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Avant-Garde, Vanguard or Avant-Garde

What we talk about when we talk about avant-garde

Per Bckstrm

Introduction

The term avant-garde was adopted from military use in the 1820s by a group of utopians

closely connected with Saint-Simon. 1 Apparently the metaphor was coined in France, and it

was there it became popular during the 19th century. From here the phenomenon spread into

the art world all over Europe, and the means and strategies of the avant-garde movements in

the first quarter of the 20th century became one of the most significant emblems of the

aesthetics of modernity. During the last part of the century something happened with the term

as such, though: it became so broad and diffuse that it was evident that it could not signify

anything by itself, that it was a critical construction. Its content was hollowed out by the

widespread use critics, journalists and artists made of the term. Now in the early 21st century,

I therefore find it urgent to ask the question: is there any theoretical discussion at all about the

use of avant-garde and what does the notion represent, if anything, today? 2

A previous version of this article was presented at the conference Rethinking the

Avant-Garde: Between Politics and Aesthetics in the USA, 3 and it struck me then as

paradoxical to be at such a conference in a country that did not really have any avant-garde in

the first half of the 20th century. This comment is not intended as a criticism, but as a factual

statement that is vital to my argument, because it does matter for the meaning of the concept

avant-garde.

The implication of the question that I am posing in the title of my article Avant-

garde, Vanguard or Avant-garde. What we talk about when we talk about avant-garde is:what is there in the notion avant-garde? My answer is that of course there can be a lot in a

notion, even in such a foggy notion as this, but also that my question as such, worded as it

is, might be badly put. The main problem might not be the term itself, but the all-inclusive

1 According to Matei Calinescu (1987: 101-2), it was Saint-Simon who formulated the premises for art to beavant-garde in 1820, but it was others around him who adopted the military term as a metaphor in 1825.2 A lax use of the term by journalists and literary historians is the reason for the hollowing out of the conceptavant-garde. My discussion in this article therefore concerns theoreticians attitudes towards the notion, in anattempt to recover the term for stringent use in comparative literature (and other disciplines), with the purpose of gaining deeper insights into the aesthetic movements of modernity and postmodernity.


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we in my phrasing. Who is doing the asking? Where do they come from? What language

are they speaking?

To exemplify the problem behind the alternative phrasing of my question I would like

to cite two respected literary critics, one from Italy and one from the USA, talking about the

relationship between avant-garde and kitsch or mass culture. The first theoretician is Umberto

Eco, who in his book The Open Work , originally published in Italian in 1962 as Opera aperta ,

comments:

The definition of Kitsch as a communication aiming at the production of an immediateeffect has certainly helped to identify it with mass culture, and to set it in dialecticopposition to the high culture proposed by the avant-garde. (1989: 185)

Compare this with what Andreas Huyssen says in his 1986 book After the Great Divide:

Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism :

My point of departure, however, is that despite its ultimate and perhaps inevitablefailure, the historical avant-garde aimed at developing an alternative relationship

between high art and mass culture and thus should be distinguished from modernism,which for the most part insisted on the inherent hostility between high and low. (1986:viii)

Umberto Eco and Andreas Huyssen seem to represent contrary positions, and one might ask:

who is mistaken? My answer is that no one is; they are both right. This might lead to the

conclusion that the author of this article is a relativist, but actually I am not. On the contrary, I

am more of a realist, since I believe that the real reason for Ecos and Huyssens disagreement

is their different (national) backgrounds: Eco is Italian and Huyssen works in America

although he is German by origin and a wide ocean divides their use of the word avant-

garde.

The concept of avant-garde before 1960

Avant-garde in Romance-speaking countries

To put it simply: the Romance-speaking theoreticians use of the term is quite different from

the Germanic-speaking critics stricter usage. 4 (I am here using the term Germanic in the

3 Rethinking the Avant-Garde: Between Politics and Aesthetics , University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana,

USA, 1415 April 2000.4 In stating this, I am not arguing that the divide between the language areas is absolute and essential. What Iwant to show is that there are certain principal differences in how the term avant-garde is used.


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linguistic sense, i.e., including the Anglo-Saxon world). In my opinion the translation of the

Umberto Eco quotation is misleading, since Eco does not talk about the avant-garde in the

strict Germanic sense at all. He is referring to a phenomenon that can best be described by the

notion high modernism, which is the preferred term in talking about the 1920s in the

English and American languages.

In the Romance-speaking countries there seems to be an awareness of the

heterogeneity of the avant-garde movements: there is not really anything like the avant-

garde in the singular, but several disparate movements that share a collective feeling or idea

about mixing art and life. On the other hand, there exists no second term, corresponding to the

Germanic notion of modernism. 5 The Romance languages only have one term for referring

to the modern art movements of the 20th century, i.e., avant-garde in its national variations.

This is a fact made clear by analyzing the use of the concept avant-garde in the

Romance languages. The Spanish critic Guillermo de Torre discusses James Joyce, T. S. Eliot

and Andr Gide under the concept of vanguardia in his early book (1925) on the subject,

Literaturas europeas de vanguardia (1971: 30, 42). In Lavanguardia e la poetica del

realismo , the Italian critic Paolo Chiarini discusses both Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann

(1961: 10-1). And in the best known Romance-language treatise on the avant-garde, the

Italian critic Renato Poggiolis Teoria dellarte davanguardia , translated as The Theory of

the Avant-Garde , one reads:

the avant-garde as much as any other art current, even perhaps more extremely andintensely, is characterized not only by its own modernity but also by the particular andinferior type of modernism which is opposed to it. (1968: 216)

This last quotation, with its rather confusing use of the term modernism, makes it apparent

that the Romance-speaking subjects do not recognize the notion modernism in the

Germanic sense of the word. They prefer to use their native term: vanguardia,avanguardia or avant-garde, since it is the well-established term that bears theoretical

significance for them.

The term avant-garde continues to be used in the Romance countries in the same way

even after the sixties. Octavio Paz discusses the avant-garde, including James Joyce, T.S.

Eliot and Ezra Pound, in his book Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to

the Avant-Garde in 1974, well after the debate about the term in the Germanic-speaking

5 Even if one can find Rubn Dario using the word modernism in 1890, it is in a different meaning, accordingto Bill Everdell in an e-mail to: Modernism Discussion List, [email protected], 28 May 1999.


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countries. This debate will be further dealt with after a short interlude.

Avant-garde in Germanic-speaking countries

The Germanic-speaking subjects, on the other hand, do not seem to recognize the Romance

speakers use of the word avant-garde, since for example Ecos term avanguardia is

mistakenly translated by avant-garde, and not correctly as I will insist by high

modernism.

A recent example of the inconsistency in the use of the term is found in Jochen

Schulte-Sasses foreword to the translation of Peter Brgers Theorie der Avantgarde ,

published in English in 1984, where Schulte-Sasse critically discusses Renato Poggiolis

contribution to the analysis of the term avant-garde:

Poggiolis criteria are both historically and theoretically too unspecific; his argumentscannot accomplish what must be the primary task of a theory of the avant-garde: tocharacterize with theoretical accuracy the historical uniqueness of the avant-garde of the 1920s (Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, the left avant-garde in Russia andGermany). (1984: x)

I can only agree that Poggioli is too unspecific, and the reason for this is that his aim is not

to characterize [...] the historical uniqueness of the avant-garde in the Germanic sense.

Poggiolis main task is to characterize the dominant strategies of high modernism. Why else

would he be discussing Joyce, Eliot, Yeats et al , under the heading of avant-garde (1968:

224), just as Romance-speaking theoreticians in general do?

The concept of avant-garde after 1960

I have not yet seen anybody commenting on the vast difference between the Romance and

Germanic uses of the term avant-garde, and I think that the reason for this is the debate about

the death of the avant-garde from the 1950s onwards, a debate that blurred the fact that the

discussion of the term was not parallel on both sides of the language barrier. It started as a

reaction on the part of the theoreticians to the inactivity of the modernistic and avant-gardistic

movements immediately after the Second World War, a silence that began already in the

decades preceding the war, with the witch-hunt against avant-garde movements in Germany

and the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until at least 1945 and 1953, respectively.

In the 1960s a stream of books appeared speculating about the failure of the avant-

garde: Hans Magnus Enzenberger speaks of Die Aporien der Avantgarde (1962: 50-80);


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metaphor of avant-garde from the Romance-speaking countries. 7 The concept of

modernism was too wide to be useful in an explanation of the phenomenon, and to reuse the

notion of high modernism, meaning the art movements of the 1920s, was no better option.

It therefore proved necessary to coin a new term to make it possible to distinguish between

modernism as a purely aesthetic movement, and avant-garde as both an aesthetic and a

political movement.

In my opinion, the use of modernism before the 1960s in the Germanic-speaking

countries does not entirely coincide with the Romance-speaking use of the term vanguardia.

The Germanic-speaking theoreticians approached the phenomenon from a modernistic point

of view, while the Romance-speaking subjects took an approach that was closer to the avant-

garde movements of the 1920s (I am here using the concept of avant-garde in the Germanic

meaning, i.e., sensu stricto ). The reason for the differing approaches seems to be the function

that the avant-gardes played in the aesthetics of the early 20th century. In the Romance-

speaking countries the avant-garde movements as such were more in the forefront of artistic

development as a whole, while in the Germanic-speaking countries, several different

modernistic currents took the lead (without denying the importance of the Dada movements in

Germany and Geneva). 8

This, I would say, is the reason for the adoption of a second concept in the Germanic-

speaking countries to characterize the art movements of the 20th century. There was no actual

need to import a second term to the Romance-speaking countries, since they could manage

with their as Jochen Schulte-Sasse puts it unspecific notion, which moreover could be

applied with the prefix neo to the different phenomena that occurred in the second half of

the century.

Avant-Garde sensu stricto

The German critic Peter Brger is one in the wild bunch that has declared the impossibilityof a neo-avant-garde. He is also the one who has taken upon himself the task of analyzing the

avant-garde sensu stricto in his book Theory of the Avant-garde (1984), and thanks to him we

now have a better understanding of what he calls the historical avant-garde, i.e., the

7 By revolutionary I do not mean political art currents in general, but movements that are both politically andaesthetically inclined in a way that foregrounds the aesthetic (as the historical avant-garde did).8 Whether Expressionism belongs to the avant-garde or not is highly debated, but the movement is usuallyincluded in theoretical approaches to the avant-garde. In the Anglo-Saxon countries there was almost no avant-garde, with the exception of Vortex, which I would say was a typically continental phenomenon, sinceWyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were all directly influenced by the French, and more especially the


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revolutionary art movements in the short period stretching from about 1915 to 1925. The

goal of the historical avant-garde was to reintegrate art into life, but not in the modernist

way, by raising life up to art. The ambition was rather the opposite, to include art in life, since

art appeared to be autonomous, with no contact with everyday life. For that purpose, the

avant-garde had to attack art as institution, and with it the concept of the work of art.

The problem with Brgers analysis is not so much his reflection on the historicity of

the epoch of the historical avant-garde, as his transposition of his results as valid also for a

period that comes after; a strategy that is not really possible with his methodological

suppositions. Transferring a theory based on an epoch that has passed can basically not be

done to explain another later period. 9

Brger did, however, narrow the analysis down, placing it under a magnifying glass

under which not much escapes the eyes of the analyzer. His theory has become the eye of the

needle through which everyone who wants to analyze the phenomenon of avant-garde has to

pass. But today, when this passage occurs in current debate, time has come to broaden the

view again to make it possible to see the issue sum specie aeternitatis .

I therefore want to propose a recycling of the Romance-speaking theoreticians, who

for reasons discussed above for the most part have been neglected or misunderstood in the

Germanic-speaking treatises on the avant-garde. The approach of Guillermo de Torre, Paolo

Chiarini, Renato Poggioli, Octavio Paz et al , is broader, with an urge not to make the field of

research too narrow, and shows a greater awareness of the fact that avant-garde not only

consists of a break with tradition, but also in many ways provides a continuous line from

Romanticism.

Avant-garde in postmodernity

The broad field of treatises on the death of the avant-garde in the 1960s and after missed a

basic point (and Peter Brgers misuse of the dialectic method is a flagrant example of it),namely that neo-avant-gardes do not react against modernity, as the historical avant-garde did,

but against what we today call postmodernity. They therefore cannot possibly use the same

strategies as the historical avant-garde; nor can they rely on the same means.

I want to relate back to my opening comment about the USA as a country without an

Italian, avant-garde, and not by any Anglo-Saxon art movements, which instead became the direct object of attacks by Vortex.9

By this, I do not mean that the theory of Peter Brger is wrong. On the contrary, nobody has done so much for the understanding of avant-garde movements as him, but one has to remember that his work concerns thehistorical avant-garde and can make no claim to explain a later phenomenon.


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avant-garde during the first half of the 20th century. When an avant-garde appears after the

Second World War, it is thoroughly American, building on the tradition rather than breaking

with it, creating its own canon, incorporating Romanticism, Walt Whitman, etc. This

behaviour is, I would say, more a reaction against postmodernity than against modernity.

When it comes to determining criteria for the corresponding aesthetic movement,

postmodernism, they are very similar to the determining criteria for the avant-garde: both

movements use eclecticism and break in one way or another with tradition. One feature that

separates them, however, is a utopian urge that is characteristic of the avant-garde, but not of

postmodernism.

The avant-gardes of the 1960s, that are so often credited with failure, did succeed in

one very important aspect: they did away with the remains of the art work, which means

that they also did away with experimentalism as an end in itself. There is, namely, not very

much left for an artist to do today, other than to use the tradition in a (passively) eclectic way

as the postmodernists do, because it is more or less impossible to accomplish anything

substantial by making it new after the 1960s. This was realized by the avant-gardists:

Experimentalism formed an important part of their practice, but it was never a goal per se . As

long as it was functional, it was just one of the means in the attack on art as institution. But

today, art as institution thrives on experimentalism, and other methods have to be used in the

battle for an art that is integrated in everyday life.

I therefore want to argue against the usual habit of using the concept avant-garde when

one means postmodernism, because this is a sloppy (journalistic) way of boxing things up,

and has nothing to do with a deeper understanding of either avant-garde nor postmodernism.

The postmodernist is, as I have argued, not avant-garde, since he or she lacks the fundamental

criteria: the urge for utopia, i.e., to mix art and life for an experience of wholeness.

Conclusion

To conclude, I want to stress the tendency to disregard what one actually talks about when

one talks about the avant-garde. The concept of avant-garde as such has been taken for

granted, while the analytical urge has been directed towards examination of the content of the

term, from the supposition that it means the same in all language areas and countries. In this

article I have argued against such a view, and pointed towards the possibilities that lie in

acknowledging the differences instead. A merger between the Romance- and Germanic-

speaking notions of the avant-garde ought to be a good idea, but at the same time it is vital toretain the Germanic division between avant-gardistic and modernistic views on art and life, as


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Andreas Huyssen suggests:

Paradoxically, the 1960s, for all their attacks on modernism and the avant-garde, stillstand closer to the traditional notion of the avant-garde than the archeology of

modernity so characteristic of the late 1970s. Much confusion could have beenavoided if critics had paid closer attention to distinctions that need to be made

between avant-garde and modernism as well as to the different relationship of eachone to mass culture in the United States and Europe respectively. (1980: 26)

I also want to stress the difference between avant-garde and postmodernism, where the latter

does not have the utopian urge to merge life and art, which is the prime mover for an avant-

garde. An analytical view that separates these two movements, will make it possible to detect

the actual heterogeneity of aesthetic movements in postmodernity, as well as in modernity.

This has been pointed out by the Rumanian theoretician Matei Calinescu. His book on the

subject is a brilliant example of the Romance-speaking subjects ability to recognize

heterogeneity and diversity, where the Germanic thinkers have a tendency to square things

up under one central notion.

I therefore believe that we will have to live for a long time yet with what Calinescu

has referred to as the Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch,

Postmodernism .

References

Ackerman, James S. 1969 The Demise of the Avant-Garde: Notes on the Sociology of Recent American Art, Comparative Studies in Society and History vol. 2, pp. 371-384.

Brger, Peter 1984 Theory of the Avant-Garde [Theorie der Avantgarde ], Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press [originally published 1974]

Calinescu, Matei 1987 Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism , Durham: Duke University PressChiarini, Paolo 1961 Lavanguardia e la poetica del realismo , Bari: Editori LaterzaEco, Umberto 1989 The Open Work , Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press

Guadarrama [originally published Opera aperta 1962]Enzenberger, Hans Magnus 1962 Die Aporien der Avantgarde in Einzelheiten II: Poesi und

Politik , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp VerlagGreenberg, Clement 1961 Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Art and Culture: Critical Essays ,

Boston: Beacon Press [originally published 1939]Hughes, Robert 1973 The Decline and Fall of the Avant-Garde in Gregory Battcock (ed.)

Idea Art: A Critical Anthology , New York: E.P. Dutton

Huyssen, Andreas 1986 After the Great Divide. Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism ,Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press


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Paz, Octavio 1974 Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde , Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press

Poggioli, Renato 1968 The Theory of the Avant-Garde [Teoria dellarte davanguardia] ,Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press [originally published 1962]

Schulte-Sasse, Jochen 1984 Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-

Garde in Peter Brger, Theory of the Avant-Garde , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Torre, Guillermo de 1971 Historia de las literaturas de vanguardia , Madrid: EdicionesGuadarrama [originally published Literaturas europeas de vanguardia 1925]

Weisstein, Ulrich 1975 Le terme et le concept davant-garde en Allemagne, Revue delUniversit de Bruxelles , no. 1, pp. 10-37

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