THIS IS A PART OF A DRAFT INTRODUCTION TO A BOOK I AM WORKING ON, ANY COMMENTS ARE WELCOME
This book is an attempt to explore in depth the issues raised by Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. The term “transgressive aesthetics” in the context of this text refers to the shift in modern art perceived by Bürger from late romantic aestheticism, l’art pour l’art, to a mode of art that acquires an ethical dimension and which Bürger describes as the “reintegration of art into the praxis of life” (Bürger 1984), which we will shorten here to bringing art into life. A fundamental problem with the project of bringing art into life as described by Bürger is that its goals and presuppositions are not clearly articulated or interrogated. Bürger’s analysis is also suspect in the sense that it suggests a paradigm shift which is not borne out when we examine the movements which he suggests initiate that shift: namely, Dada and Surrealism.
Bürger claims that Dada and Surrealism represent a shift from art for art’s sake represented by late 19th century aestheticism, most evident in the symbolist movement, towards a more ethically inclined art practice. There is some truth in what Bürger claims, is certainly the case that Dada and Surrealism were concerned with society. If we investigate this concern, however, we find that it is deeply influenced by the legacy of Romanticism. It will be argued here that it is romanticism that constitutes the paradigm shift not Dada and Surrealism, and the latter are fundamentally neo-romantic discourses in which ethical concerns become deconstructively entangled with aestheticism.
Where Bürger is correct is in his identification of an intimate connection between Dada and Surrealism and transgressive postmodern art which began in earnest in the 1960s and became the dominant discourse in fine art throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the turn of the millennium. And it is certainly the case that the concept of bringing art into life is central to postmodern art. We see this for example in attempts to escape the hegemony of the art museum in art of the 1960s and early 1970s and most recently in Nicolas Bourriaud’s analysis of art of the 1990s in terms of the concept of “relational aesthetics”.
But against optimistic and even utopian accounts such a Bourriaud’s the argument presented here is that the project of bringing art into life is disrupted by an incommensurablity between ethics and aesthetics. Immanuel Kant who founds modern aesthetics is only able to reconcile ethics–what he refers to productively as “practical reason”–with aesthetics via the classical connection between beauty and goodness. But in the modern/postmodern context this reconciliation is unacceptable. It is unacceptable because it is based upon an idealised concept of humanity which has been thoroughly deconstructed not only by the most violent century in history–the 20th century– but also by the increasing awareness of the sublimity of unconscious forces within the mind and within society.
When Bürger posits a paradigm shift from late romantic aestheticism to the project of bringing art into life he effectively suggests that the romantic project comes to an end in Dada and Surrealism. But if we consider romanticism as the genuine paradigm shift that founds modern art and more particularly modern aesthetics then it is less easy to simply dismiss it. The argument presented here is that aspects of romantic aesthetics continued to inform art practice to this day. The reason for this lies in the sophistication of romantic aesthetics which is intimately intertwined with German idealist philosophy. Romantic aesthetics developed three very important and enduring notions: the unconscious, the sublime, and genius. All of these notions are wrapped up in Dada and Surrealism and transmitted into transgressive postmodern art in the second half of the 20th century. Fundamentally we can understand Dada and Surrealism as a significant elaboration of romantic aesthetics rather than as a paradigm shift away from it.
Where the argument against Bürger’s position really gains momentum is in the consideration of poststructuralism which became the de facto aesthetic ideology for postmodern Art in the late 20th century and into the new millennium. The argument presented here is that poststructuralism is shot through with strands of neo-romanticism which resonate strongly with the condition of art at the turn of the millennium. As is the case in Dada and Surrealism this leads to a situation in which attempts to engage with practical reason devolve into aestheticism.
Despite the sophistication of Bürger’s analysis of transgressive art practice with particular reference to Dada and Surrealism he fails to address what reconciling art with life praxis might actually entail. We need, accordingly, to pose the question: what does bringing art into life actually mean, and is bringing art into life fundamentally antithetical to capitalist commodification as Bürger argues? The usual argument is that mass media successfully brings art in life but it is not emancipatory, it is fundamentally an apparatus of social conditioning. But from an ethical perspective we can ask the question: what is emancipation? The problem with the Marxist concept of emancipation that motivates Bürger’s analysis is that it presupposes a totalised condition of repression and alienation. But this is certainly not the case within the context of capitalist culture. As Foucault has pointed out “the system” is both repressive and productive. The system is not homogenous but heterogeneous, and the totality, if we can speak of such a thing, is fundamentally anarchic with local pockets of hierarchy that are not intrinsically stable. For Foucault “the system” may be characterised by a proliferation of disciplinary technologies but it is also characterised by forces of disruption. As we shall see in the course of this book what we have here is a model very similar to concepts of complex systems evident in contemporary science.
The ethical dimension of poststructuralist philosophy is antagonistic to the notion of practical reason because poststructuralism is fundamentally counter-rationalist. And in this sense we can understand it as an extension of the legacy of romanticism. Indeed if there is a foundation for poststructuralist philosophy it can be found in the writings of Nietzsche who stands in between the legacy of romantic philosophy, in particular the work of Schopenhauer, and what might be referred to as a postromantic turn.
The postromantic turn retains certain aspects of romantic philosophy: a privileging of the unconscious and a fascination for the sublime and an ethical dimension based upon the liberation of desire. However, it also amplifies the transgressive force of romanticism by removing the residual classical element contained in romanticism that is its humanism. In Nietzsche classical and Christian humanism are deconstructed in favour of an expanded concept of the human not as an essential, sovereign state of being but as a state of becoming. And this turn to becoming as opposed to being is fundamental to the ethical dimension of poststructuralist philosophy.
When we consider such notions we begin to travel far away from the philosophical foundation of Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. Bürger’s analysis is fundamentally informed by Frankfurt School Marxism and its most recent instantiation in the writings of Juergen Habermas. Habermas remains faithful to Enlightenment concepts of practical reason and emancipation whereas poststructuralism enters into a new territory which is beyond the human, beyond commonsense. What is most interesting about the philosophy of Nietzsche and poststructuralism is its relationship to science. There is a distinct isomorphism between Nietzsche’s central concept of an interconnected network of prehuman forces–which is continued in the philosophy of Foucault, Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari– and notions of complexity and emergent behaviour in postmodern science. And this relationship between Nietzsche and science becomes foregrounded in his interpretation of Darwinian evolution which several commentators argue is central to his articulation of the groundbreaking concept of will as power, which is actually a deconstruction of the humanist concept of will as the will of the conscious sovereign subject. In its place is a flux of prehuman forces that construct what we take to be conscious willing. In this sense Nietzsche provides a philosophical prelude to Freud.
From the point of view of practical reason a transition from the dimension of human relationships to a transhuman field of nonhuman forces is problematic. How is it possible to construct an ethical perspective on the basis of the nonhuman? The poststructuralist answer to this question is that any attempt to define the human is totalising and essentialising. This is certainly an important consideration but at the same time it does appear unproductive to completely ignore the dimension of practical human interaction which takes place in the space of common sense. The metaphysical orientation of poststructuralist philosophy is certainly valuable but at the same time it is necessary to return down to earth and deal with the mundane and everyday level of human interactions. In other words there is an important role to be played by the sociological dimension when considering the problems encountered when art attempts to interact with “life”. When we consider the problem of bringing art into life we are really considering the problems of commonsense, habitus, the social construction of identity, and everyday life. Where poststructuralism becomes useful is in its delineation of a sublime substrate to everyday life and commonsense wherein lies the possibility of disruptions to what appear, from the human commonsensical perspective, to be “natural” states of affairs.
The fundamental problem therefore consists in bringing these two dimensions into a productive interaction in art practice. And this problem was not solved by Dada and Surrealism or by any other major art movement that has followed in its wake.