Compared to the old avant-garde, the new, postmodernist avant-garde seems, in one of its main directions, more systematically involved in theoretical thinking. This highly
intellectualized type of neo-avant-garde is most active in continental Europe. The former members of the Gruppo 63 (Edoardo Sanguineti, Umberto Eco, Nani Balestrini, etc.), the French novelists comprised under the label of the "nouveau roman" ( Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, etc.), the Parisian group Tel Quel, whose members,
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monomaniacs of the idea of Revolution, combine with impunity the Marquis de Sade and Marx, Mallarmé and Lenin, Lautréamont and Mao ( Phillipe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet,
etc.), the Stuttgart group of concrete poets led by the scientist Max Bense -are among the best known and most influential representatives of this new avant-garde.
In England and the United States a more spontaneous and, as it were, anarchistic trend began to assert itself with the Beat movement of the 1950s ( Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, etc.), with the Liverpool group of Pop poetry (Adrian Henry, Roger McGough, Brian Patten), with the now dead Living Theatre ( Julian Beck, Judith Malina), and, in music, with John Cage. But, as the case of John Cage clearly shows, the disruptive techniques -- aleatory or otherwise -- characteristic of aesthetic anarchism do not go without a high degree of sophistication and awareness of theoretical issues. The attempt at "discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments" -- as Cage puts it in his book Silence 76 -- may be meaningful only to the connoisseur or to the snob, not to the man in the street who is likely to be a sincere consumer of kitsch and not care about pure sounds, stripped of their human significance. The same applies to the speculations about the "sensuous immediacy" of the image promoted to the rank of aesthetic norm in Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation. 77 It is not fortuitous that such theories turn out to be perfectly parallel to those about literalness (littéralité) upheld in France by representatives of the "nouvelle critique" (some of them associated with Tel Quel). Thus, modern poetry -according to Gérard Genette -- tends to suppress any distance between letter and meaning, and to abolish the old transcendence of meaning in relation to the text. Today, "the literalness of language," Genette writes, "appears as the being itself of poetry and nothing would be more disturbing for one who adheres to such a view than the idea of a possible translation, of a certain space separating the letter from the meaning." 78 In the long run, despite the apparent gap, there is an essential
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similarity between what we have called the intellectualist neo-avantgarde and the anarchistic trend. The unifying principle of the two main aspects of neo-avant-garde art is their common antiteleological drive. As Leonard Meyer rightly points out, what is involved in contemporary art is "a radically different set of ends, whether these ends be achieved by careful calculation as in the music of Stockhausen, the paintings of Tobey or Rothko, and the writings of Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet, or by random operations as in the music of Cage, the paintings of Mathieu, or the chance theater of MacLow's The Marrying Maiden. And underlying this new aesthetic is a conception of man and universe, which is almost the opposite of the view that has dominated Western thought since its beginnings." 79
One of the characteristics of our time, as revealed in the public situation of the new avant-garde, is that we have begun to get accustomed to change. Even the most extreme artistic experiments seem to arouse little interest or excitement. The unpredictable has become predictable. Generally, the increasing pace of change tends to diminish the relevance of any particular change. The new is no longer new. If modernity has presided over the formation of an "aesthetic of surprise," this seems to be the moment of its total failure. Today the most diverse artistic products (covering the whole range from the esoterically
sophisticated to sheer kitsch), wait side by side in the "cultural supermarket" (a notion ironically homologous to that of Malraux's "imaginary museum") for their respective consumers. Mutually exclusive aesthetics coexist in a sort of stalemate, no one being able to perform an actually leading role. Most of the analysts of contemporary art agree that ours is a pluralistic world in which everything is permitted on principle. The old avant-garde, destructive as it was, sometimes deluded itself into believing that there were actually new paths to break open, new realities to discover, new prospects to explore. But today, when the "historical avant-garde" has been so successful as to become the "chronic condition" of art, both the rhetoric of destruction and that of novelty
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have lost any trace of heroic appeal. We could say that the new, postmodernist avant-garde reflects at its own level the increasingly "modular" structure of our mental world, in which the crisis of ideologies (manifesting itself by a strange, cancerous proliferation of
micro-ideologies, while the great ideologies of modernity are losing their coherence) makes it more and more difficult to establish convincing hierarchies of values.
This situation in regard to the arts has been perceptively described in Leonard Meyer's "Music, the Arts, and Ideas" (the chapter entitled History, Stasis, and Change). History, the author argues, is a "hierarchic construct," and periodization -- "more than a convenient way of dividing up the past" -- is a necessary consequence of the graded character of history, which would become incomprehensible "were it not hierarchically articulated into reigns, epochs, style periods, movements and the like…."
But such an approach would be inappropriate insofar as our time is concerned. The arts today are characterized, Meyer believes, by a "fluctuating steady-state." Change is everywhere but we live, culturally, in a perfectly static world. The contradiction is only apparent, for stasis "is not the absence of novelty and change -- a total quiescence -- but rather the absence of ordered sequential change. Like molecules rushing about haphazardly in a Brownian movement, a culture bustling with activity and change may nevertheless be static." 80 This stasis appears to me as one consequence of the irreducible contradictions involved in modernity's concept of time. Such contradictions have been self-consciously exaggerated by the avantgarde, which has endeavored to bring every single art form to the point of deepest crisis. In this process, both modernity and the avant-garde have displayed an extraordinary imagination of crisis; and they have jointly succeeded in creating a complex, often ironic and self-ironic sensitivity for crisis, which seems to be both their ultimate achievement and their nemesis.
As a result, old and new, construction and destruction, beauty
and ugliness have become through relativization almost meaningless categories. Art and antiart (the latter notion taken not only in the dadaist polemical sense but referring also to the immense variety of products of kitsch) have merged. And stasis is just the most observable aspect of a crisis that seems to have become the major criterion of any significant artistic activity.
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