Ghosts of the avant-garde: Wolfgang Asholt

Wolfgang Asholt, The Long Life of the Avant-Garde: A History of Theory (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2024), 474 pages.
Open access version with CC BY-ND 4.0 license download: The Long Life of the Avant-Garde (14,6 MB) – DOI: https://doi.org/10.46500/83535756

The fate of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, written in 1924, is inextricably linked to its symbolic and historical significance for the art and literary scene of the 20th century. Classified as a "national treasure" in 2017, the manuscript is extremely rarely exhibited publicly. Originally owned by Breton's first wife, Simone Kahn, it remained in the family until her death in 1980. In 2021, the Bibliothèque Nationale acquired the document for €2,7 million following a successful fundraising campaign. It was presented at the Centre Pompidou as part of an exhibition marking the centenary of Surrealism, as a cultural heritage artifact, an artifact of a tradition akin to incunabula from the distant Middle Ages or the Ordonnance of Villers-Cotterêts.

What traces of the avant-garde can be found in contemporary French literature, and what does this mean for the status of art at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century? Is it even possible for an individual artist today to claim avant-garde status, or does the movement of the radical imaginary into an unknown future always imply a collective movement—with the danger of group formation leading to orthodoxy, as Enzensberger noted in 1962?

Wolfgang Asholt had in Lexicon of the Avant-garde He concluded his entry on France with the funeral of a particular avant-garde movement. In the year of the German Autumn, Philippe Sollers observed, in reference to a historical crisis of the avant-garde: “It is strange that all these symptoms continue to be interpreted in terms of genealogy and ultimately ‘progress,’ when they merely convey and manifest a series of struggles, detours, cries, misunderstood or tragic appeals.” ¹

However, as early as 1977, Philippe Sollers not only proclaimed literature as the only form of dissent, but also, in a lecture entitled Avant-garde crisisIn Beaubourg, this also marks the end of the avant-garde: “There is an ‘avant-garde’ only insofar as the Marxist-psychoanalytic interpretive space forms the rational horizon of thought […] the current saturation of the ‘avant-garde’ space—which very quickly exhausts itself in limited academic stereotypes—simultaneously signifies the end of a rationalist horizon.” With this, the avant-garde is definitively dismissed as a historical phenomenon; not even the questions it raised up to the Situationists have any relevance under the changed conditions, let alone being on any agenda. The moment post-avant-garde postmodernism is at the door, the corresponding avant-garde is also bid farewell along with the concept of historical progress: the end of As is (1982) effectively signed its death certificate. Since then, no movement in France has claimed any kind of affiliation with the avant-garde.

Wolfgang Asholt, “France”, Lexicon Avant-garde, edited by Hubert van den Berg and Walther Fähnders (Metzler/Springer, 2009) 117.

More precisely, Asholt observes such funeral orations and new manifestos, searching for traces of how the avant-garde continues in other forms, such as the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s, the second avant-garde, and contemporary art activism in a polycentric world (even though the Global South is largely not the subject of the book). According to his own understanding, The Long Life of the Avant-Garde to be considered a first attempt, according to Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) and Paul Mann's Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (1991) to present a more recent study of avant-garde theory, examining its development in historical and current constellations and articulations. When Peter Bürger died at the age of 80, Lothar Müller paid tribute to his groundbreaking work in an obituary in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (August 16, 2017): “The ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ responded to the failure of the radical utopianism of the student movement neither with derision nor with lamentation, but with the clarification of concepts and historicization of the core motif of the 20th-century avant-garde, the ‘transformation of art into everyday life’.” With the subtle title The aging of modernity However, at the beginning of the millennium, Bürger presented texts on modern visual art that sought ways out:

From this aporetic situation of modernity, which threatens to become stuck between formalistic aestheticism on the one hand and an unfulfillable self-annihilation as the basis of its own legitimacy on the other, Bürger now seeks a way out that does not necessarily lead to postmodernism. Instead of proclaiming a break with modernity "under the banner of postmodernism," he calls for its dialectical further development, critically incorporating forms traditionally tabooed by modernity, such as figuration in art, tonality in music, and the realistic narrative style in literature.

Veronika Schöne, “At the Crossroads: Peter Bürger’s Writings on Fine Art”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 1, 2002, 14.

Seventeen years after Bürger's book on the avant-garde, Paul Mann famously saw the theorization, institutionalization, and simulation of the avant-garde as reasons why it had lost its original power. His theses, written shortly after the global political upheaval of 1989, reflected the central themes of postmodern theory, such as the end of grand narratives and deconstruction. Avant-garde studies continue to debate the question of what forms the avant-garde may take after its transformation or even its failure. The Romance studies scholar Wolfgang Asholt argued this point ten years ago in his concluding essay to the edited volume. Avant-garde and modernism ²While he stated in this text the impossibility of grasping all phenomena of the avant-garde in a theoretically unified way, due to their historical and geographical diversity, it also depends on one's own premises whether, like Peter Bürger, one concludes that the historical avant-garde failed and dismisses neo-avant-gardes as mere repetitions of past experiences—or whether, on the contrary, one takes a "long life of the avant-garde" as the starting point for a "history of theory," as the subtitle of the volume under discussion here in Wallstein's "Philologies" series, which is essentially a history of the discipline, suggests. In keeping with the series' program, a chapter on the conditions of the institutionalization (or rejection) of avant-garde theory at universities would indeed have been another insightful chapter, one that would also have illuminated career paths and networks in Romance studies and other philologies.

While the Italian avant-garde scholar Renato Poggioli described the movement as a radical spearhead of modernization and emphasized aesthetic radicalism, Bürger spoke of a (failed) "abolition of autonomous art" and thus of the avant-garde's striving for social relevance. Asholt's book oscillates like Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt's art-historical genealogy of the avant-garde. ³ in the reconstruction attempt in a “dual movement of temporal rupture and continuity”, as Horst Bredekamp formulated it. ⁴ Avant-garde research, as Wolfgang Asholt has pursued it for decades and whose summation he presents here in a certain sense, does not proceed linearly forward along the front lines of modernity like previous approaches (which was called "historical thinking about progress" in the cited dictionary entry), but rather the vanguards move "forward, downward, sideways," as the Tagesspiegel Vincent Sauer titled his review of Asholt's book: The avant-garde's recurring presence can be traced back to an unfulfilled, yet unfinished promise; describing its long life, however, requires a certain distance from its diverse manifestations. Even though Asholt rejects Enzensberger's influential article on the aporias of the avant-garde in the introduction, because it doesn't engage with the projects, concepts, and theories of the avant-garde at all. ⁵One can indeed conclude that a study of the long life of the avant-garde (theory) can do without doctrine and collective, and thus arrive at more differentiated observations than Enzensberger did at the time:

The fault of today's avant-garde is not that it goes too far, but that it keeps its back door open, seeks support in doctrines and collectives, and remains oblivious to its own aporias, long since resolved by history. It deals with a future that does not belong to it. Its movement is regression. The avant-garde has become its opposite, an anachronism.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “The Aporias of the Avant-Garde”, Merkur XVI, 5, (May 1962): 401–24, 424.

Instead of a unified theory of the avant-garde, Wolfgang Asholt focuses on a comprehensive overview of its concepts, their dynamics, and their successions. He incorporates historical-social approaches (Bürger, Bourdieu), systems-theoretical approaches (Luhmann), and the neo-avant-garde perspectives of post-structuralism and postmodernism with their deliberate deconstruction of originality. Asholt's consideration of the cultural and social context of each historical avant-garde movement and its conceptions connects, for example, in the chapters of the first part, questions of nationalism with Italian Futurism, biographies of exile with the Dadaists, concepts of revolution with the Constructivists, the formation of European networks and institutionalization with the Bauhaus, and finally, the integration of psychoanalysis into the works of Surrealism.

For this blog on contemporary French literature, the question of whether we can identify new forms or old ghosts in contemporary production in the 21st century is of particular interest: For example, when we looked at… Philippe SollersHis death at the age of 86 in 2023 reminded everyone that his more recent production in Germany followed the funeral of As is and even more clearly has remained virtually unnoticed since the turn of the millennium ⁶However, it also became clear that there are writers who, in turn, place themselves in his tradition, such as Yannick Haenel, whose novel Renards pâles which also refers to the idea of ​​revolution among the Situationists:

When we took a sample this year Emmanuelle Lamberts second literary book about Alain Robbe-Grillet, No respect (2024), selected, which also shows how the avant-garde radicalism of his last book A sentimental novel Since the book can now only reach bookstores hidden in a cellophane protective sleeve, Julia Encke, for example, turned decisively away from the ghosts of an avant-garde that places complete freedom of the erotic above what is morally responsible, with this telling concluding judgment of her review: "With the 'Roman sentimental,' what remained of the 'Nouveau Roman' has now died at the latest. Robbe-Grillet is welcome to continue playing around. But without us." ⁷ Looking back, Lambert downplays the relevance of the avant-garde references of a particular time:

L'avant-garde ne se rend pasThe avant-garde does not give up; the cover image from 1962 by the Danish Cobra artist Asger Jorn, who died fifty years ago, illustrates Asholt's core project, namely to make actors and theories describable as part of a historically possible avant-garde project.

In Asger Jorn's programmatic image and its reference to Duchamp, we are already dealing with a complex layer of overwriting: Duchamp paints over "La Gioconda," Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," thus not 'creating' a work in the prior sense, but rather modifying a reproduction, parodying it as rectified readymade, as objet trouvà ©...also with the accompanying pun "LHOOQ," because when you read the abbreviation in French, it sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul," "She has a hot ass." Asger Jorn left the Situationist International in 1961 and founded the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism (sic!). His 1962 remake of Duchamp's painting reflects the relationship between the two main parts of Asholt's book: I. "The Historical Avant-Gardes" and II. "From the (Neo-)Avant-Gardes to Art Activism." For his modification painting, however, the artist, unlike Duchamp, does not choose high canonical art, but rather a kitsch painting, popular culture. Similarly, in the second main section, Asholt deals with the Situationist International and French Theory (especially...). As is) and the US avant-garde movement. He illuminates how avant-garde ideas developed in different directions after the Second World War and were influenced by the market and globalization processes. Modern art activism is described as a "second avant-garde" that attempts to revive the radical imaginary and reconnect art and life. The shift from Paris to New York, the politicization of the Situationists, and the theorization of As is The French Theory and the avant-garde mark important turning points in this history of the avant-garde. Asholt continues to understand the avant-garde not as a closed phenomenon, but as an "ongoing project" that still leaves its mark in the 21st century, even though its original impulses have been commercialized and institutionally appropriated. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's concept of the "now," Asholt argues that the historical avant-garde attempted to imbue its present with meaning through the radically imaginary. However, the question arises for contemporary avant-garde discourses whether they succeed in claiming comparable relevance or whether, in historical retrospect, they remain merely a "past charged with the now." While the avant-garde lives on in these discourses, the question remains to what extent it still possesses a transformative power today or merely functions as a quotation of itself. Performance art and other media, among others, have relegated the literatures of the avant-garde to the background. The aporias of the avant-garde lie in its paradoxical status as a 'failed' project, which nevertheless lives on in cultural memory and is constantly reconstructed in new contexts.

This book bears witness to a lifelong engagement with the avant-garde, a process as discreet as it is profoundly intertwined with one's own life, and simultaneously linked to the self-description and self-criticism of entire generations. Over the course of its "long life," the avant-garde has become an increasingly diffuse and ambivalent concept; on the one hand, it has lost its radical force in high culture, while on the other, it lives on in popular culture. Art activism, social movements, and digitalization offer new possibilities for transferring the legacy of the avant-garde into a contemporary context. Today, we can understand the avant-garde less as a clearly defined movement and more as a set of practices that have left their mark on both the artistic and political spheres. Analogous to the national treasure of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the presented manifesto of Surrealism by André Breton, which I mentioned at the beginning, Wolfgang Asholt has traced a creative and transformative space through Castoriadis' concept of the radical imaginary, in which the avant-garde attempted – and continues to attempt – to break through existing social, artistic and cultural structures, to design alternative realities and to question existing cultural norms, in short, to create an instrument to initiate not only aesthetic, but also social and political revolutions: the avant-garde remains in motion.

1. “Il est étrange de constater que l'on continue à interpreter tous ces symptômes en terms de généalogie et finalement de « progrès », alors qu'ils ne font que traduire et manifester une serie de combats, de détours, de cris, d'appels incompris ou tragiques.” Philippe Sollers, Avant-garde crisis?, text from the conference of 12/12/1977 at the Center Georges Pompidou, published in the number of Mars 1978 by the art press.>>>
2. Wolfgang Asholt, “After Aging and Failure: Do We Still Need an Avant-Garde Theory?” Avant-garde and Modernism: Decentering, Subversion and Transformation in the Literary and Artistic Field, ed. by Wolfgang Asholt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 327–346, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110348613.>>>
3. Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Family Trees of Art: On the Genealogy of the Avant-Garde (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005).>>>
4. Horst Bredekamp, ​​“Avant-gardists, up into the trees!” Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 31, 2005, 14.>>>
5. See Wolfgang Asholt, The Long Life of the Avant-Garde, 23.>>>
6. cf. Kai Nonnenmacher “Ship from the open sea: Philippe Sollers" Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature, May 7, 2023.>>>
7. Julia Encke, “He just wants to play”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 21, 2007.>>>