[HN Gopher] The Last Avant-Garde
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The Last Avant-Garde
Author : apollinaire
Score : 32 points
Date : 2024-07-17 05:00 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
| ggm wrote:
| To read about the real, original Avant-Garde, I recommend "The
| Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France - 1885 to
| World War I" by Roger Shattuck. It's a great book about a true
| revolution in the arts.
|
| The situationists were (in my personal opinion) non-productive
| poseurs. Too much bound in the manifesto and not equal to the
| times they lived in.
|
| Perhaps to one side, at the end of the situationists time, ex-
| anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit started levering the cobblestones up
| to make barricades and wound up a TV pundit and Co-opeted into
| the state political arena of the EU. Regis Debray was critical of
| Situationists. Tariq Ali likewise. I don't think they were as
| smart, or useful as they thought.
|
| Organised Labour movements have little need of public
| intellectuals, and their postures.
| gran_colombia wrote:
| This is impossibly pedantic.
|
| Lots of claims that artists are confined to their media. This
| assertion is false. Artists mix in new technology, innovate all
| the time.
|
| A lot of emphasis is put on the history of ideas, establishing a
| pedigree for the situationists, as if that pedigree lent
| credibility. This is juvenile.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Today's young adults would give an arm and a leg to live in a
| society as safe and comfortable as the one the situationists were
| criticizing and rebeling against.
|
| Unfortunately it's not going to happen any time soon.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| A little hard to believe anyone in 40s/50s Europe felt
| particularly safe and comfortable!
| meindnoch wrote:
| Wrong. The situationist movement was politically active in
| the years leading up to 1968. The Society of the Spectacle
| was written in 1967.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| A little hard to believe anyone in 60s Europe felt
| _particularly_ safe and comfortable!
| meindnoch wrote:
| I don't know what to say then. Maybe study some history?
| Ask your parents?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_economic_miracle
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II
| _ec...
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Ah I see. I think if you read what situationists and the
| like actually said, you'd learn that such examples of
| rapid of capitalist growth is precisely the object of
| their critique!
|
| Like it or not, many thinkers in this era do not see
| liberalism as a particularly powerful answer or
| conclusion to the terror of facism they lived through or
| inherited. Quite the opposite in fact! And situationism
| falls squarely in this camp.
|
| I gather you would not agree, totally fine, but that is
| different than asserting "they just didn't know how lucky
| they already had it."
|
| But then again, from your original comment, what has gone
| wrong since? Why have we forever lost our safety and
| comfort? If it is not something intrinsic to what began
| during such reconstructions, I wonder what external force
| you have in mind?
| prewett wrote:
| The article talks about AI, but I think it's interesting that Ted
| Gioia ("Honest Broker"), similarly, talks about the lack of a
| counter-culture [1]. I propose that the avant-garde has been
| synonymous with deconstruction / meaninglessness and the
| Enlightenment project of personal freedom. Now that we've come to
| the place where anyone can define their own gender, or, indeed,
| choose to identify as a completely different species from Homo
| sapiens, where is there left to go? The avant-garde has been
| completed.
|
| So if we want to look for the counter-culture or the new avant-
| garde, we're going to have to look somewhere else. I think that,
| in a culture that systematically stripped all meaning out of life
| by atomizing it--how can humanity have any meaning if even being
| human is up to each individual--I think things like religions
| which offer meaning are going to be very appealing. In today's
| culture, someone converting to, say, Eastern Orthodoxy (in the
| West) is very counter-cultural: they are old, odd, hierarchical,
| are insistent that truth rests not in ourselves but in God, and
| say that fulfillment comes from ordering our lives based on an
| external Other not our internal feelings; all of these are
| opposing current cultural values. Similarly, I think Jordan
| Peterson is part of the new counter-culture (not that he is E.
| Orthodox). However we aren't conditioned for "counter-cultural"
| to look like anything like that, because that has always been
| seen as "conservative" or "reactionary". But since there is
| nowhere else for the Enlightenment project to go, it seems like
| the only possible change is back towards the way we came, and
| hence, this is the only sort of direction remaining for the
| advance guard of the culture to go.
|
| [1] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-
| vil...
| euroderf wrote:
| One data point: a personal fave of the Situationism "genre" is
| The Revolution of Everyday Life, by Raoul Vaneigem.
|
| If Society of the Spectacle is your thing, you might try Jean
| Baudrillard.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| MacKenzie Wark does a good job on one of her two books about
| the situationists to connect some dots but also draw some lines
| between Baudrillard and Debord. But even more interesting is
| the shadow of Lefebvre and his "Critique of Everyday Life"
| which predates much of this stuff by decades. Lefebvre himself
| is a somewhat forgotten figure in Marxism in general, got a
| somewhat bad rap for going against the party line at the time
| to focus on the "bourgeoisie science" of sociology. But he
| became a kind of elder for the situationists for a time. His
| "Critique" is much more aligned with a Kantian philosophical
| tradition, which makes it a little hard to digest if you're not
| already bought in to such things (let alone bought into Marxist
| critique...) but it is huge, vastly interesting book
| nonetheless.
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