william watkin's blog (since 2003)

The Practice of Everyday, Everybody, Everything At one point Lefebvre declares, “the true critique of everyday life will have as its prime objective the separation between the human (real and possible) and bourgeois decadence, and will imply a rehabilitation of everyday life” (Lefebvre, Critique 127). The right of each individual to a rehabilitated everyday life, that is one divested of bourgeois categorisation, returns us back to the predicament of David Antin’s mother. Denied access to the everyday, her world becomes increasingly confusing and hostile to her, her own world hostile to her, in a manner Lefebvre calls alienation. Undoubtedly, he does not see the rehabilitation of the everyday coming from the avant-garde, quite the opposite in fact, but his comment does raise a radical issue in relation to the perceived gap between art and life which is, that removal of this gap as much requires a radicalisation of the everyday as it does the processes of artistic creation. If this is to...

In the Event of Avant-Garde Practice… For Lyotard, the sense of practice as the site for a radical challenge to the totalising dominance of bourgeois art is equally as strong as in Burger and Kristeva. However, because he comes from a critical, essentially Kantian, philosophical tradition, rather than a dialectical, Hegelian, tradition, his sense of practice is somewhat different. For Kant, the practical realm is the realm of understanding whose adherence to natural laws is called into the pleasure/pain realm of the sublime, by the demands of infinite reason on its finite limits. His schema is as predominant within the category of art as the dialectical schema, and, traditionally, it has relegated the practical realm to a pedestrian and secondary function. However, Lyotard looks to rehabilitate it through his use of the sublime event. The event is the representative and temporal incommensurability of the moment, which is doubly sublime: the experience of the “it happens,” proof of the ...

The Practice of the Avant-Garde Kristeva is in agreement with Burger, that the aim of the avant-garde from the epistemological break onwards has been to return the fetishised, autonomous art “object” or “book,” back to the realm of social practice. However, she moves beyond the somewhat simplified, and metaphysically predictable, dichotomy success/failure that dominates Burger’s work, and leaves him ultimately within the realm of reifying criticism. Burger presents us with a central avant-garde intention, which is readable, is conveyed through work, and which, because he says it failed, could also be conceived of as succeeding. This is the main difference between his idea of the sublation of art/life-praxis, and Kristeva’s formulation of signifying practice, a difference as radical again, as that between the practice of work and art/life-praxis that Burger maps out. Kristeva defines practice as something which is, somehow, a utilisation of the experience of heterogeneous contradiction ...

The Praxis of the Avant-Garde At the root of these three critical theories of the avant-garde is the theory of practice and, indeed, it may be said that when one talks of the avant-garde, one is always, by implication, talking about the practice of the avant-garde. This conception of practice takes on special resonance only when considered in terms of work. It is more usual when analysing any movement to consider the work of that movement, and whether you are a hermeneutic or materialist critic, it is with work and works that you are finally concerned. This is necessitated by the retrospective temporal category which is criticism, which must, in almost all cases, make art forms into fetishised objects treated in a quasi-archaeological fashion. In calling the avant-garde a practice, one is not saying therefore that there are no avant-garde works of art, rather one is saying that the avant-garde confronts the category of “work” with the category of “practice” and, at least for a period, ...

Lyotard’s “sublime” Lyotard’s conception of what is essentially not the sublime but the Kantian sublime, is not initially posited in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime as a development of his earlier work on the sublime and the postmodern and the sublime and the avant-garde. Rather, it is an attempt to read the sublime as a “tautegorical” sensation of pleasure and pain which marks the point where Kant’s critical schema is cut across by the manner of his text. This manner is the way in which we linger over the beautiful, the way in which tautegorical sensation causes us to linger rather than rationally follow through Kant’s heuristic schema, which he lays out for the third Kritik. However, away from the “letter” of Lyotard’s text, which itself purports to stray from the “letter” of Kant’s text, we can find a vital addition to critical theory of the avant-garde. Earlier work has, of course, provided useful clues as to how we might carry out such a reading. “Answering the Question Wha...

Kristeva’s Subject En Procès As much as it is necessary to understand the historicisation of bourgeois art categories to comprehend Burger’s theory of the historical avant-garde, it is necessary to understand Kristeva’s conception of signifying practice to comprehend her concept of the avant-garde and its ability to put the subject en procès (on trial). I will not summarise the whole of her argument in Revolution in Poetic Language, [i] rather I will restrict myself to a brief outline of her concept of signifying practice, and then go on in more detail to look at its implications for the avant-garde. Strictly speaking, Revolution in Poetic Language is not a theory of the avant-garde, but of the manner in which revolution within social structures can find an equivalent through linguistic structures, in the subject. [ii] Subjective “revolution,” further, is not actuated especially by what Burger would identify as the historical avant-garde, and indeed the second part of the work which ...

This article was originally a chapter in my PhD thesis that did not make it into In the Process of Poetry. I write because it is natural like I piss like I’m ill...We are looking for a straightforward pure sober unique force we are looking for NOTHING we affirm the VITALITY of every instant... Tzara, “Unpretentious Proclamation” The word leads a double life. Sometimes it simply grows like a plant whose fruit is a geode of sonorous stones clustering around it; in this case the sound element lives a self-sufficient life, while the particle of sense named by the word stands in shadow. At other times the word is subservient to sense...sound becomes merely a “name” and humbly carries out the commands of sense... Khlebnikov, “On Contemporary Poetry” Only the unsyntactical poet who unlinks his words can penetrate the essence of matter and destroy the dumb hostility that separates it from us. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” After you have settled yourself in a place as ...