The Radical Avant-Garde and the Contemporary Avant-Garde

This essay invokes the ontological ethos of the avant-garde work as a particular way of disclosing meaning. The avant-garde, according to Philippe Sers, signals not the ruin of representation but its redefinition; not the debunking of truth but a new relationship to truth. Here Sers manifests his impatience with current accounts of the avant-garde that remain fixated on its nihilism, formal novelty, and value-leveling dimensions. The contemporary infatuation with transgression epitomizes a false transcendence that only plays into the logic of contemporary capitalism. Highlighting the strains of iconophobia that pervades language-based aesthetic theories, the essay calls for a new reassessment of the cognitive and transformative power of images. The status of the original avant-garde work as even lies not in its negativity but its utopianism, its harboring of a moment of transcendence that is profoundly ethical in its implications.