Avant-Garde Temporality
The term avant-garde has had a long and contestual life dating back to the 19th century, with its military use going as far back as the Middle Ages. Today, the term is used to refer to everything from elite, expensive art and decorative objects to experimental writing that uses language to create sound and texture rather than meaning. Of course the term also desribes art and literary works that challenge and question certain current social, political, and economic trends and practices. In fact, avant-garde has come to mean so many things, that contemporary literary critics either use the term sparingly, refering mainly to those artists and writers of the early 20th century, or, like Mark Wallace and Steven Marks in their introduction to Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, they stress the “multiplicity of methods, techniques, lineages, and influences that bear on the production of present-day poetry,” which makes “the interplay of form and content equally multiple” (4). Wallace and Marks even recognize that “the sales of various types of non-‘mainstream’ poetries, if taken together, likely exceed the ‘mainstream’ center whose shadow they supposedly occupy” (1). So what is avant-garde art? what is avant-garde writing? One of the more problematic definitions of avant-garde makes it synonymous with experimental, and although there may be historical reasons for such a synonymy, the troubles it causes are very much current. There is an underlying meaning to the term that positions it not only as an opposition to “mainstream” culture and writing, but as a quest for newness and novelty in the service of moving forward, of progress. There are two issues with equating avant-garde and experimental. The first is that experiment has literally nothing to do with opposition or progress; most experiments fail, they lead to nothing, and they are conducted, not to oppose anything, but to discover something new, to prove something. The other trouble with this is that novelty and newness do not necessarily relate to progress or moving forward. In fact, the conflict between capitalism’s obsession with the new, which is based on novelty being valuable, a high level of product replacement, and increased revenue, and the avant-garde’s obsession with the new, while professing to be opposed to capitalism and consumerism, has not been explored enough.
Through all of this ambiguity, confusion, and conflict, there have been very few attempts by contemporary scholars and critics to define, or redefine, the term avant-gard. One such attempt has been made, however, by Krzytsztof Ziarek in his book The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event. Although the redefinition I am interested in goes beyond what Ziarek has done, I lean heavily on this book as a way to explain the type of temporality that is necessary to get to the redefinition I am after. Historically speaking, in its move from military terminology to artistic and literary metaphor, the implication of the “front” changes, losing its spatial referent in the art and literary worlds, while taking up the temporal referent. According to the OED, vant-guard means “to defend in front,” and avant-garde’s military definition is “the foremost part of an army.” Why then, has the term, specifically within literary criticism and theory, not only taken on the breaking of tradition as one of its many qualities, but is also sometimes used to refer to just that one quality? This, according to Matei Calinescu, has to do with the term’s political connections and the fact that war concerns “the struggle of light, life, and knowledge against darkness and evil” (100). War is inextricably tied to revolution, which aims toward ideas of a utopia and therefore, necessarily, a future. The current and historical tensions related to the term avant-garde, between notions of tradition and anti-tradition and within practices and theories of experimentation, innovation, and the future, all stem from the temporal implications historically associated with the term. In what follows, I explore these tensions and propose a different temporality that opens avant-garde to a more useful, critical, and distinctive concept.
The most famous paradox of the avant-garde is, to use the words of Barrett Watten, that “it cannot survive its reentry into history, as a form of representation, without losing either creative potential or critical force” (582). This paradox, or problem, of the avant-garde, aside from being one that has crept alongside the term’s evolution from the beginning, is directly tied to notions of past and future, new and old. In the 1860s, not long after the term’s first purported metaphorical use, Baudelaire declared his distaste for it. Matei Calinescu tells us that “Baudelaire’s profound intelligence was struck by the paradox of the avant-garde (as understood at the time): nonconformism reduced to a kind of military discipline or, worse, to herdlike conformity” (110 original emphasis). Baudelaire himself wrote that “this weakness for military metaphors is a sign of natures that are not themselves militarist, but are made for discipline—that is to say, for conformity” (qtd. in Calinescu 111). Although the militaristic aspects of the term have, supposedly, lost much weight in today’s use, Baudelaire was nonetheless able to recognize what, 100 years later, Hans Magnus Enzensberger called “The Aporias of the Avant-Garde” (Calinescu 111). It is this paradox (or these paradoxes) that brought about concepts of the end of the avant-garde, or as Paul Mann, and many others, would have it, the death of the avant-garde. Mann writes that “the avant-garde, we know, is dead: nothing could appear more exhausted than its theory, its history, its works” (3). The story goes that at some point in the 1960s, towards the later half of the decade, a crisis occurred and the avant-garde was its (somewhat suspected) casualty. In fact, Mann dates the publication of a number of ‘obituaries’ of the avant-garde as occurring from 1967-1969 (117). This echoes David Lehman’s statement that “postmodernism is the institutionalization of the avant-garde,” which, according to Louis Armand, was “the characteristic complaint ... in the 1970s” (3-4).
The most common critical approaches to the avant-garde, including the conviction that it was a failure, that it’s dead and over (though it may survive in theory and discourse), and that it keeps renewing and recuperating itself (which invites confusion between new, innovative, experimental, and avant-garde), all rely on ideas of temporality, chronology, and the movement and passing of time. Two of Stanley Cavell’s “three confusions endemic to the concept,” as described by R.M. Berry, also come out of this temporality. According to Berry, these two confusions are the avant-garde’s “tendency to overemphasize art’s future at the expense of its past, leaving present work ungrounded,” which misrepresents “possibility as indeterminacy,” and its “uncritical enthusiasm for any and everything that calls itself innovative;” he calls this the “‘farther out than thou’ syndrome” (36-7). The sense of the temporal that I want to remove from the avant-garde is that sense that constructs a linear, clean, time-line that moves from past to present to future; it’s the temporal sense that underlies our culture’s obsession with, and reliance on, progress. It is also the sense of time that allows there to be anything new, and conversely, is the condition under which things become old. This has been the main cause, not only of the tensions around possible definitions of the avant-garde, but also the paradox mentioned above, and the contestation around whether or not there can be a current/contemporary avant-garde. The problems within the concept of the avant-garde that center around the brief life of that which shocks, the move from innovative to traditional, and the troublesome relationship between experimentation and a kind of novelty that will lead us to an attractive future, are only possible within a strictly linear and singular perspective of time. It is the rejection of such a formulation that allows for useful distinctions to emerge between these terms, and others.
It is not from the ‘life’ of the term that I want to remove this temporal sense, for there is of course the history of the term’s use and its definitional evolution in both the political and artistic/literary worlds. The term’s existence in time is not disputable; it’s the sense of linear time that has become wedded to the meaning and application of the term that is being contested. Louis Armand writes, in the introduction to Avant-Post, that “experimentation is inevitably tied to innovation by the same thread that binds the purportedly new to the idea of a tradition. Such a formulation reveals an inherent ‘referential indeterminacy,’ wherein words like experimental, avant-garde, and tradition come to approximate ‘heterologous signs’” (2). It is precisely these ties and bindings that unravel and loosen when one relieves the definition of avant-garde from having to contain the cyclical aspect of time, of things arising and passing away.
One of the problems that comes from the past to future model of the avant-garde is the potentiality, and often actuality, of rejecting the past, of refusing what has come to be considered tradition, convention, and accepted modes of practice and representation, simply because it has already been done, because it is not new. As Calinescu observed, “the avant-gardist often ends up forgetting about the future. The future, he [sic] seems to imply, can take care of itself when the demons of the past are exorcised” (96). Although I disagree with Calinescu that this “shows that ultimately they are committed to an all-encompassing nihilism,” there are three main areas of trouble that this attitude, and action, towards the past engenders (96). The first, and perhaps most obvious, has to do with what is considered past, and how quickly the ‘new’ thing one is doing to reject the past becomes the past itself. Embedded within this issue is also the fact that what is ‘new’ and ‘old’ may not actually be a matter of time passing, but of exposure and knowledge; what is old and established to one person may be new and never before encountered to another. The second issue that rejecting the past creates is what to do when rejecting the past, itself, becomes the ‘old’ thing to do. If the goal of this approach towards the past is to break with tradition, what happens to the avant-garde when it, itself, becomes a tradition? Finally, there is the matter of the new thing itself. According to the OED, our word new comes from the roots of the word now, and has, as one of its first definitions, “not previously existing; now made or brought into existence for the first time.” “Not previously existing” means that it was also not previously known. The trick, then, is how to make or bring something into existence that was in the realm of the unknown previous to its existence, while still rejecting the past. Put another way, it is impossible to make or create something, either visual or literary, without relying on something known, which, in this model, means something past.
Another very important aspect of the avant-garde, that is ultimately tied to the temporal sense I have been discussing, but which stretches beyond it, has to do with artists and writers objecting to the demand to follow certain social and capitalistic customs within the intention, production and distribution of their work. This objection stems from the understanding that customs set a tradition, both customs and tradition are from the past, in order to secure a better future one must reject the past, and rejecting the past means creating and embracing the new, i.e., anti-traditional. A large part of this objection in the literary/art world coincides with the political application of the term, and has to do with a belief and conviction that dates back to the early 19th century. According to Matei Calinescu, Henri de Saint-Simon, a socialist theorist active around the turn of the 19th century, was convinced that “the artist is the ‘man [sic] of imagination’ and, as such, he is capable not only of foreseeing the future but also of creating it. His grandiose task is to take the ‘Golden Age’ of the past and project its magic glow into the future” (102). Written around the same time, but published 20 years later, posthumously, was Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, in which he writes that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry” as well as his more famous line, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Although this part of what avant-garde refers to has shifted its particulars since then, one of the more recent (1970s) and perhaps most obvious examples being the socio-economic platform of the so-called Language School, the sense of revolution, carried from the military associations of the term through the political and into the artistic/literary world, continues to run into the problem of cyclical time and the notion that revolution is simply a turning around of things, and not actually a movement into newness.
One of the most problematic results, especially in the literary world, which falls under the banner of the avant-garde, is the call for newness, constant invention, innovation, and experimentation. In fact, in more recent years, the term avant-garde has become, for some people, synonymous with experimental. Some of the issues that arise out of this are displayed in the following statement, by Charles Altieri: “contemporary experimental writing proves difficult to approach unless we conceive of it as continuous with an avant-garde tradition” (629). Here we have the paradox of an avant-garde tradition, the assumption that one needs to approach experimental writing in a specific way to create more ease for the reader, for the critic (I question here whether or not ‘ease’ should have priority), and the notion that there is a continuity within the avant-garde. Altieri though, for all the difficulties in this one statement, also makes the observation that “some ways of looking back may be necessary if we are also to see beyond the present into the future” (129). In fact, the only time there actually is, is the present, and any notions we have of past and/or future are only possible in, and dependent on, the present, though they do reflect off each other. The trouble with equating experimental with an avant-garde that pushes forward into the future and purports to lead the rest of us into this ideal future is based, at least partly, on the etymology of the word experiment. According to the OED, experiment means “the action of trying anything, or putting it to proof; a test, trial,” “a tentative procedure; a method, system of things, or course of action, adopted in uncertainty whether it will answer the purpose,” and “an action or operation undertaken in order to discover something unknown.” Tentative procedures, uncertainty, and the possibility of something new, however, does not translate into the ability to create an attractive future. More often than not, experiments fail, the test fails to attain a proof, the method fails to answer the purpose, and/or the procedure fails to discover something new. This is not always the case, certainly, but unless we redefine avant-garde to simply mean different and new, erasing all connections to the notions of foreseeing, producing, and leading others into an attractive future, experimental art and writing can not be equated with the avant-garde.
The most useful thing that the term experiment provides us is its etymological connection to the word experience. One of the obsolete definitions of experiment that the OED gives is “to have experience of; to experience,” and both words come from the Latin root experiri, which means “to try, put to the test” (Perseus). Breaking down the word even more, we find the Latin word periri: “to pass away, come to nothing, vanish, disappear, be lost,” which is paralleled in the English peril (Perseus). This etymology is important because it brings to the forefront the sense of danger in both experiment and experience. Taking his cue from Heidegger and Benjamin, Krzysztof Ziarek notes the “‘literal’ inscription of danger in the matrix of experience.” He goes on to say that “danger exists both on the ontic level ... and on the ontological level—as the very modality of experiencing, as the manner or the way in which one undergoes an experience” (43). Danger here is meant in the sense of being put to a test, of undergoing a trial, and of risking disappearance. The kind of experience that is being brought to light here is specifically not the type or mode that we normally perceive, rather, it is one that is structurally kept open and that goes beyond the bounds of representative language. If by experiment, we mean this kind of risk and this kind of danger, perhaps we can reconnect the bridge between avant-garde and experimental. In fact, this may help us to redefine the entire area, scope, and application of the term avant-garde itself.
The redefinition of avant-garde we are concerned with here, not only rejects the past to future model, it shifts the focus away from the more conventional understanding of experiment towards the ideas of experience mentioned above. Krzysztof Ziarek, in his book The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event, presents a redefinition of the term avant-garde that rids us of the multiple contradictions and confusions generally associated with the term that I have discussed here, utilizes an understanding of experience as event through Heidegger and Benjamin, and allows for a sense of time that expands the present to include both the past and the future. One of the ways Ziarek avoids the problems caused by the past to future model of the avant-garde is by focusing his own critique on Peter Bürger’s conception of the avant-garde as a failed project because it did not succeed in collapsing the gap between art and life.[1] Aware of the temporal issues surrounding ideas of the avant-garde, Ziarek argues “that as long as it is caught in this futural dialectics, the understanding of the avant-garde as proleptic or visionary cancels the more complex radicality of its art” (19). He goes on to say, quite correctly, that the “proleptic reading” of the avant-garde sees it “as a revolution in the aesthetic structures and categories of knowledge, with which a future will catch up,” that “as a result, history is read in terms of a linearly conceived progression,” and makes the optimistic observation that “the fact that we have become comfortable with the avant-garde is, then, not necessarily a sign that it has turned itself into a “tradition” or that it has failed to produce the future it promised, but that, perhaps, we still do not read the avant-garde” (19-20 original emphasis). For Ziarek, the importance of the avant-garde “lies in its radical refiguration of experience and temporality as an event” (4).
The refiguration of experience that Ziarek is calling for critiques what he refers to as “modern experience.” What he means by this is that the modern technologicalization of experience has reduced it to being measurable, calculable, and completely representable in language. Beginning with both Heidegger and Benjamin, he develops “the conception of experience as event,” event being “a dynamic and open-ended field of forces, whose historicity prevents experience from closing into representational constructs, psychic spaces, or lived instants” (14). Important to this concept of event, of experience as event, is the notion of technology that Ziarek borrows and expands from Heidegger. According to Ziarek, Heidegger’s idea is that “technology as manufacturing and processing into information becomes possible only because the actual in modernity is always already revealed as a standing-reserve of, in principle, calculable and measurable resources” (15). Also important here is Heidegger’s definition of art, which Ziarek tells us is “the temporal event of unconcealment” (4). This connects to Heidegger’s ideas of presence and presencing, of a revealing (an existence, a being), an unconcealment, that simultaneously withholds full presence. It is crucial here that this withholding is understood, not in the sense of hiding or secrecy, but as a necessary result of experience understood as event, of experience as never fully present, never fully able to be translatable into representability. Ziarek refers to this as a “certain ‘non-comprehensibility’ of the event as experience.” He goes on to say that “this form of incomprehensibility is the result precisely of the inessentiality of experience (that is, its withdrawal from essence and presence), or its irrecuperable (never made fully present or representable) historicity” (20).
Historicity, for Ziarek, “acts as a force of temporal dislocation: It (de)organizes the dynamic field of the event in such a way that its coming into presence never coincides with what is made present or opened up by it” (14). This means that the coming into presence, of whatever it might be, is not the same as that which, whatever it might be, becomes present; thus, “historicity both lets the event emerge into presence and withholds (full) presence from it, keeping the event disjointed and incomplete” (14). It is this disjointedness and incompleteness, in other words, historicity, that is suppressed, rejected, when it “becomes measurable and representable” through a solid and fixed structure of linguistic referentiality (13). The connection between historicity, experience, and language is critical for Ziarek’s redefinition of the avant-garde because of his notion that “avant-garde art activates and reinvents the interval between experience and language” (10). Historicity, then, could be understood as the limit, or perhaps the result of the limit between language and experience. In his book, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, Giorgio Agamben also explores the “interval between experience and language.” For Agamben, it is infancy, literally the inability to speak, that “finds its logical place in a presentation of the relationship between language and experience” (4). This is because, as he writes, “the singularity which language must signify is not something ineffable but something superlatively sayable: the thing of language” (4 original emphasis). In other words, since language can only refer to itself, it is unable to fully disclose experience, which, in this way, remains somewhat removed from language, removed from the ability to be signified in language; it remains in infancy, or as Ziarek would have it, it is incomprehensible.
The reason any sense of history enters the discussion at all is because of the distance between the human and language. According to Agamben, the human, “by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language—he has to say I.” This means that, whereas “animals do not enter language” because “ they are already inside it,” the human must enter language in order to speak. It is because of this entering, this split within the speaking human, and as Agamben says, “because language is not the same as the human,” that we are able to conceive of a life, our life, as separate from our sense of self (52). It is this break, according to Agamben, that produces history and the condition of historicity. It is important here that we understand infancy, not as a chronological pre-condition of speech, but rather as the simultaneous and continuous origin and limit of our ability to speak. In fact, for Agamben, it is experience itself that is infancy, and it is the fact that the human is “always in the act of falling from [it] into language and into speech,” that is historicity, that is the condition and character of history (53). It is the sense of experience as event that Ziarek writes of, and the historicity of the event, tied as it is to the difference between the human and language, which “lets the event emerge into presence and withholds (full) presence from it,” that, as Ziarek writes, “both open up the spaces of experience, thought, and representation, and ... makes their closure impossible (14).
The conception of the event that Ziarek uses weighs heavily, as Ziarek himself tells us, on Heidegger’s “concept of the event as poiēsis” (13). Rather than taking poiēsis simply as creation or production, as its Greek etymology would have it, Heidegger explores and defines the term in relation to technē, understood as technology, not in the sense of “manufacturing or production,” but as “a modality of the revealing of the actual which underlies modern techno-scientific reality” (Ziarek 15). According to Ziarek, “Heidegger critiques the instrumental notion of technology” in order to bring attention to “how the laws of science and the patterns of technological development emerge from the much older practices through which the power imbedded in modern technology historically has come to decide the shape of experience and thought” (101). It is this notion of technological experience, of experience as “regulated, ordered, and compressed into information,” that Ziarek’s concept of the avant-garde critiques and rejects. It is poiēsis, for Ziarek, that “retains the event in its historicity, underscoring its irreducibility to the order of representation” (14). What this also means for him, is that avant-garde art must be postaesthetic, understanding aesthetics to mean the theory of art that makes it an aesthetic object. The term postaesthetic describes a work of art “as an active, quasi-performative event” that is able to “recover poiēsis and bring it to bear upon the denial of the temporality of experience” (Ziarek 26, 15). Otherwise put, poiēsis, as a form of revealing set against the technological mode of revealing, which encloses experience within representability, making it final and measurable, allows for the historicity of experience, breaking the confines of representability. Because Ziarek understands “art as always already ‘integral’ to experience, reworking it, as it were, from within, because of art’s ‘figuring’ of the event structure of being,” avant-garde art moves beyond just the aesthetic, as it must, in order to figure the event as poiēsis (16). As the event as poiēsis retains its historicity, so avant-garde art that is postaesthetic retains the ecstatic temporality of experience that is not reducible (translatable) to representation.
The concept of aesthetic that Ziarek is opposing here, “is not a term for a neutral, ‘objective,’ reflection upon art; rather, aesthetic reflection is already implied in the larger philosophical and cultural framework” (35). Understood as “an offspring of metaphysics,” this notion of aesthetics is one that not only supports “the metaphysical models of presence and subjectivity,” but is conceived in that model (39). The critique of experience that Ziarek calls for questions exactly that structure of presence and subjectivity and sets those two categories off into a maze of the constant possibility of lack of presence and an explosion of subjectivity, opening the “metaphysical categorizations of experience” (39). What he is interested in doing with the terms postaesthetic and nonaesthetic, is to emphasize “the necessity of circumventing the series of exclusions—of the aesthetic from the cognitive and the practical—on which aesthetics is founded” (36). Another term that Ziarek uses is paraesthetic. The post- and para- aesthetic are important, not only because of the ecstatic temporality of the event, but also because it shifts the notion of a work of art, where the term work actually refers to the static object of art, to that of the piece of art working, literally acting upon, our senses of experience, temporality, understanding, openness, and yes, cognition and practicality. As Ziarek himself writes, taking his cue from Heidegger, art is “a certain work ... precisely because it ‘works’ experience and history, that is, renders them legible as such” (35). It is within this notion of work that art figures experience because “art works by unworking its own articulations;” “the line between working and unworking becomes increasingly fine, like the corresponding play between concealment and unconcealment” (35).
While I do agree with how Ziarek lays this out and what his understanding of aesthetic and postaesthetic are in this context, I want to go back to a definition and understanding of the term aesthetic that rids us of the confusing prefix “post,” which means after, subsequent, or later, while opening up the meaning of the word to include an active working on that allows for the incomprehensibility of the event/experience as poiēsis. The etymology of the term aesthetic, according to the OED, is the Greek word aisthētikos, meaning “of sense perception,” which comes from aisthanesthai, to perceive.” Certainly every work of art, avant-garde or not, is aesthetic in the sense that it is perceivable by our senses. I mean sense here in terms of the physical senses, not in terms of making sense mentally, through language, or fitting within previously established aesthetic frameworks. What I’m interested in here is a concept of aesthetic that goes back to that original Greek meaning, leaving behind ideas of the static art object and of the more general understanding of aesthetics as the study of that which is beautiful. It’s the notion of sense, specifically of our physical senses and those sensations, or perceptions, that I want to put against the kind of sense that requires linguistic representation. This understanding situates our sensual perception as the kind of experience that Ziarek is arguing for. In my understanding of aesthetics, then, the sense that is connected to our physical senses is in opposition to the sense that accompanies reducing that sensual experience into full representability, into the kind of sense that is comprehendible to us. In fact, I would say that without the kind of aesthetics that I am arguing for, avant-garde art and literature would not be able to criticize modern experience in the way that Ziarek wants it to; it is the working and reworking of perception, through these works of art, through their aesthetics, that does the work that makes Ziarek want to move to terms such as postaesthetic.
The final aspect of Ziarek’s redefinition of the avant-garde that I will discuss, which is perhaps most important for my purposes, is the temporal aspect of the avant-garde. He wants to make sure that “the event’s historicity is never simply equivalent to avant-garde utopianism,” and stresses that “the vital question for understanding the critique of experience is how one reads” the avant-garde’s rupture within time, its apparent push for the future, for some revolution that has yet to happen (18-9). For Ziarek, this rupture or “futurist moment,” is “itself a refiguration of temporality” (19). This refiguration removes the avant-garde from the past to future model and any sense of linear time, instead creating a present that can contain not only this futurist moment, but also the past. According to Ziarek, “the avant-garde’s time is always within the present, but as a specific noncoincidence of its works with the presence of meaning, as a ‘future anterior’” (19). He gets the term future anterior from Julia Kristeva, who uses it to describe her sense of time that is embodied by poetic language (32). Kristeva’s concept of poetic language is that it brings the semiotic mode of language to the surface as opposed to ordinary or symbolic language, which although it has traces of the semiotic, attempts to suppress the semiotic. The semiotic, as proposed by Kristeva, is that mode of language that begins before a young child actually acquires speech but is present in every utterance thereafter.[2] Because the semiotic goes back to a prelingistic stage of development, it also goes back to a time before the subject is formed, an anterior, which means that bringing the semiotic to the forefront of language creates ruptures in the subject.[3] It is these ruptures in the subject, in the “I” of linguistic utterances, that open up, or reopen, the space between experience and language, and thus the time of history; these ruptures in the subject allow for the historicity that Ziarek calls for.
These ruptures, situated as they are at the cusp of experience and language, not only create a “futural inscription within the present,” they also open up history to its own historicity. Kristeva writes, of the future anterior that “anteriority and future join together to open that historical axis in relation to which concrete history will always be wrong” (33). It is this open “historical axis” that creates the possibility for the time of the future anterior, a time “that will never take place, never come about,” a time that is “an impossible time-to-come” (32-3). The only manner in which the time of the avant-garde art or literary work does exist in the present, is through “an upheaval of present place and meaning” (32). This is what Ziarek means when he says that the “avant-garde rupture dislocates the present” (19). Another possible way to talk about this rupture, about the specific temporality I am after, is to look at Gertrude Stein’s concept of the continuous present. According to R.M. Berry, for Stein, as opposed to Ziarek, the present is already dislocated, and the avant-garde is simply trying to get there (41). In her 1926 essay, and lecture, “Composition as Explanation,” Stein writes, of “every one” that “they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.” One of the things that this means for Berry, is that the avant-garde, understood through Stein’s notions of time, “isn’t just the struggle for it’s time. It’s the struggle in it’s time for something suppressed by time itself” (40 original emphasis). This “something suppressed by time itself,” is the historicity of experience, of the event, of poiēsis, and of the working that art can do, if “time” here is understood to mean past to future, linearity, and history. Stein’s notion of the “continuous present” can, as Berry says, be considered the term “both for this struggle and for its object” (40).
Whereas Ziarek and Kristeva’s notion of the future anterior brings the future into the present, Stein’s continuous present opens the possibility for the past to also be included in the present. In her introduction to Gertrude Stein: Selections, which she edited, Joan Retallack notes “the subtle temporal development Stein is writing into her description by acquaintance with the continuous immediacy of the experience of presentness” (45). This “continuous immediacy” is only available through an exploration of the relation, the gap, between language and experience; there can be no continuous immediacy if one reduces experience to representation. Annette Rubery, in “The Mother of Postmodernism? Gertrude Stein On-line,” writes that “to avoid the corrupting influence of time on her writing, Stein devised the ‘continuous present’; a state in which each moment has its own emphasis.” It is the “corrupting influence of time,” that I want to remove from the temporality of the avant-garde, and it is this sense of time that obscures historicity and relies on history. Retallack, considering Stein’s concept, writes that “each moment in the writing is a new take in a process of revision as continuous permutation. This is her “continuous present”—successive words or phrases reconfiguring what precedes them through repetition and variation” (44). An important point to add about these “successive words or phrases,” is that, according Ulla E. Dydo, Stein’s continuous present “emerges from her struggle with methods of telling stories by experimenting with sentences stripped of dependent clauses and cast into a total present filled with ‘its own life’” (617). These words and phrases, then, are never made still, never rest, and are never static, but instead, continuously fold and refold their previous figurations into their current and continuous variations, making past and present coincide in a single moment.
Combining the continuous present and the future anterior gets us to the kind of temporality that I am interested in, that I want to assign to the concept of the avant-garde. It allows for a sense of time, for a temporality, that opens the present moment to both the past and the future. It is a concept of time that is born specifically from Ziarek’s call to historicity; it is neither dependent on the past to justify its existence, nor does it rely on the future as its claim to legitimacy. And although it is present, it is present in the Heideggerian sense of “simultaneous coming into presence and withdrawal” (Ziarek 13). This unfixed temporality, this vibrating moment, folds history back into itself, revealing historicity, revealing the past and the future as synchronous with the present, and it explodes the present to reveal the past and future that are a part of it. It is this temporality, this complex present, if you will, that makes it possible to conceive an understanding of avant-garde that no longer runs into the troubles, conflicts, and tensions discussed earlier. The drive towards innovation and newness becomes obsolete within a complex present because the goal becomes to be now rather than to be new. As Berry writes, “art’s motivation to become present has nothing to do with striving after novelty,” and “avant-garde art can be said to measure ... the present’s distance from itself” (38, 41). It is not about experimenting to discovering something no one else has, but experimenting for the sake of experience, experimenting to explore that gap between experience and language. The paradox of an avant-garde tradition and the trouble with the brief shelf-life of shock also disappear when considering the complex moment of the avant-garde, for both of these issues can only exist when one operates within the past to present model of temporality. In this sense, the cyclical nature of time, and of revolution, cease to cause conflicts within the concept of an avant-garde, and instead become condensed into what I am calling the complex moment.
Ultimately, I want to redefine the avant-garde and radicalize it even further by attempting to reintroduce the spatial referent that accompanies the term’s military application. My idea is that the temporality of the avant-garde that permits the simultaneity of past, present, and future opens up a space, both theoretically and practically, that, when divorced from its military associations and focused on the work of critiquing the modern technological formation of experience, allows artists and writers to develop avant-garde practices, art, and writing that not only reopen experience to its incomprehensibility and erratic temporality, but reject the project of prophecy or any claim towards the “future,” understood here to mean the chronological one that we will apparently catch up with at some point. This space would cancel the drive to constantly create new things. It is the opening up of this possibility, of this space, and the rejection of the call to the new, the constant need for innovation, and the privileging of experimental art and writing, that creates the possibility for an ethical relationship, not only towards and between multiple practices, multiple avant-gardes, if you will, welcoming the plurality inherent in the alterity of the other, or in this case, the others, it also allows for an ethical relation between the artist and/or writer and his/her experience and language. It is in this way that I hope, eventually, to be able to make the claim for an understanding, and useful applicability, of avant-garde that is necessarily poethic, poethic not simply as a combination of poetic and ethic, but as an understanding that poiēsis, as Ziarek understands it, is intrinsically ethical.
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Notes
[1] See Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. U of Minnesota P, Minneapolis: 1984, chapter 3, section 3 and chapter 4, section 1.
[2] See Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. Columbia UP, New York: 1984, chapter 1, sections 1 & 2.
[3] Kristeva’s term for these ruptures is the “subject in process/on trial” (Revolution 58).
