The content of the avant-garde : subjectivity, community, revolution

Abstract

This thesis develops a new conception of the twentieth century avant-garde, viewed through its relationship to the revolutionary politics of that century. In so doing, it stresses the importance of generating a concept that both isolates the specificity of avant-garde aesthetic production, apart from broader trends in aesthetic experimentation, and is able to account for both the initial emergence of such movements and their later reappearance in the 'neo'-avant-garde. This requirement is met by developing three concepts, the intersection of which, and commitment to, is the unique property of the avant-garde. Preeminent here is the centrality of revolutionary social transformation to the vision of the avant-gardes, and the question of how such change is accomplished. This, in turn, requires the avant-garde to develop a concept both of the subject in whose name revolution is made, and the new community that such a revolution founds. This thesis argues that all avant-gardes, regardless of their ostensible political orientation, shared a common answer to these questions. Deploying a term developed to describe the particular orientation of the working-class movement in the early twentieth century, I describe this common answer as 'programmatism'. It consists of revolution viewed as the steady accumulation of victories by a mass, male subject engaged in industry, envisioning a community where such labour was generalised. Using this as a heuristic, this thesis relates the emergence of an initial or 'historical' avant-garde with the revolutionary height of programmatism, and its greatest political victories, followed by a subsequent emergence of a 'neo'-avant-garde marked by the decomposition of programmatism, and revolutionary moments that brought that conception itself into question. This broad theoretical panorama is illustrated by a series of close readings of distinct texts and bodies of work. The conceptual apparatus is first developed by a close engagement with previous texts that have attempted to develop a 'theory of the avant-garde', followed by studies of the manifestos of the historical avant-garde, of the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Guy Debord, the political writing of the Situationist International, and the feminist manifestos of Mina Loy and Valerie Solanas. These individual studies follow a broadly chronological sequence, and trace the limits of an avant-garde structured by programmatism. In mapping this sequence, the thesis concludes that, once understood in this way, the avant-garde must be seen not as an always-present potential in aesthetic production, but as an historically contingent product of a certain configuration of revolutionary politics and capitalist development. The thesis thus closes with the suggestion that new forms of aesthetic radicalism will have to abandon the particular commitments that marked the twentieth-century avant-gardes. THESIS RESTRICTED TO ABSTRACT ONLY UNTIL 27/02/2020

Date of Award	2015
Original language	English