garde under maturecapitalism. Without distance and negation, without a structural sense

that art loses what marks it out (contingently) as not-o-capital bysublating itsel into the capitalist everyday, the neo-avant-garde becomeseectively either a orm o social decoration or a orm o social work.In this sense it is more productive to talk about the avant-garde in thepresent period as a suspensivecategory.13

The Suspensive Avant-Garde

By suspensive avant-garde, I mean that what now distinguishes theavant-garde as a productive category is how and under what terms, andto what ends, it negotiates the pathos o its post-Thermidorian condition.That is, in what ways is the avant-garde up to the task o realistically as-sessing its condition and prospects? I collapsing artistic technique intononaesthetic reason weakens arts powers o negation and reduces therole o the artist to that o a neobureaucrat or civil servant, then thealternative o ully embracing the destructive legacy o the avant-garde asa permanent war oressentimentleads to madness, despair, and delirium.

Admittedly this second position is airly marginal these days, but it stillcarries enough orce or those who are attracted to romantic atalismto think o the artist above all as a prophet and sentinel. This is theavant-garde mythology o end times. Equally problematic, however, isthe aestheticization o the avant-garde: the reduction o the avant-gardeto the subtractive resequencing o its historic ormal moves as a way oholding onto and reviviying the revolutionary artistic languages o thepast. This is one o the problems with Alain Badious recent move intothe debate on the avant-garde.14 Dismissing the convergence o politics

and art in the historic avant-garde as the Romantic dissolution o artinto what it cannot possibly changethe collective political processBadiou argues that the revolutionary unction o art lies in its fdelity tothe negative strategies o its original ormal aesthetic program (abstrac-


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tion) that establish a nonrelational and sel-distancing relationship tothe capitalist everyday. This position leaves the avant-garde as nothingmore than an academic orm o autopoiesis.

Thus, i the avant-garde is to retain some continuity with its core ide-als and precepts and i it is to think o itsel as an open-ended researchprogram, it must recognize that the issues and questions it conrontsand the problems it sets itsel are structurally governed by arts delimitedplace within bourgeois culture. In other words, in nonrevolutionary pe-riods the avant-garde is necessarily positioned betweenthe orces o totalrevolutionary praxis (or, rather, the memory o these orces) and thepragmatic exigencies o autopoiesis. It is locked, thereore, into an active

butsubordinate relationship to the historic orms o its core social andpolitical program. And this, essentially, is what I mean by the constitutiveplace o revolutionary pathos in the post-Thermidorian avant-garde. Whatis achievable socially and politically in the name o art is mediated bythe determinate loss resulting rom this process o subordination. Thisis why the crucial issue or the avant-garde in its avoidance o either atransgressive psychosis or aesthetic or bureaucratic submission is the ques-tion ohowit negotiates this process o subordination. In other words,how does it establish an autonomous place or its research programs

across the division between aesthetic and nonaesthetic reason, on thebasis o a maximalizationo its limited critical resources and capacities?For in submitting art either to aesthetic reason (purity o disengagement)or to nonaesthetic reason (direct utility), the intellectual and culturalmanoeuvrability o art is oreshortened. What is required, in contrast,is a position on arts autonomy that is nondualistic and nonidentitary, aposition that recognizes that the strength o art in the epoch o its totaladministration lies precisely in its resistance to the opposing routes osocial eectivity and aesthetic sublimity.

Consequently, what marks out arts autonomy under these stricturesis the extent to which it is able to sustain its passage between aestheticreason and nonaesthetic reason as the redefnition and expansion othe relations between these two spheres. For one o the critical unc-tions possessed by the artist in our culture is that he or she is able toincorporate and utilize various artistic or nonartistic practices without

fully investing ideologically and socially in these activities. This ideo-logical disinvestment is crucial, because art is thereby able to secure itsautonomy and the open-endedness o its research programs on the basis

o the contingent distance it is able to establish rom both the reifcationo aesthetic reason and arts assimilation o nonaesthetic reason. Thus

what distinguishes art rom other practiceswhether social, scientifc,philosophical, or artisanalis that it is the only practice that operates


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out o a direct sense o its own impossibility and impermanence. Thatis to say: physics or weaving or engineering, or example, do not seekto escape the legitimizing traditions and institutional supports o phys-ics, weaving, or engineering in order to defne their (provisional) placein the world and the conditions o their own uture possibility. Theymay provide an immanent critique o their own guiding precepts andtraditions, but they do not seek their uture in an exit rom physics,weaving, and engineering. Art, however, given its powers o infniteideation, o transcendental overcoming o itsel, is never identical withthose traditions that give it value and legitimacy. Indeed, it defnes itspossibilities in terms o its own eventual dissolution as a category and

seeks, thereore, as a condition o its reedom, an exit rom the histori-cally delimited category o art as such.This is because, as the embodiment o ree labor in an alienated orm

(the commodity orm), the labor immanent to art carries the promise, inTheodor Adornos sense,15 o a world o productive labor and o socialrelations transormed in the emancipatory image o a liberated aestheticreason. And, thereore, it prefgures a world in which the hierarchicaldivision between productive labor and artistic labor, intellectual laborand manual labor, the artist and nonartist, is dissolved. This is why artistic

labor as the embodiment o infnite ideation is quite unlike any otherpractice: arts sovereignty as ree labor continually puts to the test theclaims to truth o those who would reduce arts emancipatory signif-cance to either aesthetics or social utility. And this is also why theree labor o art represents not only a critique o instrumental accountso reedom subscribed to by positivistic models o nonaesthetic reason,but also o those traditions and institutional arrangements o art that

would limit arts transcendental overcoming o itsel as an overcomingo its own alienated status. Consequently, art necessarily operates out

o joint with the cultural and social contexts and institutional arrange-ments that bring it into being, as a matter o its sel-defnition andsel-determination. In this sense arts autonomy is better understood,not as another name or the distance art takes rom the world, but ascognate with a notion o determinate negation. That is, arts liminalidentityits capacity to move across aesthetic reason and nonaestheticreason, art and nonartis the very condition of its renewal. And this, inturn, is what I mean by the suspensive unction o the avant-garde. Thepost-Thermidorian avant-garde systematizes the nonidentitary unction

o art as the necessary condition o its open-endedness, or powers oinfnite ideation.

Thus recognizing the real structural limits o total revolutionarypraxis in the current period does not mean the rejection o the place o


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nonaesthetic reason in arttout court, just as the destabilization o aestheticideology through arts necessary assimilation o nonaesthetic reason doesnot mean the end o the pleasures o aesthetic distance constitutive ospectatorship and artistic judgement. Rather, the transormative actions,thought experiments, critical interventions, and symbolic reinventionso the contemporary avant-garde become, in their speculative labors,

placeholdersor the historic ideals and achievements o the historic avant-garde. This thereby sets up an interesting mnemonic identity or theavant-garde in our own time: the avant-garde is revolutionary preciselythrough its fdelity to itsfuturespast. But, signifcantly, this is not simply apromissory space, or a holding operation. On the contrary, the avant-

garde may be suspensive in these terms, but what now distinguishes itrom its historic orebears, and recent neo-avant-garde relations, is thatits suspensiveness is a condition ofits explicit anticapitalist and opposi-tional character. That is, the avant-garde today has passed into what wemight call a third space: neither the space o revolutionary transorma-tion as such (the building o a revolutionary culture; the production othought experiments as part o a mobilization o the working class), northe pragmatic adjustment o critical and radical art to the new postwaradministration o modern art (the neo-avant-garde), but the concrete

implication o artistic practices in the critique o capital, the state, laborpractices, and the ofcial institutions o art.In this sense, the political outcomes o the knowledges and strategies

employed by the suspensive third avant-garde are quite dierent romthose o its predecessors, insoar as its thought experiments, symbolicmaniestations, and social interventions unction as integrated partso arts place in a critique o the totalityo capitalist relations. Thereis here a decisive shit away rom the counterhegemonic model o the1980s and early 1990s, which ocused principally on the art institution.

Politics in art are no longer attached simply to a triangulated counter-representational model (race, sexuality, and gender)as overwhelminglyembraced by the neo-avant-garde o the 1980sbut to the mobilizationo collective artistic energies in alliance with practices o cultural sel-determination, a politics rom below and research and developmento counter-inormational knowledge, as means o modelling a place orart in new orms o sociability. Some o this work goes under the nameo postrelational aesthetics, some o it under the nomenclature o digitaland Internet art,16 and some exists in uid and temporal sites o pro-

duction and reception outside the ofcial art world altogether, in thedark matter o the unofcial economy o occasional artists, part-timeactivist-collectives, and various hit and run ecopractices.17 Most o thesegroup practices are unnamed and dissolve once the political strugglehas moved on.


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Now, as I have stressed, these orces are predominantly attached to whatI have previously described as the hegemony o nonaesthetic reason inthe new art. And, as such, as I have also shown, these approaches set upinnumerable pressures or the collapse o this work into instrumentalizedorms o activity, particularly at those points where, by dint o the actthat it is divesting itsel o the circuits o the ofcial artworld, it believesitsel to have escaped rom these instrumental pressures. But, neverthe-less, what this collective push towards nonaesthetic reason produces isan extraordinary repoliticization o the category o the avant-garde, asart submits its energies to a totalizing critique o art, praxis, and labor.In this sense, this third space produces not just an intellectual, but

an active and practical relationship to the notion o the avant-garde asplaceholder or utures past. Consequently, I want to ocus, in my fnalsection, on one group that I believe best represents this third avant-garde, the Russian group Chto Delat? (What is To Be Done?). Althoughit has contributed enormously to the political energy o this emergentcultural space, it has not done so at the expense o a relationship to theexigencies o revolutionary pathos and the autonomy o art. Indeed, thegroup is exemplary in this respect.

Chto Delat? and the Third Avant-Garde

Chto Delat? have been in existence since the beginning o the newmillennium and comprise an expanding and contracting personnel,centered currently on three core members: the artist, writer, and flm-maker Dmitry Vilensky, the philosopher Alexey Penzin, and the writer,translator, and editor David Ri. In addition Vilensky and Ri are themain editors o the groups newspaper Newspaper of the Engaged Platform

Chto Delat? published out o St. Petersburg in Russian and English. Thepublication presents and develops many o the projects Vilenskyinparticularcollaborates on (flm and video work, archival and ethno-graphic work), but also acts as a theoretical orum or others inside thegroup or on its ringes and supporters o its aims. In this respect thenewspaper is properly constituted as a partisan and polemical literatureo intervention into the groups own praxis and the praxis o others;it is not an academic journal or a review. On this basis, it representsone o the most sustained eorts over the last ten years to develop the

language o a research program inside the space o the avant-garde bydrawing on the shared interests o the group in alliance with its criticalsupporters.

Hence, many issues o the newspaper have taken up core questionsand problems o the historic avant-garde. In what ways is it possible to


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continue the avant-garde as a proletarian project today? What would thereal, sensuous (not decorative) utility o theory be like?18 What ormsmight a progressive art take as part o a totalizing program o socialand political critique?19 How can progressive art remain committed tothe project oBildung(the process o individual development throughaesthetic education)?20 Yet, i these classic questions o the historic avant-garde are amiliar enough, their position within a third avant-garderamework removes them o any nostalgic or purely redemptive character.This is because the group, despite its political engagement and outward-looking nature, is quite clear about the necessarily suspensive charactero the new avant-garde. Thus, in a special issue o the newspaper on the

avant-garde in 2007, Vilensky and his coauthor Zanny Begg argue: Theradicality o art . . . cannot be reduced to its connection to social orpolitical imperatives nor to ormal stylistic innovation but must also beunderstood through its poietic orce; its ability to question and destabilizethe very notion o the political, cultural and artistic. The avant-garde isa coup detat against history, making visible new possibilities in both artand politics.21 That is, artists have to speak in their own name as parto collective political transormation. Moreover, in contradistinction tothe historic avant-garde, the new avant-garde necessarily has the nega-

tion o capitalisms totality as its point o departure. At the same time, itstrives to connect this negativity with aesthetic method, adequate to thestudy o the world in which new subjectivity arises, not only as somethingdestructive, but as something that produces social lie.22

In this light Chto Delat? divide their new avant-garde model into threecategories or principles: realism as critical-modernist method in thespirit o Bertolt Brecht (mapping as a orm o resistance, counternar-rativization and counterhistoricization, montage, subversive afrmation,the carnivalesque, fctional reenactment); fdelity to the revolutionary

impulse o the historic avant-garde as totalizing critique; and a deenseo artistic autonomy as a principle o sel-organization. These prin-ciples place the group, then, at a certain distance rom the prevailingnonaesthetic orthodoxy. First: in terms o the groups primary fdelityto the memory o the Russian Revolution and the Soviet avant-garde,and second: in terms o their resistance to the dominant model o thesublation o artintolie. The point is not arts dissolution into lie, butits crystallization in lie as a constant re-discovery, beyond our reactionarytimes, o the possibilities o new orms o lie (yet) to come.23 Indeed,

the majority o art-as-social-activism practices end up creating only asel-inicted barrier to uture progressive transormation and alliances.

As Vilensky says in conversation with Alexey Penzin: These practicestake the orm o producing service packages or normalizing the lives


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o problem communities. That is, or us, they are o little interest tous because at bottom they are normalizing in nature.24

Chto Delat? are a small group and are, thereore, utterly marginalin terms o the machinery and hierarchies o the ofcial artworld, par-ticularly given that they operate out o one o the ar-ung outposts ocontemporary art: Russia. Yet, something real and transormative is indevelopment here that marks out the notion o the third avant-gardeas a placeholder or the memory o total revolutionary praxis. In other

words, the key issue that needs addressing in relation to what the avant-garde means today lies in how such initiatives (which may emerge romany social location) mediate the revolutionary pathos o the historic

avant-gardethe gap between the actual and idealas active and produc-tive. The primary unction o the new avant-gardes totalizing critique,then, is not to generate a utopian acceleration away rom the world,but, on the contrary, to seek out those points and fssures in actuality

where new cultural relations and orms o organization are possible oremergent. This means that it is precisely the pathos o the avant-garde,its role as the cultural memory o loss and deeat, that will direct andshape this potentiality.

University of Wolverhampton

NOTES

1 Hal Foster, Whats Neo About the Neo-Avant-Garde? October70 (1994): 532.2 Peter Brger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (1974; Minneapolis: Univ.o Minnesota Press, 1984).3 Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).4 See Jacques Rancire, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso,2007) and The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009).5 Maria Gough, The Author as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeleyand Los Angeles: Univ. o Caliornia Press, 2005).6 Boris Arvatov, Kunst und Produktion(1926; Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1972).7 Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientic Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers, vol.1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).8 John Roberts, Productivism and its Contradictions, Third Text 23, no. 5 (2009):52736.9 See in particular, Geert Lovink and David Garcia, The ABC of Tactical Media, availableonline at http://www.ljudmila.rg/nettime/zkp474.htm.10 See in particular, Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics(1998; Dijon: Les Presses duReel, 2002).

11 Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community: Communication in Modern Art(Berkeleyand Los Angeles: Univ. o Caliorrnia Press, 2004).12 Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin(London: Macmillan, 1982).


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13 For a urther discussion o the suspensive avant-garde, see John Roberts, On theLimits o Negation in Badious Theory o Art,Journal of Visual Arts Practice7, no. 3 (2008):27182 and John Roberts, Avant-Gardes Ater Avant-Gardism, Newspaper of the Platform

Chto Delat?/What is to be Done? (2007)14 See or instance, Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Pol-ity, 2007) and Destruction, Negation, Subtractionon Pier Paolo Pasolini, GraduateSeminar, Art Center College o Design, Pasedena, February 2007, available at http://www.lacan.com/bapas.htm15 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & KeganPaul, 1984).16 See Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art: The Online Clash of Art and Commerce(London: TatePublishing, 2003).17 Greg Sholette,Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture(London andNew York: Pluto Press, 2010).

18 See Alexey Penzin and Dmitry Vilensky, Whats the Use? What is the Use o Art,Newspaper of the Platform Chto Delat? (2007).19 Dmitry Vilensky, publication to the exhibition, Make it Better, April 917, 2003, St.Petersburg State Museum, Newspaper of the Platform Chto Delat? (2003).20 Penzin and Vilensky, Whats the Use?21 Vilensky and Zanny Begg, On the Possibility o Avant-Garde Composition in Contem-porary Art, Debates on the Avant-Garde, Newspaper of the Platform Chto Delat? (2007).22 Vilensky and Begg, On the Possibility.23 Vilensky and Begg, On the Possibility.24 Penzin and Vilensky, Whats the Use?

revolutionary pathos, negation, and the suspensive avant-garde john roberts

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