Theory of the Avant-Garde (review)

170 the minnesota review posture of radicaUty. Nonetheless, this theoretical transfusion from Europe has definitely provided a needed jolt to the long moribund field of art criticism and aesthetics, forcing it to confront itself and its object in a new and more vital way. The work of reappraisal and differentiation —wresting away the power to define culture, both contemporary and historical, from dominant institutions—has important implications for cultural politics. Peter Burger's recently translated Theory of the Avant-Garde (University of Minnesota Press, 1984) operates along a similar axis of poUtical deUneation as The Anti-Aesthetic, but on the terrain of Modernism. His project is to carve two opposed movements out of that supposed unity. This first he calls Aestheticism—the detachment of art from the praxis of life and its crystallization as anautonomous sphere. When this happens art becomes the subject of art and form becomes the content of works. The second is the Avant-Garde, which Bürger defines as the self-criticism by art of its own institutional status within society, and for which Aestheticism is an historical precondition. Burger's book, grounded in Frankfurt School Critical Theory, insists on periodizing the transformations within art's institutional status, rather than charting transformations within individual works. The Anti-Aesthetic, grounded primarily in French poststructuralism, is, on the whole, committed to the work as text, to uncovering the social via the textual. Yet as Burger's book makes clear, a materialist theory of culture must maintain the specificity of the social, or risk remaining bound to the discourse of autonomous aestheticism. Despite its shortcomings, The A?ti-Aesthetic can perform the function of arousing fracas within mainstream art institutions, where modernism has still by no means gracefully expired, and postmodernism is an object Uke the Maltese Falcon—its ownership in dispute, it passes through a myriad of hands, provoking brawls and mayhem. Thus the particular move this book attempts—staking out the ground of postmodernism as an oppositional practice—is a provocative one. LAURA KIPNIS Notes 1HiS real gaffe, which Owens also cannot quote because Jameson is acceding to Owens' position (or trying to) is on p. 100: "the affirmation of radical feminism, therefore, that to annul the patriarchal is the most radical poUtical act—insofar as it includes and subsumes more partial demands, such as the Uberation from the commodity form—is thus perfectly consistent with an expanded Marxian framework." This strikes me as simply a case of the gentleman letting the ladies through the door first. Are Marxism and feminism really so easily commensurable? Does Jameson reaUy consider the uberation from the commodity form, or in other words, an end to aUenation, a "partial demand"? Peter Bürger. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw; foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Pp. Iv + 135; 8 illustrations. $10.95 (paper); $25 (cloth). The avant-garde itself may be dead, but the scholarly debate over its meaning is thriving, never more so than in Peter Burger's Theory ofthe Avant-Garde, the first comprehensive theory of the avant-garde to appear in EngUsh since Renato Poggioli's book of the same title (English translation, Harvard University Press, 1968). Burger's attempt to rehabilitate the political avant-garde of 1910-40 should infuse the modernism debate with a strong dose of historical reflection, a quantity absent from most New Critical and deconstructionist treatments of the same texts. The book has been controversial from the start; its initial appearance in 1974 was foUowed quickly by a thick volume of responses, chiefly from the German academic left. Reinforced by Jochen Schulte-Sasse's sharply written foreword, this reviews 171 English translation is certain to extend the American influence of Frankfurt School theory, while inviting reconsideration of the Frankfurt School's judgments for and against the avant-garde. Burger's argument rests upon two basic theses. The first is a broadly sketched definition of middle-class European culture from the late EnUghtenment to the late 19th century. According to Burger, artistic activity during this period was contained within an "institution art" that granted artists and writers an autonomy fromsocial...