Page 34 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

AVANT-GARDE

discursive resources just as the order of words and narrative structure of one novel
is not exactly the same as another. Both the self and texts are original, like a
snowflake that is constructed from the common ingredients that make up snow.
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Links Différance, hermeneutics, humanism, meaning, poststructuralism, subjectivity, text

Avant-garde The French term avant-garde is equivalent to the English word ‘vanguard’
and refers to the foremost part of an army that is often sent ahead of the main body
to perform some special task. The idea of the avant-garde was adopted as a
metaphor within aesthetic theory to refer to experimental Art movements, most
notably those of the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. These
would include the self-proclaimed new movements of cubism, dada and surrealism.
The idea of the avant-garde carries with it the connotation of cultural leadership
and progress. In particular, avant-garde movements have often sought to destroy,
or at least deconstruct, the very idea of Art even while they appear to many as the
height of aesthetic elitism.
Some writers associated with or drawn upon by cultural studies have embraced
avant-garde Art. Thus Adorno praises the non-realism and the ‘alien’ nature of
avant-garde work which, he argues, inspires us through its ‘utopian negativity’. Art
of this type is said to force us to consider new ways of looking at the world through
its unconventional use of form. In a similar vein, Kristeva argues that ‘transgression’
is marked in certain kinds of avant-garde modernist literary and artistic practice
through the rhythms, breaks and absences in texts that re-order signs in time and
space and so develop a new language. Indeed ‘femininity’ is understood by Kristeva
to be a condition or subject position of marginality that some men, for example
avant-garde artists, can also occupy.
On the other hand, given its cultural populism, that is, the sense that popular
culture is as valuable as high culture, cultural studies also contains a strand of
thinking that is less sympathetic to avant-garde work, seeing it as obscure and
condescending. Thus it is sometimes argued that the task of breaking down the
barriers between Art and popular culture has been achieved rather more successfully
by postmodernism with its blurring of the boundaries of Art, commerce and
popular culture than by the modernist avant-garde. Postmodernism often shares
with avant-garde work the use of non-linear narrative forms, montage,
juxtaposition, de-contextualization of images and aesthetic self-consciousness.
However, postmodernism plays with popular culture and its forms more obviously
than does modernist avant-garde art and with a stronger sense of irony.
Nevertheless, postmodernism in Art has remained avant-garde in its relative
isolation from mainstream popular culture.
Links Aesthetics, critical theory, modernism, popular culture, postmodernism