Throwing the Da-Da...Dice: The Agonistic Gestures of the Interwar Avant-Gardes (1909-1944)

Abstract

Half a century after the last explicit attempt to theorize the phenomenon of the “avant-garde” in art (Peter Bürger, Theorie Der Avantgarde 1974), the production of the so-called “historical avant-gardes” has been well documented historically but remains only partially theorized. Founded on an extensive survey of the history, theory, and criticism of the concept of an artistic avant-garde, its terminological trajectory (Chapter 1), the debates which have shaped its historiography (Chapter 2), the discourse around its emergence and exhaustion (Chapter 3), this research centers on a philosophical and theoretical negotiation of the complex notion of artistic combativeness from the perspective of affect studies and critical poetics. Historically focused on the expanded Interwar Years in Europe (1909-1944), the hypothesis is that beneath their stylistic diversity and sociopolitical incommensurability, the forms (objects, texts, events) produced by the self-proclaimed comrades of historical Futurism, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism were symptomatic of an internally chiastic mindset of revolutionary impulse (agon) and emotional struggle (agony), which fueled their fiery declarations and guided their formal experimentations.

Following Fredric Jameson’s example in the Political Unconscious, the semiotic square introduced by A.J. Greimas for the analysis of complex terms, is here employed for the further subdivision of the initial affective pair (agon – agony) into four specific constituents of combative action (Chapter 4), namely activism, antagonism, nihilism, and agonism, in accordance with Renato Poggioli’s seminal typology of avant-gardism (Teoria, 1962). The performative concept of ‘Gestus’ (gesture), originating from Bertolt Brecht’s theorizations of modern dramaturgy, is mobilized to facilitate the examination of the objects of the avant-garde as material embodiments of the combative attitudes under investigation (Chapter 5). Reduced to ground form-making gestures, the Interwar movements are then inserted into the affective ontology and scrutinized for their level of attraction to the four attitudinal poles, in a way which further granulates Interwar avant-gardism into an ideological counterpart (Chapter 6) and a dimension of drives (Chapter 7). Ultimately, the production of action-centric accounts for Interwar artworks is expected to grant an otherwise classicized production with renewed theoretical relevance, while the proposed “virtual map” of combativeness offers a pedagogical tool for instructing the European avant-garde across media and disciplines in a decentered and inventive manner.