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Revolutionary Pathos, Negation, and the Suspensive Avant-Garde

A politicized concept of the avant-garde has currency again. This is the result of a number of factors: the rapid decline of postmodernism as a term of cultural and political allegiance; the deepening crisis of capitalist reproduction, unleashing a renewed reengagement between art and politics; and the rise in cultural theory and philosophy of an antihistoricist relationship to the revolutionary past, in which the transformative moments of futures past become a working resource and ideal horizon in the present (we see this expressly in Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Ranciere’s writing). But, perhaps most pertinently, one of the key factors in the historic Soviet avant-garde—the democratization and dispersal of artistic technique—that Walter Benjamin codified in his famous essay “The Author as Producer,” has come to exert a renewed pressure on the official art world and its hierarchies, as the new image and technologies and their network of distribution and affiliation produce a new creative commons “from below”—or at least outside of the main parameters of the art world. This has contributed to a massive shift in the priorities of artistic activity itself over the last fifteen years. A growing number of artists now choose to work outside of the official art world in groups, in collectives, in collaboration with nonartists and nonartistic agencies. Indeed, this shift in position and emphasis has, in turn, allowed new spaces of association and exchange between “professionals” and “nonprofessionals.” This has produced the conditions for what I call a third or suspensive avant-garde, which draw on the futures past of the historic avant-garde, as an active and totalizing critique of art and the capitalist division of labor.