the owl of minerva: all flights canceled

I did manage to do set aside some time around football to look over Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and Lyotard’s “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” yesterday.  It had been a while since I’d read either – about 10 years for the latter, maybe eight for the former.  So I was a little apprehensive as to whether the comparison I offered was actually appropriate or simply a product of faulty memory.  After looking at them, I think it is woth exploring. Caveats: there's a lot I'm going to leave on the table - I’m not interested here in hashing out the Lyotard-Habermas debate, however fun that might be, nor am I looking at either essay in the broader context of the writers’ work. I also have to admit that I’m not sure I’m up to all of the work involved in drawing out the important points.  Thinking is hard, which is why I normally don't do it.

Fortunately, Dan has already done some of it for me in his comment here.  His “sense that both engage in similar strategies of revolutionary rhetoric” is especially to the point.  Greenberg’s Marxist rhetoric is more forthright, but that is partly a reflection of the time and place of his writing.  There are other comparisons to make as well: Greenberg’s “Alexandrianism” is matched by Lyotard’s “period of slackening”; both respond to this unsatisfactory condition by trying to get something moving; both see the stakes involved as not merely aesthetic but involving the most serious social and political questions.  While they have different underlying analyses of society, both view realism as kitsch and discuss it in terms of political arrangements:

Realism, whose only definition is that it intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in that of art, always stands somewhere between academicism and kitsch.  When power assumes the name of a party, realism and its neo-classical complement triumph over the experimental avant-garde by slandering and banning it – that is, provided the “correct” images, the “correct” narratives, “ the “correct” forms which the party requests, selects, and propagates can find a public to desire them as the appropriate remedy for the anxiety and depression that public experiences.

That’s Lyotard, but the main difference here with Greenberg lies simply in what degree of agency each writer attributes to political authority as opposed to the public.

Most importantly, both are committed to the avant-garde as the motor for the creative movement needed to counter a period of slackening.  They understand it in different ways, but not entirely so.  Obviously realism stands condemned as academic (if not fascist) by Greenberg and Lyotard alike, but eclecticism also is the enemy.  For Greenberg, “the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or besides the point.”  Lyotard might have shuddered at the very mention of “the absolute”  And yet, consider this passage from "Avant-Garde and Kitsch":

As for the other fields of literature – the definition of avant-garde aesthetics advanced here is no Procrustean bed.  Bust aside from the fact that most of our best contemporary novelists have gone to school with the avant-garde, it is significant that Gide’s most ambitious book is a novel about the writing of a novel, and that Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem to be, above all, as one French critic says, the reduction of experience to expression for the sake of expression, the expression mattering more than what is being expressed.

That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating – the fact itself – calls for neither approval nor disapproval.  It is true that this culture contains within itself some of the very Alexandriamism it seeks to overcome.  The lines quoted from Yeats referred to Byzantium, which is very close to Alexandria; and in a sense this imitation of imitating is a superior sort of Alexandrianism.  But there is one most important difference: the avant-garde moves, while Alexandrianism stands still.

Compare to the later essay: Lyotard’s postmodernism is a moment within the modern, just as Greenberg’s modernism is a “superior sort of Alexandrianism.”  Rather than a turn to the absolute, the postmodern avant-garde turns toward an aesthetic of the sublime, which Lyotard articulates by comparing Proust (modern) to Joyce (postmodern):

Joyce allows the unpresentable to become perceptible in his writing itself, in the signifier.  The whole range of available narrative and even stylistic operators is put into play without concern for the unity of the whole, and new operators are tried.  The grammar and vocabulary of literary language are no longer accepted as given; rather, they appear as academic forms, as rituals originating in piety (as Nietzsche said) which prevent the unpresentable from being put forward.

I think they may have read the same French critic.

Lyotard may have been thinking of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (I am comfortable in the assumption that he knew it) when he called the outline he provided of realism and kitsch a “narrowly sociologizing and historizing” one.  In making the comparisons that I have, I don’t mean to deny the differences in tone and substance between the two essays.  In the comment linked to above, Dan asks about the ways in which the two differ and tentatively offers the opposition of Greenberg’s Marxism to Lyotard’s Nietzchean orientation.  I don't believe either author addresses the question of time in their respective essays, but it’s obviously central to any attempt like these to set aesthetics in motion.  Without getting too far into it, I’d say that in this area Lyotard owes more directly to Levinas than Nietzsche – as the man says, “The Sublime is Now.”  I do wonder if a commitment to avant-gardism means necessarily means some sort of residual commitment to the dialectic (Michael Fried notes in his introduction to Art and Objecthood the underlying influence of Lukacs on his early criticism, for instance.)  More importantly for this discussion, I wonder what an attempt to provide a jump-start to the times might look like without avant-gardism.

I've only scratched the surface here.  I haven't even really addressed how these essays function, how they go about doing the work they do.  It's a start, though.  As for Timothy Quigley's comment, I was (perhaps too glibly) expressing my skepticism about a thorough "sociology of art".  Danto's work, or what I've read of it, has a more theoretical bent than what I was contemplating.  I do agree that we all should "come to terms with the practices that constitute the contemporary artworld"; I suppose I was simply venting my frustration at grasping bits and pieces and not the whole picture.  I'm just a crypto-fascist totalizer that way.  Nostalgic, too, no doubt.

Comments

[Dan]

"I don't believe either author addresses the question of time in their respective essays"

Hmmm. I really do need to reread them.

[Miguel Sánchez]

If I may hedge a little: I was going by memory, so I may have missed something. And by "addresses the question", I meant in a sustained, explicit way. I suppose one can say that any attempt to talk about modernism (or postmodernism) involves talking about time (and some of Lyotard's comments go in that direction), but again, I meant something more than that. Both are involved in temporality, but don't really get too explicit about what that means here. They do elsewhere, though, in their different ways.

[Timothy Quigley]

Hmmm...thought I posted a comment last night before running off to class but now it's nowhere to be found. Oh well...I'll try to get back to this later today. For now I must say I'm struck by how easily a discussion can get lost or overlooked when it's in the comment section of a blog. This may be a structural problem or just my own ineptitude, but it seems these items do not typically trigger a notice -- email or by news aggregator -- to those who are otherwise following the posts on a blog. Am I missing something? Yes. More later on Clem and J-F...

[Miguel Sánchez]

thought I posted a comment last night before running off to class but now it's nowhere to be found.

I didn't see anything come through. I think you did leave a comment along these lines over at Iconoduel; perhaps you are thinking of that one?

I appreciate having comments and like to leave them elsewhere, when it's appropriate and I have time. But it's true that things can get buried. I have no idea about the technical aspects of putting them in a feed or email alerts and so on. Heck, if Typepad didn't have templates and menus to create and run a site, I probably wouldn't have one at all. I'm not very good at this stuff.

It is one of the silver linings that the art sites are unlikely to grow so big as to have their comments sections deteriorate as happens elsewhere. But then again, maybe I'm wrong; check out the Talkback areas on Artforum. Scary.