Writing and Society Home
Rory Dufficy on the Avant-Garde
This paper 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. 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, the emergence of an initial or 'historical' avant-garde coincides with the revolutionary height of programmatism, and its greatest political victories, while the subsequent emergence of a 'neo'-avant-garde is marked by the decomposition of programmatism, and revolutionary moments that brought the concept of the avant-garde itself into question.
Rory Dufficy completed his PHD at Western Sydney University earlier this year, and currently teaches there and at the University of New South Wales.
Audio: Listen or download (right click and "save link as") the audio of Rory's paper.
