The turn of art: The avant-garde and power

New Literary History

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 89-107

  Ziarek, Krzysztof ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949586477     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2002.0010     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. Richard Shusterrnan, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art. (Ithaca, 2000).
2. "Every7 work is a force field . . . ."; Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, 1997), p. 206; hereafter cited in text as AT.
3. See Tony Pinkney's introduction to Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London, 1989), p. 19.
4. Thus the very conditions which had provoked a genuine modernist art became the conditions which steadily homogenized even its startling images and diluted its deep forms, until they could be made available as a universally distributed "popular" culture. The two faces of this "modernism" could literally not recognize each other, until a very late stage; The Politics of Modernism, p. 131.
5. Martin Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, Gesamtausgabe vol. 69 (Frankfurt am Main, 1998).
6. Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, Gesamtausgabe vol. 66 (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), pp. 187-96.
7. Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik (Frankfurt, 1989).
8. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helikopter Quartett, Arditti String Quartet, 1999.
9. Martin Heidegger, "Question Concerning Technolog)," Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York, 1993), p. 339.
10. In thinking force here, I follow the line that extends from Nietzsche to Heidegger and Foucault, and see force in ontological terms as the "push" (German stossen) of unfolding or coming into being. This sense of force borrows from Heidegger's redefining of physis as the force of happening, the emergence of what comes to be. In such a differential event, beings come to be what they are through and by virtue of a sheaf of relations which decide their "being." In other words, the force is inherently differential and mediatory: it instantiates not simply what is but the relatedness through which what is comes to be. Contrasted with the notions of a stasis or an atemporal essentia, being as force describes the very temporality of happening, in which occurrence has the structure of an event extended into the coming future and, therefore, irreducible to any particular instant of the now. As an event of unfolding or revealing, force does not have an identity or a presence of its own, for its "being" consists in merely bringing into being. The "being" of force, then, is not an identifiable force or a being, since force never is in the manner in which one predicates existence of things, phenomena, or events. At best, we could say that it is the force of occurring, the actuation which marks the emergence of anything that exists. Thought this way, force constitutes the material event of all relationality. But this materiality, as the field where all relations become inscribed, the site from which force lines unfold, has the tissue of a language, one that works before and beyond the order of signification. It is a "language" in the specific sense of constituting the temporalization of force lines, their disposition, which fashions the script for all relations. It bespeaks the ways in which forces materialize, in which relations are formed into history, articulated into social formations. This language tissue of relations has its model in Heidegger's notion of "saying" (Sage) that exceeds language. The actuation of such an event forms a wordless language that reads through all relations. It is a fold or spasm which institutes (the opposition of) materiality and language, and enfolds all relation ality. As such, it also marks the limit of what is commonly understood as materiality and language. This limit, however, is internal: it indicates not the point where language or materiality cease but the disposition or the modality according to which they unfold and become related to each other.
11. "Artistic expression, expanded beyond recognition from the grudging gifts offered by the masters as a token substitute for freedom from bondage, therefore becomes the means toward both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation. Poiesis and poetics begin to coexist in novel forms - autobiographical writing, special and uniquely creative ways of manipulating spoken language, and, above all, music." Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 40.
12. Amiri Baraka, Funk Lore (Los Angeles, 1996), p. 9; hereafter cited in text.
13. "Art, however, is social not only because of its mode of production . . . nor simply because of the social derivation of its thematic material. Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique in itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as 'socially useful,' it criticizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 225-26).
14. The sound video installation is briefly described in Bill Viola, ed. David A. Ross and Peter Sellars (Paris, 1997): "two channels of color video projections from opposite sides of large dark gallery onto two large back-to-back screens suspended from ceiling and mounted to floor; four channels of amplified stereo sound, four speakers."
15. Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Evanston, 111., 1998), p. 319.