The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance

Chapter 7 - Victims of History and the Ghosts of the Avant-Gardes: A Plausibly Deniable Conclusion

188 Chapter 7 victims of history and the Ghosts of the Avant-Gardes A Plausibly deniable conclusion a theatre that is closed cannot raise money, a theatre that is struggling can. once dead everyone mourns, people don’t try to revive the dead but they do save the living. Julian Beck Perhaps it is a testament to the original timeliness of the work itself that roughly forty years after its publication by surkamp verlag in 1974, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde continues to haunt not only studies of avant-garde performance but studies of the avant-gardes across the spectrum of the arts. if there is an irony to this haunting, it lies in the fact that, as critical gestures, the constant refrains of Bürger’s work are so very un-avant-garde. Looking backward rather than forward, they possess little of “the radical quality of the break with what had prevailed heretofore” or “the historically unique break with tradition” that Bürger posited as defining touchstones of “the historical avant-garde” as a mode of cultural expression.1 obviously, there is no dictate that requires studies of the avant-gardes to be avant-garde themselves. however much scholarship is driven by a seemingly unending quest for the new, legitimacy in cultural criticism is not contingent upon a break with tradition or with what has prevailed heretofore—unless of course that break renders visible that which existing scholarly discourse leaves invisible. in this latter respect, there is significant irony in the haunting presence that Bürger’s work has in current studies of the avant-gardes. That haunting largely precludes critical inquiry into another form of haunting that has everything to do with how we might conceptualize the living legacy of the avant-gardes. indeed, while Bürger’s theories lend a kind of life support to arguments that grandly pronounce the death of the avant-garde, these same theories discourage serious critical scrutiny of what one might call the ghosts of the avant-gardes. victims of history and the Ghosts of the Avant-Gardes | 189 as a conclusion to this book, i would like to suggest that much of the significance and continued viability of the avant-gardes—whether one speaks of the avant-gardes of the past, the present, or the future—rests with those ghosts, and with what i would call vanguard ghosting. This is, of course, a metaphorical and not a metaphysical paradigm, and i posit it here as a counterweight to the often-overlooked fact that the “death” critics have frequently used to pronounce a finality, end, or termination to avant-garde gestures is itself a metaphor. as grand as those pronouncements of the death of the avant-garde might sound—and the function of metaphors is in part to aggrandize—they traffic in a conceptual impossibility . every vanguard gesture leaves a trace, and those traces have an uncanny, haunting vitality that critics have been slow to consider—a vitality rich with previously unexplored meanings and new potential meanings as well. indeed, avant-garde gestures frequently derive their initial vitality from the ghosts haunting the gestures that preceded them. at its most basic level, then, vanguard ghosting is the process whereby avantgarde gestures find and give voice to residual or untapped significance and meaning in previous gestures—significance and meaning that linger either because they were left unexplored or because new historical contexts bring them into play. in terms of historiography, this notion of vanguard ghosting offers a conceptual flexibility that is vastly superior to the strict linearity and the far more restrictive notion of the avant-gardes and of history itself that Bürger assumes in Theory of the Avant-Garde. indeed, some initial sense of the conceptual restrictions that Bürger’s theories enforce can be garnered through a simple juxtaposition of his categorical dismissal of “the neo-avant-garde,” on the one hand, and Marvin carlson’s more recent embrace, on the other, of the characteristic feature of theater, which he calls “ghosting.” Bürger’s arguments discount almost the entire post-war american avant-gardes, and they carry a surprising hostility toward performance—avant-garde or otherwise. in one of his more dismissive references to the work of andy Warhol, for example, Bürger argues that “the neo-avant-garde, which stages for a second time the avant-gardiste break with tradition, becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of...