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Title: The Problem of the Head Author: Tiqqun Date: 2001 Language: en Source: http://libcom.org/library/problem-head Notes: Translation of a critique appearing in Tiqqun 2 in 2001.
Democracy reposes upon a neutralization of antagonisms relatively weak
and free; it excludes all explosive condensation... the only free
society full of life and force, the sole free society is the bi or
polycephal society that gives to the fundamental antagonisms of life a
constant explosive outlet, but limited to the richest forms. The duality
or the multiplicity of heads tends to realize in the same movement the
acephalous character of existence, for the principle even of the head is
reduction to unity, reduction of the world to God.
— Acephale, January 1937
I consider all the acts of the “avant-gardes” in their supposed
succession. They all come out with an injunction, with a commandment: a
commandment regarding how to understand them. The “avant-gardes” demand
to be treated in a certain fashion; I do not believe that they ever were
anything else, all told, than this demand, and the submission to this
demand.
I listen to the history of the Red Brigades, of the Situationist
International, of Futurism, of Bolshevism or Surrealism. I refuse to
grasp them cerebrally, I raise my finger to search for a contact: I feel
nothing. Or rather I do feel something: the sensation of an empty
intensity.
I observe the defile of avant-gardes: they never cease to exhaust
themselves in tension against themselves. The scandalous actions,
purges, grand dates, noisy ruptures, orientation debates, campaigns of
agitation, and splits are milestones on the road to their termination.
Torn between the present state of the world and the final state toward
which the avant-garde must guide the human herd, ripped apart in the
suffocating tension between that which is and that which must be,
waylaid in the organizational auto-theatricalization of itself, in the
verbal contemplation of its own power projected into the heavens of the
masses and of History, failing, without stop, to live nothing if it is
not by the mediation of the always already historical representation of
each of its movements, the avant-garde turns round in the ignorance of
self that consumes it. Then it collapses on this side of birth, yet
without even coming to its proper beginning. The most ingenuous question
on the subject of avant-gardes — that of knowing as the avant-garde of
what, exactly, they regard themselves — finds there its response: the
avant-gardes are first in the avant-garde of pursuing themselves.
I speak here in so much as a participant in the chaos that develops at
present around Tiqqun. I do not say “us”; no one can, without
usurpation, speak in the name of a collective adventure. The best that I
can do is to speak anonymously, not of but in the experience I take part
in. The avant-garde, at all costs, will not be treated as an exterior
demon that one must always guard against.
There is therefore an avant-garde comprehension of “avant-gardes”, an
act of “avant-gardes” that is in no manner distinct from the avant-garde
itself. One could not explain without this, as the articles, studies,
essays and hagiographies of which they are still the object can
invariably leave even the impression of second hand work, of
supplemental speculation. For one only does the history of a history,
that upon which one discourses is in already a kind of discourse.
Whoever was one day seduced by one among the avant-gardes, whoever let
themselves be filled by their autarchic legend had not missed
experiencing, in contact with one or the other layman, this vertigo: the
degree of indifference of the mass of humans to their good work, the
impenetrable character of this indifference and beneath all this the
insolent happiness that the laity dare, all the same, to manifest in
their ignorance. The vertigo of which I speak is not that which
separates two divergent consciousnesses of reality, but two distinct
structures of presence — the one that reposes on itself, the other that
is suspended in an infinite projection behind itself. Thenceforth one
understands that the avant-garde is a subjective regime, and not a
substantial reality.
Useless to specify as to characterize this regime of subjectivation, it
would be necessary at first to extract it; and what consents to this
division exposes itself to the loss of a great number of enchantments,
and is rarely long in being taken with a permanent melancholy. In
effect, seen from this angle, the brilliant, virtuous universe of
avant-gardes offers rather the aspect of a ghostly idealization of a
noisome heap of wrinkled corpses. Those who would like to find something
palatable in this vision must therefore place themselves in sort of a
calculated naivety, done well, so as to dissipate such a compact haze of
nothingness. To this reasonable understanding of avant-gardes
corresponds an abrupt sentiment of our common humanity.
In all domains, the avant-gardist regime of subjectivation signals
itself by the recourse to a “watchword”. The watchword is the discourse
of which the avant-garde is the subject. “Transform the world”, “change
life”, and “create situations” form a trinity, the most popular trinity
of watchwords launched by the avant-garde in a century. One could remark
with some ill-wishing that in the same interval nothing has transformed
the world, changed life or created situations save commodity domination,
that is to say the declared enemy of avant-gardes, as it becomes
imperial; and that this permanent revolution Empire has most often led
without phrases; but in resting there, one deludes oneself as to the
target. What must be remarked is rather the unequalled power of
inhibition of these watchwords, their terrible power of sideration. In
each of them, the dynamic effect expected rebounds according to an
identical principle. The avant-garde exhorts the mass-man, the Bloom, to
take for its object something always already understood — the situation,
life, the world — and to place in front of him that which is by essence
all around him, to affirm themselves in so much as subject against that
which is precisely neither subject nor object, but rather the
indiscernability of the one and the other. It is curious that this
avant-garde never sounded the injunction to be a subject as violently as
between the 1910’s and 1970’s, that is to say in the historic moment
where the material conditions of the illusion of the subject tended to
disappear the most drastically. At the same time, this evidences well
enough the reactive character of the avant-garde. This paradoxical
injunction thus must not have had the effect of throwing Occidental Man
into the assault of the diffuse Bastilles of Empire, but more rather
obtained in him a split, a rupture, a schizoid destruction of me in the
confine of myself, a confine where the world, life, and situations, in
brief his proper existence, would be henceforth apprehended as
estranged, as purely objective. This precise constitution of subject,
reduced to contemplate itself in the midst of that which surrounded it,
could be characterized as aesthetic, in the sense where the arrival of
the Bloom also corresponds to a generalized aestheticization of
experience.
In June 1935, Surrealism came to the last supportable limits of its
project of forming the total avant-garde. After eight years passed
trying to hold itself in the service of the French Communist Party, a
too-thick flood of camouflets made it take note of its definitive
disaccord with Stalinism. A discourse written by Breton, but read by
Eluard at the “Congress of writers in defense of culture” must thus mark
the last contact of importance between Surrealism and the PCF, between
the artistic avant-garde and the political avant-garde. Its conclusion
has remained famous: “ ‘Transform the world’ said Marx; ‘change life’
said Rimbaud: for us these two watchwords are one”. Breton did not only
formulate the frustrated hope of a rapprochement, he also expressed the
intimate connection between artistic and political avant-gardism, their
common aesthetic nature. Ergo, in the same manner as Surrealism held
itself towards the PCF, the PCF held itself towards the proletariat. In
The Militants, written in 1949, Arthur Koestler delivers precious
evidence of this form of schizophrenia, of the ventriloquism of class
that is so remarkable in the discourse of Surrealism, but less often
recognized in the delinquent KPD of the start of the 30’s: “A particular
trait of the life of the Party, in this era, was the ‘cult of the
proletarian’ and the hatred of intellectuals. That was the distress and
obsession of all the Communist intellectuals who had issued from the
middle class. We were tolerated in the Movement, but we did not have
full rights: we had to convince them day and night...an intellectual
could never become a veritable proletarian, but his duty was to
approximate this as much as possible. Certain attempted to renounce
ties, wearing working-class sweaters and keeping their nails black. But
such a snobbish imposture was not officially encouraged.” He adds for
its own sake: “In as much as I had only suffered from hunger, I
considered myself as a provisional offshoot of the déclassé bourgeoisie.
But since in 1931 I finally assured myself of a satisfactory situation,
I felt that the hour had come to expand the ranks of the proletariat.”
Therefore, if there is a watchword, certainly unformulated, that the
avant-garde never failed, it is this: go to the masses rather than start
from self. It is also relevant that the man of the avant-garde, after
having gone to the masses for a whole life without ever finding them —
at least where he waited for them — consecrates his old age to deriding
them. The man of the avant-garde could be the sort, advancing in years,
to take the advantageous pose of the man of the Ancien Regime and to
make of his rancor a profitable business. In this manner he will always
live under certainly changing ideological latitudes, but always in the
shadow of the masses that he himself invented.
Our time is a battle. This begins to be known. At stake is the bypassing
of metaphysics, or more exactly the Verwindung of this, a bypassing that
will in the first place remain close at hand. Empire designates the
ensemble of forces that work to conjure this Verwindung to indefinitely
prolong the suspension of the epoch. The wiliest strategy put in the
service of this project, that which must be suspected everywhere there
is a question of “post-modernity”, is to push for a so-called aesthetic
surpassing of the metaphysical. Naturally, one who knows to what
aporetic metaphysics this logic of surpassing would lead us, and who
thus perceives in what deceitful manner aesthetics can serve from now on
as refuge for the same metaphysics — the “modern” metaphysics of
subjectivity — will guess without trouble exactly where Empire would
like to arrive by this maneuver. But what is this menace, this
Verwindung that Empire concentrates so many apparatuses to conjure? This
Verwindung is nothing other than the ethical assumption of the
metaphysical, and by that as well of the aesthetic, in so much as it is
the ultimate form of aesthetics. The avant-garde appears precisely at
this point as center of confusion. On one side, the avant-garde is led
to produce the illusion of a possible aesthetical surpassing of the
metaphysical, but on another side there is always, in the avant-garde,
something that exceeds it and is of an ethical order; which, thus, tends
to the configuration of a world, to the constitution of an ethos of a
shared life. This element is the essential repressed of the avant-garde,
in measuring all the distance that, in the first Surrealism for example,
separated the Rue Fontaine from the Rue du Chateau . It is in this
manner that since the death of Breton, those who have not renounced
laying claim to Surrealism tend to define it as a “civilization”
(Bounoure) or more soberly as a “style” in the manner of baroque,
classicism, or romanticism. The word constellation is perhaps the most
just. And in fact, it is incontestable that Surrealism did not stop
subsisting, in so much as it was living, on the repression of its
propensity to make itself the world, to give itself a positivity.
Since the start of the century, one cannot miss recognizing in France,
notably in Paris, a rich terrain of study in the manner of
auto-suggestion of the avant-garde. Each generation seems to need to
give birth to new conjurers who wait their turn to perform
sleight-of-hand tricks so that they can make themselves believe in
magic. But naturally, from generation to generation, the candidates for
the role of Grand Charlatan only end by tarnishing their reputation,
covering themselves each season with new layers of dust and pallor from
miming the mimes. It has happened, to me and my friends, to cross paths
with these people who distinguish themselves in the literary market as
the most laughable pretenders to avant-gardism. In truth, we have no
more business with this corpse: it was already for specters, for
mummies. In a past era, they had launched a Manifesto for a Literary
Revolution; which was only judicious: their brain — all avant-gardes
have a brain — published his first novel. The novel was titled My Head
in Freedom. It was very bad. It commenced by these words: “They want to
know where I have put my body”. We say that the problem of the
avant-garde is the problem of the head.
With the end of the Hundred Years’ War there was posed the question of
founding a modern theory of the State, a theory of the conciliations of
civil rights and royal soveriengty. Lord Fortescue was one of the first
thinkers to attempt such a foundation, notably in his De Laudibus legum
anglie. The celebrated 13^(th) chapter of this treatise contests the
Augustinian definition of the people — populus est cetus hominum iurus
consenu et utilitatis communion sociatus — A people is a body made by
men that reunites assenting to laws and a community of interests: “Such
a people does not merit being called a body because it is acephalous,
that is to say without a head. Because the same as a natural body after
a decapitation does not remain a body, but what we call a trunk, so in
the body-politic a community without a head is in no case a body.” The
head, after Fortescue, is the king. The problem of the head is the
problem of representation, the problem of the existence of a body that
represents society in so much as a body, of a subject that represents
society in so much as subject — no need to distinguish here between
existential representation as it is performed by the monarch or fascist
leader and the formal representation of the “democratically” elected
president. The avant-garde hence does not solely come to accuse the
artistic crisis of representation — in refusing that “the image be the
semblance of another thing that it represents in its absence”
(Torquemada), but that it be itself a thing — the avant-garde comes also
to precipitate the crisis of the instituted political representation,
that it puts on trial in the name of instituting avant-gardist
representation of the masses. So doing, the avant-garde effectively
surpasses politics or classical aesthetics, but it surpasses them on
their own terrain. The exclusive rapport of negation in which it places
itself vis-a-vis representation is the same that it retains inside
itself. All the currents in advertising their direct democracy, notably
councilist avant-gardism, take from it their stumbling block; opposing
themselves to representation, and by this opposition place
representation in their heart, no longer as principal but this time as
problem. Imperative mandates, delegates revocable at any instant,
autonomous assemblies, etc., there is a whole councilist formalism that
results from the fact that it is still the classical question of better
government that they wish to answer, and by that answer to the problem
of the head. It may be that these currents will always arrive at
overcoming their congenital anemia by favor of exceptional historic
circumstances; it will be thus for representing the departure of
representation. After all, politics also has a right to its own Las
Meninas . In all things, it is in the operation that it completes
whereby one recognizes the avant-garde: putting its body far away,
facing itself, then attempting vainly to rejoin it. While the
avant-gardes go to the masses or deign to mix themselves in the affairs
of their times, it is always in taking care, at first, to distinguish
themselves. It thus sufficed that the Situationists began to have a
semblance of what they called “a practice” in Strasbourg, in the student
milieu, in 1966, so that they could tend brutally towards workerism,
thirty years after the historic collapse of the workers’ movement.
It is curious, but in all very natural, that those who have the
profession of glossing over the avant-garde, and who have never been
short of an anecdote upon the least gesture of those who, in the
Occident, have lived for them, I would like to say upon the thin handful
of avant-gardists of the century; it is curious, therefore, that these
people here, hold themselves back on this point, on the destiny of the
avant-garde in Russia in between the two wars, that is to say the only
historic realization of the avant-garde. The fable says that after an
embarrassed period of toleration in the 20’s, the Bolsheviks being
metamorphosed into terrifying Stalinists, the political avant-garde
liquidated the free and creative proliferation of the artistic
avant-garde, and tyrannically imposed the reactionary, retrograde, and
to sum up vulgar doctrine of “socialist realism”. Naturally this is a
little short. From the top, then: in 1914 collapsed the liberal
hypothesis, in so much as an answer to the problem of the head. As
regards the cybernetic hypothesis, it will be necessary to wait until
the end of the Second World War for it to impose itself completely. This
interregnum, which thus must be understood as 1914 to 1945, will be the
golden age for the avant-garde, of the avant-garde as the project of
differently answering the problem of the head. This project will be that
of the total re-creation of the world by the artist of the avant-garde;
what one has called more modestly, later, “the realization of art”. It
will be notably carried, and in an ever more mystical manner, by the
successive currents of the Russian avant-garde, from the LEF to Opoaiz,
from suprematism to productionism in passing by constructivism. It was
thus a question of the radical modification of the conditions of
existence, to forge a new humanity, “the blank humanity” of which
Malevitch spoke. But the avant-garde, being tied by a rapport of
negation of traditional culture and thus with the past, could not
realize this program. Like Moses, it could carry its dream, but not
accomplish it. The role of the “architect of the new life”, of “engineer
of the human soul” never came back to it, precisely because it was
attached, even be it by rejection, to ancient art. Its project, which
only the Party could realize, of which the avant-garde never stopped to
advertise was that it would put to work, that it would utilize, that it
would make it serve the construction of the new socialist society.
Mayakovsky demanded without malice that “the pen be assimilated as the
bayonet and that the writer be able to, like no other soviet enterprise,
balance accounts with the Party in raising ‘a hundred volumes of Party
cards’”. Nothing shocking here, as the resolution of the Central
Committee of the Party on April 23, 1932, that pronounced the
dissolution of all the artistic groupings had been saluted by a large
part of the Russian avant-gardists. The Party, in its first Five Year
Plan, did it not take up with its watchword “transformation of all life”
the maximum aesthetic project of the avant-garde? In consenting to
repress and thus to recognize the activities and aesthetic deviations of
the avant-garde as political, did not the Party endorse the role of the
collective artist, for which the entire country would be hereafter
nothing more than the material with which it was to impose the shape of
its general plan of organization? In fact, that which one interprets
most often as the authoritarian liquidation of the avant-garde, and that
one must consider more exactly as its suicide, was instead the debut of
the realization of its program. “The aestheticization of politics was
only, for the leadership of the Party, a reaction to the politicization
of aesthetics by the avant-garde” (Boris Groys, Staline oeuvre d’art
totale). Hence, with this resolution, the Party explicitly became the
head, the head which, lacking a body, would come itself to form a new
one, ex nihilo. The immanent circularity of Marxian causality, which
would have it that the conditions of existence determine human
consciousness and that humans themselves make, though unconsciously,
their conditions of existence, only left to the Party the point of view,
for justifying its demiurgic pretension for a total reconstruction of
reality, of a sovereign Creator, of an absolute aesthetic subject.
Socialist Realism, in which one feigns to see a return to folkloric
figuration, to classicism in artistic matters, and as Groys observes
more generally, “Stalinist culture, if we consider it in the perspective
of a theoretical reflection of the avant-garde upon itself, appears
rather as its radicalization and formal surpassing”. The recourse to
classical elements, condemned by the avant-garde, did but mark the
sovereignty of this surpassing, of the great leap forward of
post-historical times, where all the aesthetic elements of the past can
be equally borrowed, put to profit, at the whims of a utility that finds
a totally new society, without connections, and by that without hate,
towards past history. All the posterior avant-gardism will never
renounce this promethean perspective, this project of a total remaking
of the world; and by that to envisage itself as a sovereign subject, at
the same time contemporaneous with its time and separated from it by a
necessary aesthetic distance. The growing comedy of the matter certainly
holds for the aspiring avant-gardists who have not understood that since
1945 the cybernetic hypothesis, in decapitating the liberal hypothesis,
has suppressed the problem of the head, and therefore it is each day
more vain to flatter oneself to respond to it. The ultimate goals of the
avant-garde were thus to be all uniformly marked by the same stamp of
grotesque unreality, of a failed remake. This is without doubt what the
authors of the sole internal critique of the Situationist International
to appear in its time wanted to say, since they wrote in L’unique et sa
propriete “ All the avant-gardes are dependent on the old world of which
they mask the decrepitude under their illusory youthfulness...The
Situationist International is the conjunction of the avant-gardes in
avant-gardism. It has mixed the amalgam of all the avant-gardes with the
synthesis and reprise of all the radical currents of the past.” The
brochure, published in Strasbourg in 1967, was subtitled For a critique
of avant-gardism. It denounced the ideology of coherence, of
communication, of internal democracy and of transparency by which a
spectral groupuscule maintained itself, surviving artificially with the
help of voluntarism.
No doubt Futurism has contributed in a considerable manner to the
contemporary definition of the avant-garde. Consequently it is not bad
to resume the lecture at a point where the avant-garde can no longer be
more than an object of raillery or nostalgia: “We dictate our first
wishes to all the men living on the earth...Poetry must be a violent
assault against unknown forces, to summon them to bow down before man.
We are at the extreme promontory of centuries! What good to regard
behind us, in the moment when we must smash the mysterious windows of
the Impossible? Time and Space were dead yesterday. We already live in
the absolute, because we have created the eternal omnipresent speed. We
want to glorify war — sole hygiene of the world — militarism,
patriotism, the destructive acts of the anarchists, beautiful Ideas that
kill, and disdain of women...We will sing of the great crowds agitated
by work, pleasure, or revolt.” It is nowhere here a question of irony,
even less of morality, but solely of comprehension. Of understanding, as
a type, that the avant-garde was born as a masculine reaction to the
inhabitable character of the world such that the Imperial Machine had
commenced to develop, as the wish to re-appropriate the non-world of
autonomous technique. The avant-garde was born as a reaction to the fact
that all determination had become ridiculous in the midst of universal
commodity equivalency. To the intolerable human marginality in the
Spectacle, the avant-garde responded by proclamation, by the
proclamation of the self as center; a proclamation besides which only
illusorily abolished its peripheral character. From thence comes the
frenzied competition, the syndrome of chronic obsolescing, and the
tragi-comic fetishism of tiny differences which agitates the miniscule
universe of the avant-gardes, and which also finally offers a spectacle
as painful as those terrible fights of the hobos in the Metro at the
hour of the last train. That the avant-garde was essentially an affair
of men must be comprehended in close relation to that. The movement of
the avant-garde is largely negative, it is the retreat in advance, the
forced march of classical virility, in peril, towards a final blindness,
towards an ignorance of self more sophisticated still than that which
had for so long distinguished the occidental male. The need of mediating
his rapport with self by a representation — that of his place in the
History of politics or art, in the “revolutionary movement” or more
commonly in the avant-gardist group itself — corresponds solely to the
incapacity of the man of the avant-garde to LIVE IN DETERMINITY, to his
real acosmism. In his empty affirmation of self, the profession of a
personal originality advantageously substitutes itself for the
assumption of his derisory singularity. By singularity, I understand
here a presence that does not concern itself only with space and time,
but of a signifying constellation and of the happenings in its heart.
And this is well because this singularity finds nowhere access to its
proper determinity, to its body, because as the avant-garde pretends to
the most exact, to the most magisterial representation of life, that is
to say to strike this singularity, absurdly, of its name — one is
therefore right to question oneself, outside of the managerial
hypothesis of a collective exercise in auto-persuasion, on the meaning
of the Situationist conclusion that “our ideas are in everyone’s heads”:
in what proportion can an idea in everyone’s head belong to anyone? But
happily for us, number 7 of the Situationist International has the last
word on this enigma: “We are the representatives of the overpowering
idea of the great majority”. As we know, all of this admirably
accommodates a Hegelianism that is merely the puffed-up expression of an
inaptitude for assuming its own singularity of its normal character —
one opportunely remembers above all on this subject the start of the
Phenomenology of Spirit, of which the inaugural gesture, a veritable
trick of a one-armed juggler, is to disqualify determinity: “The
universal is thus in fact the true of sensible certitude...since I say
me, this singular me here, I say in general all the me’s” That the
implosion and dissolution of the SI coincided exactly with the historic
possibility to lose itself in its time, to participate in a determining
fashion, is the foreseeable lot of those who hurried themselves to write
on the subject of May 1968: “The Situationists...had for many years very
exactly foreseen the current explosion and its results...Radical theory
has been confirmed.” (Situationists and Enrages in the Occupations
Movement). We see it there: the avant-gardist utopia has never been
anything else than this final annulling of life in discourse, of the
appropriation of an event by its representation. If thus one must
characterize the avant-gardist regime of subjectivation, one could say
it is that of the petrifying proclamation, that of an agitated
impotence.
“The Obscure Privacy in the Hollow of the Shoe” (Heidegger, Holzwege)
On September 1^(st) 1957, that is to say a little before the foundation
of the Situationist International, Guy Debord sent Asger Jorn, his
favorite alter ego of those days, a letter where he affirms the
necessity of forging around this grouping a “new legend”. The
“avant-garde” never designates a determined positivity, but always the
fact of a pretend positivity: first, to maintain itself durably in
negativity, and second to award itself its own character of negativity,
of “radicality”, its own revolutionary essence. In this way the
avant-garde has never had a substantial enemy, despite that it makes a
great show of its diverse enmity in regard to this or that; the
avant-garde only proclaims itself the enemy of this or that. Such is the
projection that it operates behind itself to earn the place that it
intends for itself in the system of representation. Naturally, for this
the avant-garde commences to spectralize itself, that is to say
represent itself in all its aspects, therefore discouraging the enemy
from doing so. Its mode of being positive is hence always a pure
paranoiac negativity, at the mercy of any trivial appreciation on its
account, upon the curiosity of the first imbecile to arrive; a
Bourseiller, for example. It is why the avant-gardes so often have the
sentiment of a failed encounter, of a rickety assemblage, ill-at-ease,
of monads waiting to discover, through this or that shock, their lack of
affinity, their intimate dereliction. And this is why in all
avant-gardes the sole moment of truth is that of their dissolution.
There is always at the base of avant-gardist relations this substratum
of contempt, this unshakeable hostility that characterizes the terrible
community. The suicide of Crevel, the resignation letter of Vaneigem,
the circular for the auto-dissolution of Socialisme ou Barbarie, the end
of the Red Brigades, always the same knot of icy hatred. In the
injunction, in the scarlet letters of “one must...”, in the manifesto,
identically resounds the hope of a pure negation that could give birth
to a determination, that a discourse could miraculously make a world.
But the actions of the avant-garde are not very good. None can ever hold
themselves towards “practice”, “life”, or the “community” for the simple
reason that each one is always already present, and it is merely a
question of taking responsibility for what practice, what life, what
community there is; and to make oneself the bearer of the proper
techniques to modify these. But what is there is precisely unassumable
in the avant gardist regime of subjectivation.
Since the famous “Poetry must be made by all, not by one” of Lautremont
until its interpretation of the “creative” wing of the movement of 77 —
“the mass avant-garde” — everything attests to the curious propensity of
the avant-garde artist to recognize in the O.S. their look-alike, their
brother, their veritable addressee. The constancy of this propensity is
all the more curious in that it has almost never paid in return. As if
this constancy expressed nothing else than a bad conscience, of the
“head” for its supposed body, for example. Really, it is that there is
effectively a solidarity in existence, of art as separated sphere from
the rest of social activity, and the inauguration of work as the common
lot of humanity. The modern invention of work as abstract work, without
qualifications, as indifferentiation of all the activities under this
category affects itself according to a myth: that of the pure act, of
the act without a how, that reabsorbs itself entirely in its result, and
of which the accomplishment exhausts all signification. Still today,
where the term remains employed, “work” designates all that is lived in
the imperative degeneration of how. Everywhere the question of how acts,
things, or words, is suspended, derealized, displaced, there is work.
Now there is also a modern invention of art, simultaneous and
symmetrical to that of work, which is an invention of art in so much as
special activity, producing oeuvres and not simple commodities. And it
is in this sector that will concentrate itself henceforth all attention
previously denied to the how, that will be as a collection of all the
lost signification of productive acts. The art will be this activity
that, as the inverse of work, will never exhaust itself in its own
accomplishment. It will be the sphere of the enchanted gesture, where
the exceptional personality of the artist will give, under the form of
Spectacle, to the rest of humanity the example of forms of life that it
is henceforth forbidden to them to undertake. To Art will be thus
confided, for the price of its complicity and silence, the monopoly of
the how of acts. The inauguration of an autonomous sphere where the how
of each act is without end weighed, analyzed, commented upon, has since
then not ceased to nourish proscription in the rest of the alienated
social rapports of all evocation of the hows of existence. There, in
everyday life, productive, normal, there must not be but pure acts,
without hows, without any other reality than their raw result. The world
in its desolation can only be peopled by objects that never return to
themselves, never come to presence other than as the title of products,
not configuring anything other than a constellation of the presence of
this kingdom that has used them as tools. So that the how of certain
acts can become artistic, it necessarily follows that the hows of all
the other acts cease to be real, and inversely as well. The figure of
the avant-garde artist and that of the O.S. are polar figures of modern
alienation, as ghostly as they are interdependent. The offensive return
of the question of how finds them facing self as that from which they
must equally protect themselves.
The innate part of the failure that determines a collective enterprise
like the avant-garde is its incapacity to make a world. All the
splendors, all the actions, all the discourses of the avant-garde
unceasingly fail to give it a body; it all happens in the head of the
few, where the unity, the organic content of the ensemble flourish, but
only for thinking, that is to say externally. Common ties, weapons, a
unique temporality, a shared elaboration of everyday life, all sorts of
determined things are necessary so that a world can arrive. Ergo it is
justice if all the manifestations of the avant-garde finish up in the
museum, because they are already there before being exposed as such.
Their experimental pretension designates nothing else: the fact that an
ensemble of gestures, practices, and relations — as transgressive as
they may be — does not make a world; Weiner Aktionismus knew something.
The museum is the most striking form of the
world-that-is-no-longer-a-world. All that rests in a museum results from
the tearing away of a fragment, of a detail from its organic milieu. He
might have suggested it, but he never understood it — what Heidegger was
so heavily fooled by in The Origin of the Work of Art in placing the
work of art at the origin of itself: to be a work of art does not
signify “creating a world” but rather to carry on mourning-; the work,
to the difference of the thing, is but the melancholy refuse of
something that once lived. But the museum only collects “works of art”
and one sees here in what manner the “work of art” is right away the
death of art: a thing right away produced as a work brings with it its
lack of the world, and by that its insignificant destiny — it pretends
also, through the history of art, to reconstruct for them an abstract
dwelling, to make a world fit for them, where they will find themselves
in good company among those who have succeeded, like all the nouveaux
riches meet one another in their clubs on Friday night. But between the
“works of art” there is nothing, nothing but the pedantic discourse of
the most frigid of the philosophies of history: the history of art. I
say frigid because it is on all points identical to capitalist
valorization.
One has had the custom, for several years, to give the avant-garde grief
for a too-visible complicity with “modernity”; one reproaches it for
sharing with this modernity a too shallow idea of history, a new cult
that is at bottom a faith in Progress. And it is certain, in effect,
that the avant-garde is in its essence teleological — that one could
represent the synoptic history of the different artistic movement and
that of the radical political groupuscules by the same type of diagram
is here more shocking than this or that common Hegelian hobby-horse, the
death of Art or the end of History. But it is first of all because it
determines by the mode of being perceptible, and by the fashion of
living as always-already posthumous, that the historicism of the
avant-gardes condemns itself. In this way one periodically observes this
curious phenomenon: an avant-garde occupies in its own time a
more-than-marginal position even if it occupies it with the pretension
of being the center of history; its time past, all the actuality of this
retires as well; and it is while the avant-garde comes to be uncovered
that it emerges from its epoch as the most pure substratum. In this
manner operates a sort of resurrection of the avant-garde — Debord and
the situationists offer an illustration of this, almost too exemplary,
and so foreseeable — which makes itself pass for the heart, for the key
of its epoch, if not for its epoch itself. At the base of the
avant-gardist regime of subjectivation, there is therefore this
confusion between history and the philosophy of history, a confusion
that permits the avant-garde to take itself for history. In fact,
everything happens as if the avant-garde had, in sheltering itself in
its own times, made an investment and that it sees itself accordingly,
posthumously, remunerated in terms of historical consideration.
In 1931 in Le Travailleur, Junger noted: “We live in a world that on one
side exactly resembles a workshop and on the other looks exactly like a
museum”. A dozen years later, Heidegger exposed in his course on
Nietzsche the hypothesis of the achievement of metaphysics: “The end of
metaphysics that must be thought of here is the debut of its
‘resurrection’ in derived forms: these are no longer left to history,
properly speaking, and now they complete fundamental metaphysical
positions as the economic role of furnishing the materials of
construction with which, transformed in a corresponding fashion, the
world of ‘knowing’ will be reconstructed anew...According to all
appearance, we are at the equalizing of different fundamental positions,
of their elements and their doctrinal concepts.” Our time is the general
recapitulation of all past history. The imperial project to finish with
history concordantly takes the form of an historical appropriation of
all past events, and hopes with that to neutralize them. The institution
of the museum does but sectorally realize the project of a general
museumification of the world. All the attempts of the avant-garde have
taken place in this, at the same time, real and imaginary theatre. But
this recapitulation is equally well the dissipation of the historicist
illusion in which the avant-garde lives, with its pretension to novelty,
to uniqueness, to originality without replica. In such a movement where
the element of time reabsorbs itself into the element of meaning, where
all past history gathers itself in a topology of positions amongst
which, for lack of these being known to everyone, we must learn to
orient ourselves, we assist in the progressive accretion of
constellations. Men like Aby Warbug with his drawing boards, or Georges
Duthuit, in his Unimaginable Museum, began to sketch such
constellations, to liberate each aesthetic from its ethical content.
Those of our days who move closer, in the same cavalier fashion, to the
punk of certain para-existential circles of the after-war years, then
those of the Gnostic effervescence of the first centuries of our era, do
nothing else as well. Beyond the temporal spacing which separates them
from the points of illusion, each of these constellations understands
gestures, rituals, enunciations, uses, practical arts, determined forms
of life, in brief: a proper Stimmung . It assembles by attraction all
the details of a world, which advertises being animated, being
inhabited. In the context where the avant-gardes affirmed themselves and
a fortiori today, the question has, for a long time, not been to make a
novelty, but to make a world. Each thing, each being, that coming into
presence brings with it an economy given by presence configures a world.
Going from that, it is a question solely of inhabiting the determinity
of the constellation which deploys itself always-already in our
presence, to follow our derisory, contingent, and finte taste. All
revolt that goes from self, of the hic et nunc where it reposes, of the
inclinations that traverse it, goes in this sense. The movement of 77 in
Italy remains, as such, a promising failure.
One of the most feeble books on the avant-gardes of the second half of
the twentieth century certified, in 1980, The Auto-dissolution of the
Avant-Gardes. The author, Rene Lourau, the founder of the totally
laughable “institutional analysis”, omits, needless to say, the
essential: to say in what the avant-gardes were dissolved. The most
recent progress of the occidental neurosis has long since been
confirmed: the avant-garde was dissolved in the totality of social
relations. The henceforth banal characterization of our times as
“post-modern” evokes nothing else, even if it is only another way to
purge modernity of all its trimmings to save the fundamental act: that
of surpassing — it is not fortuitous, in this, that even the term “post
modernism” made its first appearance in 1934 in the circles of the
Spanish avant-garde. Equally well, the best definition that Debord gave
to the Spectacle — “a social relation between persons, mediated by
images” — and that today defines the dominant social relation, only
takes note of the generalization of the mode of avant-gardist being. The
Bloom is thus those for whom all the relations, to self as to others,
are entirely mediated by autonomous representations. It is the careerist
who organizes his permanent auto-promotion, the cynic who menaces at
each instant to let themselves be absorbed by one of their discursive
excrescences or to disappear in a chasm of bathmological irony. The
paranoia of the avant-garde has also been diffused, with this diffuse
manner of carrying itself as the exception to itself at each instant of
life; with this general disposition to build itself its own personal,
remote-controlled little legend. Enzensberger was not all wrong to see
in the Bild-Zeitung the achieved realization of the avant-garde, as much
from the point of view of formal transgression as from collective
elaboration. A certain dose of Situationism also seems demanded for all
well-paid work, at present. The particular appropriately incisive tone
of this intervention meets here its content: it is only a matter of
liberating ethical signification from the avant-garde.
As epilogue to this, it does not seem superfluous to evoke a point of
reversal for the avant-garde. Acephale, symbol of the crowd without a
leader, names one of its extreme points. Acephale tends to liberate
itself from the problem of the head. All the agitation, all the
gesticulation of the avant-garde, be it artistic or political, Acephale
would like to erase this in erasing itself, in renouncing a form of
action “that is but the placing of existence for later”. Acephale would
like to be this secret existential society, this elective community that
would assemble “the individuals truly decided to undertake the struggle,
at a small scale to the need, but on the efficacious path where their
attempt risks becoming epidemic, to the end of measuring itself with
society on its own terrain and to attack it with its own arms, that is
to say to constitute themselves in a community, more still, in ceasing
to make the values that they defend the perquisite of rebels and
insurgents, regarding them in the inverse as the first values of the
society that they would like to see installed and that as the most
social of all they must be somewhat implacable...To the constitution in
groups presides the desire to combat society in so much as society, the
plan to confront it as the most dense and solid structure tending to
install itself as a cancer in the heart of a structure more unstable and
loose, although incomparably more voluminous.” (Caillois, Le Vent
d’hiver). The papers of Henri Dussat, member of Acephale, contains a
note dated march 25 1938 “To tend to ethics, there is the resolution
that one recognizes, or of that which is wicked to recognize the
Christian as the supreme value. Another thing is to move oneself in
ethics.” Looking explicitly to constitute itself as a world, Acephale
did not only break with the avant-garde, it retook also that which, in
the avant-garde, had been something other than the avant-garde, that is
to say precisely the desire that was aborted there: “Since the end of
the dada period the project of a secret society charged with giving a
sort of active reality to the aspirations that were defined in part
under the name of surrealism has always rested an object of
preoccupation, at least in the background.” Recalled Bataille in the
conference of the College of Sociology on March 19, 1938. Acephale,
however, would not come to exist so much as to contaminate. Although
being full of rites, of habits, of sacred texts and ceremonies, the
proclamatory politics that, externally, had disappeared remained
internally; so much so that the watchword of community, of secret
society, finally will absorb the reality of these terms. Acephale was
almost exclusively, and more reasonably than Surrealism for example, an
affair of men. Acephale did not know, to crown it all, how to pass by
the head and how to not be, from one end to the other, the community of
only Bataille: as he alone wrote the genealogy, the “internal journal”
which gave birth to Acephale, as he alone defined the rites of this
order, he finished alone, imploring his pale companions to sacrifice at
the foot of his scared tree: “It was very beautiful. But we all had the
sentiment of participating in something that happened on the part of
Bataille, in the head of Bataille.” (Klossowski).
It would not seem opportune to take a conclusion, even less a program,
from what is going to be said.
Following from what I know, a certain relation must be able to be
established with the Invisible Committee; be it only in the sense of a
generalization of insinuation.
It must be said in passing: there is not a problem of the head, there is
but a paralysis of the body, of the act.