Edward Said and the Avant-garde.

This article examines the interconnections between Said's critical oeuvre and a range of theoretical positions apropos of the European and American Avant-gardes. Questions raised in this article pertain to the critical deconstruction of generic distinctions between the work of art and the work of the critic; the role of the Avant-garde in identifying and critically subverting the institutional basis of aesthetic discourse; the ironic antagonisms between Said's discursive projects and the critical "heritage" of the Avant-garde. In light of the latter's proto-critical maneuvers in a variety of media (plastic, literary, musical), Said's work can be seen as expanding, enriching, and radically accelerating certain avant-garde initiatives, though he often subverts them in turn, conspicuously in respect of their postmodern inflections.

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The purpose of this essay is to identify and analyze the mostly unexamined inter-discursivities between the work of Edward Said and that of the Avant-garde in its various artistic, literary, and critical manifestations. Said's theory will be examined for what insights it may provide into the historical emergence of the Avant-garde over the last two centuries and its relation to both Modernism and Postmodernism. While the task is complicated by a lack of documentary evidence regarding Said's critical responses to specific Avant-garde works and texts, his many writings on modern theorists, novelists, and composers provide sufficient critical resources to ensure a sustained, if somewhat speculative, investigation of his oeuvre in relation to this topic. And while it may be objected that the Avant-garde is not the same as Modernism, it certainly constitutes a portion--indeed, the most formalistically radical one--of the modernist sensibility and thus both extends and lays claim to some of its expressive and critical capacities. The essay, then, will compare Said's theories to others that pertain to the Avant-garde (i.e., the movement in both literature and the plastic arts) and various "avant-gardists" (i.e., anyone engaged in modern cultural practice who innovates in an avant-garde way) in order to see how they confirm or resist each other with respect to the role of the critic, the meaning of history, questions of modernity, exile, and Orientalism. In this way I hope to bring to Saidian theory a number of formal and discursive objects otherwise presumed to be beyond or beneath its critical horizon.

Although the essay highlights shared coordinates of intellectual concern between Said and the Avant-garde--i.e., their attitude of transgression and critique of dominant ideologies, institutions, ways of seeing, or "structures of feeling" (Raymond Williams's phrase)--it by no means asserts that Said is part of the Avant-garde or even qualifies as having an avant-garde sensibility. Indeed, the majority of instances show how Said's critical insights conflict with the expressive impulses of the classic Avant-garde of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the neo-Avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, or various poststructuralist discourses that some critics, including Said himself, have labeled "avant-garde" in order to disparage, marginalize, or otherwise object to them. In these latter instances of labeling academic discourses "avant-garde," an intellectual genealogy can be traced between avant-garde and postmodern practice and/or criticism, establishing connections Said seems to regard with suspicion, though on closer inspection his own critical posture occasionally reveals surprising affinities with postmodern formulations of avant-garde attitudes, as I shall demonstrate. A premise on which this pairing of avant-garde and postmodern is based pertains to the comparable relation of both to twentieth-century Modernism, with the Avant-garde's relation being more synchronic and culturally-inflected, while Postmodernism is more diachronic and historically complex (changed conditions of production, distribution, and consumption related to America's postwar hegemony).

Theory of the Avant-garde and "Avant-garde" Theory

To start, certain key concepts about the Avant-garde and its sometimes paradoxical relation to other modern cultural practices need to be elaborated as a way of anticipating points of connection, whether sympathetic or antipathetic, to corresponding elements of Said's discourse. Most importantly, one must recognize in the Avant-garde a distinct species of Modernism that anticipates, though often negatively, aspects of a later cultural and critical milieu in which Said's own theoretical principles were advanced. This is because the Avant-garde--whether that of such nineteenth-century "seers" as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, or Mallarme, or the Twentieth Century's more extreme cultural provocateurs, Duchamp, Picabia, Tzara, and Huelsenbeck--is unprecedented as a movement both committed to the future and alienated from the past, a movement that celebrates the new even at the expense of its own productions and cultural durability, and thus both exemplifies and deviates from the modern and from Modernism. In its obsession with the new, the Avant-garde conceives of art in a radically historical way: i.e., not simply as the latest style or fad succeeding another in a process of repetition, variation, and assimilation, but as a desire to change the relations of aesthetic production for the future. It thus constitutes a delirious, existential pursuit that is both romantically self-destructive and parodically mechanistic, involving a tireless descent, as Baudelaire has written, "au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau" (qtd. in Poggioli 215).

The Avant-garde thus constitutes an extreme case--or incipient metamorphosis--of Modernism, accelerating modern principles of artistic production at the expense of the subject and in a way that anticipates aspects of Postmodernism. It is a kind of masochistic revolutionary movement, though its revolutionary zeal pertains primarily to aesthetic form, not content. As a result, its combined manifestations are ideologically ambidextrous, covering a broad range of political positions. The avant-garde attitude is one of deliberate self-alienation, of disgust for the pieties of tradition and the banalities of contemporary culture; but at the same time, its proponents seem to thrive in the kind of humanistic culture that initially disparages, then tolerates, and finally appropriates its hysterical antagonism through marketing, collecting, and celebrating its "products" in a process of capitalist reification. Indeed, it is difficult to decide how much either resistance or capitulation characterizes the Avant-garde, a movement that ultimately, if unintentionally, takes its place within the very tradition it wants to destroy. Thus, with respect to Saidian discourse in its insistence on "speaking truth to power," the Avant-garde occupies an ambiguous space both at the center and on the periphery of modern capitalist culture, or, as Renato Poggioli has remarked (in a way that seems applicable to Said's own situatedness), both in "the ivory tower and the ghetto" (Poggioli 31). Furthermore, it occupies this space by way of distinctly affiliative determinations as both Said and Poggioli define them (The World, the Text, and the Critic 17; Poggioli 31)--that is, not as the natural, genealogical consequences of traditional or class filiations, but by virtue of intellectual choices, "elective affinities." (1) In this way, intention and method, as Said has elaborated on them with respect to the modern intellectual, explain the activity and attitude of the avant-gardist despite the anti-intellectual veneer of his or her more outrageous gestures.

Theorist of the Avant-garde Peter Burger insists that this self-consciousness is definitive (Burger 29), (2) though in doing so, he takes issue with Walter Benjamin, who sees the Avant-garde as the sociological consequence of the proliferation of techniques of mechanical reproduction. For Burger, the politico-ideological ambiguity of the Avant-garde is the conscientious result of the necessary distance of art from life praxis, but also of the movement's collective desire to reconnect the two in a way that effects art's disappearance through transforming life praxis itself. Thus, for Burger, the function of avant-garde art is not the standard functionlessness of art in its full autonomy (the Aestheticist ideal), but that of critique itself--albeit through artistic as well as discursive means. This critique, however, is not the traditional, reflective one of art against society, or of one artistic style against another, but of art against itself as an institution whose distance from society is finally recognized as something neither organic nor essential but historically produced in the late phase of capitalist production and thus susceptible of resolution:

   The avant-gardistes ... adopted an essential element of
   Aestheticism. Aestheticism had made the distance from
   the praxis of life the content of works. The praxis of life
   to which Aestheticism refers and which it negates is the
   means-ends rationality of the bourgeois everyday. Now,
   it is not the aim of the avant-gardistes to integrate art into
   this praxis. On the contrary, they assent to the aestheticists'
   rejection of the world and its means-ends rationality.
   What distinguishes them from the latter is the attempt
   to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art. In this
   respect also, Aestheticism turns out to have been the necessary
   precondition of the avant-gardiste intent. Only an
   art the contents of whose individual works is wholly distinct
   from the (bad) praxis of the existing society can be
   the center that can be the starting point for the organization
   of a new life praxis. (Burger 49-50)

What is especially interesting about Burger's definition of the Avant-garde as the institutional self-criticism of art is that while twentieth-century works of avant-garde art and literature were presumably becoming more "critical" and "connected" in the manner described above, criticism itself was, by Said's time, becoming more disengaged and thus, according to Said, more "avant-garde" in a way that ultimately contradicted Burger's claims. In an interview in Diacritics in 1976, Said remarked that the label of avant-garde criticism connoted--at least from the perspective of its opponents--a disquieting Francophilia or continental influence that was often sweepingly demonized as "theory." Younger American critics had succumbed to the appeal of new methodologies that took literary criticism beyond its traditional rituals of analysis and evaluation, engaging literary texts on a new level that seemed to elevate the work of the critic itself by insisting on the textuality of all texts, whether "primary" or "secondary," "literary" or "critical." Thus the hierarchical relation between the literary and the critical text was being undermined in a way that unsettled those schools of thought that saw the critic's role as one of appreciative commentator on the superior achievements of the literary practitioner or author (Viswanathan 5). The polemics against the new style of criticism were often fierce, though the younger critics, as Said characterized them in the interview, were less inclined to aggressive counter-polemics and simply more devoted to their work (5). All of this suggests that the newfangled, French-influenced, "avant-garde" critics of the seventies were, like the avant-garde art movements before them, blurring the boundaries among different disciplines and thus opening them up to alternative practices in a way that now seems analogous not only to Jurgen Habermas's idea of reintegrating specialist discourses into the public sphere, but to the avant-garde intention of reconnecting art itself with social praxis.

But even in the seventies and early eighties, Said expressed ambivalence towards some of the new, mostly poststructuralist, methodologies. In his view, these methodologies were solidifying into a kind of occult discourse, hermetically sealed from history and the world by treating all forms of intellectual inquiry as autonomous, textual operations, a rhetoric without contents beyond itself, and thus abandoning the subversive interdisciplinarity that had seemed to advance with its initial innovations. In Said's view, this new emphasis in American criticism on "textuality'" quickly became a "retreat from the interventionary movement across lines of specialization" (WTC 3), and shifted away from a phenomenon of critical rupture to one of regression and repetition. In response, he proposed an alternative "secular criticism" based on the ideal of a "critical consciousness" that affirmed connections between texts and actualities, between works of literature and the realities of power and authority (WTC 5). (3) In terms of Avant-garde discourse, Said's complaint parallels Burger's contention that, while Avant-gardism was premised upon the autonomy heralded by Aestheticism, its future lay in transforming life praxis itself and thus dissolving or transcending its apparent separateness.

Yet for Said, this overcoming could not be left to the artist or poet alone. Indeed, his discourse takes a Platonic turn in recommending the critic as the true innovator, or "original," of cultural endeavor. His critical maneuver continues the avant-garde strategy of institutional self-criticism, but through an appropriation that puts the critic in the cultural driver's seat. In other words, Said echoes the self-criticism of art, but as a critic of the arts, not as an artist. Burger is no different in terms of elevating the critical impulse of the Avant-garde, a position that leads to the disparagement of certain avant-garde works that fail to meet his standard. As a result, Burger ends up complaining that the neo-Avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s was basically an aestheticist re-appropriation of avant-garde strategies of the teens and twenties for the sake of a booming art market and thus very different from the provocations of Dada: a kind of farcical repetition of the original Avant-garde that evokes Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon." The neo-Avant-garde was only the mask of a resurgent Aestheticism in Burger's view, a contention that echoes Said's critique of textuality as a screen against true critical activism, which he recommends as an antidote.

While Said sometimes saw both the critic and the poet/artist as providing equally valid forms of resistance to the dominant culture, he believed that their different means--the critic's use of rational argument, and the creative writer's deployment of "imagistic, non-rational means" (WTC 15)--provided the crux of a theoretical and hierarchical reversal: While criticism was against any form of totalization, it did not question the rational basis of its own narratives nor its formal adherence to the discursive essay. In this way criticism only partly escaped its own totalizing potentiality through cultivating "irony" and "opposition" (WTC 29). The critic's ironic use of the dominant culture's primary modes of self-justification--rational discourse and narrative form-thus became a kind of enhancement and burden for Said, while the Avant-garde's association with creative, imagistic, anti-narrative operations became an impediment insofar as such strategies, far from ensuring critical autonomy, seemed to facilitate recuperation by the dominant culture through the academy, the museum, and the market. A certain antagonism emerges between Saidian and avant-garde discourse, with the latter somewhat tiredly insisting on its poetic and aesthetic rights NOT to narrate itself in universally comprehensible forms, and the former interpreting texts in order--if not to silence them by substituting the critique for the thing itself, the idea for the poem--at least to supplement them in a way that sometimes eclipses their avowed autonomy. While Said does not reject the aesthetic or banish the poet from his universe the way Plato did, he does rank them beneath criticism and the critic, who enlightens through rational discourse, while the poet merely unsettles--as if this unsettling required a more explicit direction or functionality in order to be effective in his view.

In this regard, Said seems to veer away from Theodor Adorno, who was at pains to assert the almost stoic integrity of avant-garde art in its formal, anti-discursive resistance to the "totally administered society" and its culture industry (Burger 1, 60; Musical Elaborations 50), even if, in the long run, he pessimistically forecast an inevitable end to such resistance. Although we will need to examine Said in relation to Adorno again later with respect to the question of artistic autonomy--particularly in the sphere of music--it is fair to say that Said's attitude toward the Avant-garde, particularly with respect to literature, was closer to that of Georg Lukfics, who saw the movement, in its falling away from classic realism, as a form of bourgeois decadence, ineffectual in its strategies of resistance because of its ritual reluctance to explain itself--as if it were some secret society. (4) For Lukacs it was the realistic novel and the discursive essay, not the experimental poem or work of art, that acceded to critical enlightenment. Said approvingly summarizes Lukacs remarks on the genre of the essay as follows:

   Essays are concerned with the relations between things,
   with values and concepts, in fine, with significance.
   Whereas poetry deals in images, the essay is the abandonment
   of images; this abandonment the essay ideally shares
   with Platonism and mysticism.... What the essay expresses
   is a yearning for conceptuality and intellectuality, as
   well as a resolution of the ultimate questions of life.
   (Throughout this analysis Lukacs refers to Socrates as the
   typical essayistic figure, always talking of immediate mundane
   matters while at the same time through his life there
   sounds the purest, the most profound, and the most concealed
   yearning. What the critical essay does is to begin to
   create the values by which art is judged. (WTC 51-52). (5)

In this respect, Said seems, once again, to agree with Burger that the Avant-garde's great merit is its capacity for self-criticism, but that its formal means almost always require discursive supplementation. In effect, rational critical discourse is the cure for what ails the Avant-garde. But what ails it? Answer: its formal antagonism, not to tyrannical discursive regimes, but to the enlightening potential of narrative itself.

There is something subversive in this critical maneuver that is reminiscent of the avant-gardist's own capacity for producing shock, though Said resorts to the classics to make his point. By suggesting that the "critic" is the true "original" compared to the creative writer or artist (whose association with Bohemia, spontaneity, and glamour is subtly disparaged in the essay "On Originality" [WTC 128]), Said indirectly persuades us that the Avant-garde's own originality is not to be found in its expressive means or formal innovations, but in its critical motivations or beginnings. (6) In breaking with tradition, the Avant-garde rejects the filiative process of observing genre imperatives, and instead, like the critic, adheres affiliatively to "a set of contingencies and worldly circumstances from which came the [conscious] decision to write" (WTC 130). Thus both the critic and the avant-gardist are "anti-filiatives," acceding to originality through the critical reappraisal of the institution of art itself and the Romantic notions of originality that infuse it. Indeed, their originality is to work against the grain or conventions of originality. In "Secular Criticism" Said attributes this anti-filiative impulse to the great Modernist writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Joyce, Eliot, Mann, and Proust: "Childless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women populate the world of high modernism with remarkable insistence, all of them suggesting the difficulties of filiation" (WTC 17). (7) The cultural situation is explained again by reference to Lukacs who associates the phenomenon of childlessness with alienation, reification, and degeneracy. Yet Said seems less judgmental than Lukacs on this point, seeing this disintegration of collectivities and individualities as an analogue, perhaps, to his own enforced exile as a Palestinian. And while he has sometimes remarked on the hyperbole of the modernist complaint that modern experience is a kind of psychological and intellectual depaysement, he has also utilized this argument as a way of poeticizing what might seem, at a distance, the mundane reality of literal exile. (8) Similarly, the Avant-garde takes this sense of a loss of identity, of absence of self. and literalizes it by transforming literary and artistic production into a series of dehumanized mechanical strategies, displacements, and techniques, not much different from pushing a button or pulling a lever, over and over and over. (9)

While both Said and Burger assume a certain Lukacsian or judgmental air apropos of Modernism and the Avant-garde, Said is by far the subtler thinker, careful not to reduce art to ideology in the way that Burger comes close to doing with his idee fixe of the self-criticism of art. Said is not opposed to aesthetics or artistic autonomy, and in this regard seems more in line with Poggioli, who, writing at an earlier stage (10) than Burger, describes the Avant-garde more in terms of a rich historical phenomenon than a rigid cultural mission only Dada or Duchamp might plausibly accomplish. Though afflicted by, or at least affecting, a psychology of social antagonism and alienation, the Avant-garde, in Poggioli's view, consistently adopts new forms, undergoes credible transformations, and displays its quotient of aesthetic value, even in its most radical, anti-aesthetic guises. (11) And while Poggioli insists that on the whole the avant-garde sensibility is historically unprecedented, it does not end history, but rather extends it by assuming new and multiple problems, solutions, dogmas, and schools. In the final analysis--like the ambiguities of repetition and originality, filiation and affiliation of Saidian theory--the Avant-garde, though committed to the new, begins to repeat itself, parody its own gestures, and make a tradition of them in a way that reconciles the movement to history, or at least to the recent past (particularly in the case of the neo-Avant-garde in America). Both Said and Poggioli tentatively assent to the Eliotic paradigm of literary tradition (Poggioli 70, 84; WTC 131) as an exchange between the past and the present, collective traditions and individual talents: in short, a cultural dialogics that is primarily affiliative, but which, through a series of linkages and oppositions, gradually comes to seem continuous, genealogical, natural. However, this tendency is consistently thwarted by the critic, who, for Said, has a moral obligation to call attention, as Vico did, to the constructedness of history, something created in response to actualities. Thus while partially accepting the Eliotic schema (a schema most would consider modernist as opposed to avant-garde as Poggioli designates it), Said also criticizes Eliot for not really adhering to the implications of his theory, since the poet largely excises tradition from history--i.e., history not as a series of canonical texts, but as a lived thing, or more specifically, what Said calls "direct experience" or "immediacy"--the very things some theorists of the Avant-garde consider central to its practice:

   When we leave the realm of Marxist critical discourse
   and look at the criticism fostered by some of the modernists,
   the wish to escape from experience perceived as
   futile panorama is central. T. S. Eliot is unintelligible
   without this emphasis on art opposed in some way to
   life, to the historical experience of the middle class, and
   to the disorder and dislocation of urban existence.
   Eliot's extraordinary powers of codification and influence
   produced the almost too familiar canon of critical
   practices and touchstones associated with the New
   Criticism along with its rejection of biography, history
   and pathos in the form of various fallacies.... By the
   time "theory" advanced intellectually into departments
   of English, French, and German in the United States, the
   notion of "text" had been transformed into something
   almost metaphysically isolated from experience. The
   sway of semiology, deconstruction, and even the
   archaeological descriptions of Foucault, as they have
   commonly been received, reduced and in many
   instances eliminated the messier precinct of "life" and
   historical experience. (Reflections on Exile xviii)

Said takes issue with Eliot, the high modernist, on the grounds that the literary and the aesthetic constitute a kind of escape for him, a way of insulating oneself from critical responsibilities. This should not be construed as a simple dismissal of the aesthetic. Indeed, in the same essay, Said criticizes Lukacs, too, for abandoning experience--not for poetry, but for "insurrectionary theory" (RE xx)--though it would be foolish to accuse Said of being unresponsive to insurrectionary theory where experience called for it. In these two rich, yet distinct, examples of evasion (Eliot and Lukacs), one begins to see how both Said and the Avant-garde, as opposed to the modernists, carve out overlapping spaces (experience, immediacy, history) while trying to ameliorate their discontents. For the Avant-garde, experimentation and transgression propel its adherents toward the new, which sets the criteria for its future sublation to the real, the immediate, the actual; nonetheless, a persistent contempt for popular demands, as Poggioli explains, militates against any easy acquiescence to mere fashion and thus helps maintain a condition of autonomy. For Said, there are a broad range of options for how to bring both theory and art back to the "messier precinct" of life and experience without being reductive or absolutist, and he manages to do it even in one of the most formally autonomous areas of aesthetic endeavor: modern music.

Modern Music and the Implications of Parody and Critique

In "Performance as an Extreme Occasion" Said describes Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music, in which music--Western classical music--is portrayed as moving inexorably, ever since the late style of Beethoven, toward total autonomy from historical reality, a process that culminates in the extreme technicalization of Arnold Schoenberg's dodecaphonic system, a technicalization that has both modernist and avant-gardist implications. Yet far from being a reduction or nullification of music, Schoenberg's twelve-tone system captures, for Adorno, "the true meaning of music's trajectory, a tragic intensification of the separation between music and society" (ME 12). This is because the twelve-tone system totally rationalizes form, resulting in a kind of "preprogrammed expressiveness" that, through its dehumanized, technical purity, alienates and shocks the listener into a recognition of the emptiness of the modern world, or as Said puts it: "its very rigor and distance from the everyday world ... casts a devastating critical light upon the degraded and therefore meaningless world" (ME 13-14). While modern music continues to be symptomatic of a Lukacsian notion of bourgeois decadence, it also, according to Adorno, "sacrifices itself to this effort" of total disillusionment in a way that seems analogous to other avant-garde practices. Adorno continues: "It has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world. Its fortune lies in the perception of misfortune; all of its beauty is in denying itself the illusion of beauty.... Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal" (ME 14).

At this point Said takes issue with Adorno by noting how the almost apocalyptic register in which Adorno discusses the theoretical significance of works by Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, is vitiated by their more recent and utterly respectful assimilation into the musical repertory of the most prestigious orchestras. Said characterizes this development not as an appropriation of modern music by the institution, but as an ironic adaptation, as it were, by the works themselves to that institution through the eccentric mediation of individual performance, illustrating the impossibility of any system to realize fully the dream of an impervious totality, despite Adorno's profound pessimism that such is indeed the fate of all modern art. For Said, transgression is always possible (ME 55), and even musical performance, while succumbing to the inducements of what some might consider the high-brow end of the culture industry, can discover occasions for the transgressive production or "elaboration," in Gramsci's sense, of civil society. Somewhat surprisingly, Said credits pianist Glenn Gould with no less an achievement in his

   restless forays into writing, radio, television, and film
   [which, for Said] enhanced, enlivened, and illuminated
   his playing itself, giving it a self-conscious aesthetic to
   enable performance to engage or to affiliate with the
   world itself without compromising the essentially reinterpretive,
   reproductive quality of the process. This is the
   Adornian measure of Gould's achievement, and also its
   limitations, which are those of a late capitalism that has
   condemned classical music to an impoverished marginality
   and anti-intellectualism sheltered underneath the
   umbrella of "autonomy." (ME 29)

In this way, Said attributes to Gould's performance the qualities of avant-garde spectacle in its apparent merging of art and life praxes through the combinatory of critical discourse. Said gets even more explicit when he describes Gould's innovations as contributing to an "anti-aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk" producing the effect of a "deracinement du sens" (ME 33). In this fusion of references to Wagner and Rimbaud, the autonomous, if theatrical "high art" embraced by the state in the context of Bayreuth comes together with a recalcitrant "anti-art" that deregulates the senses and disorients society in a way that revives and reconfigures the avant-garde agenda for a new era--a "late" or "post-" modern era whose cultural practitioners want to capture the lost feel of the historical sense and the lost feel of a meaningful future. How did Gould's transgressive manipulation of the conventions of performance come to seem analogous to avant-garde praxis for Said? Did Gould's "forays" into other media constitute an overturning of aesthetic categories or blurring of boundaries that recalled for Said his initial expectations for 1970s and 1980s "avant-garde" theory in its original tendency toward skewing relations among specializations in a way that implied a new immediacy or openness to historic experience? And what was to prevent Gould's innovations from ceding to a similar re-aestheticization or insulation that evoked the old formulae of "textuality" by turning all such forays into simply another aspect of "performance" or even "celebrity" in a way that undermined any possibility of immediacy or direct experience?

Indeed, Said seems all too aware of this possibility insofar as his essay on "Performance" is paired with another one entitled "On the Transgressive Elements in Music." In this second essay the reader detects a number of parallels and symmetries that deftly insinuate, if not actually elaborate on, the parodic dimensions of Gould's own eccentricities of performance. Gould's innovations acquire an aura of parody, of a self-conscious reiteration of avant-garde strategies in the interest of reinvigorating a depleted art form, utterly trivialized through social ritualization. After reading the second essay, one cannot help but compare the bravura pianist to the protagonist of Thomas Mann's Faustus, a novel Said discusses at length in the second half of Musical Elaborations. In that work, fictional composer Adrian Leverkuhn makes a devil's bargain in order to transcend the classical canon of music (associated with a kind of historical health of the state, though it paralyzes the creative will through stultifying repetition and cliche). He does this by virtue of a technical genius for parody and critique, strategies thematically associated in the novel with madness and disease and which assume the tantalizing character of a cancerous will to power that we come, as readers, to link allegorically with National Socialism. Said goes on to discuss Mann's treatment of the disease that reinvigorates, the critique that aspires to artistry, the revision that achieves originality:

   Originality cannot be derived from health because the
   canon form, which in its regulated permutations is
   Mann's symbol of a historical time ruled over by God,
   has exhausted all the possible combinations of notes.
   Therefore parody and critique propose themselves as
   the only true novelty in so overripe and exhausted a
   period, and their equivalents in the life of the truly gifted
   individual are disease and the barbarism of the elemental,
   which exist outside time and culture, and
   beyond the scope of anything elaborated in ordinary
   duration. (ME 46-47).

Thus parody, critique, and revision (as well as "barbarism," which I will address later in the context of Orientalism) are associated by Mann with a kind of disease of state, though a disease that is possibly indistinguishable from Faustian or Nietzschean self-overcoming. But, as Said goes on to show through a reference to Death in Venice in the same essay, Mann also fears pollution of the state by contact with the Other, i.e., through the popular, Dionysian, indeed oriental, peril that becomes the harbinger of cultural death and decomposition in the modern era. Yet these same mortifications, as it were, paradoxically compel art along a path of cultural self-definition, self-knowledge, and self-overcoming--a path of persistent, formal innovation that preserves art's autonomy, integrity, and future as a creative endeavor. Thus, while parody and critique are allied by Mann, they point, like the Avant-garde itself, in opposite directions--toward pollution and purification, toward critical integration with the world and aesthetic removal from the world. Is it because parody and criticism have essentially contrapuntal implications? The difference is perhaps clarified by replacing the term "parody" with "pastiche," a term Fredric Jameson famously employs in "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" (Jameson 111-25). In that essay, pastiche is distinguished as a kind of objectless parody in which no explicit literary models are mocked but in which language itself has become the object of ridicule. For Jameson, pastiche constitutes Postmodernism's often uncritical repackaging of history through an eclecticism of contemporary forms that evoke an illusory feel of history by utilizing outmoded representations that appeal to our sense of nostalgia. All postmodern popular art becomes pastiche, a tireless reiteration of obsolete forms for the sake of sensory stimulation, but not for any critical reinsertion into the archive of history. In essence, a form of distraction, as Walter Benjamin conceived it in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Thus art, as pastiche, becomes art about art, disconnected from any existential or historical reality, but minutely responsive to sensory demands of the moment, our contemporary, consumerist requirements of instant gratification in hyper-civilization.

Thus for Said, the use of the word parody is probably significant, inasmuch as it suggests a critical, even satirical, appropriation and revision of historically- or canonically-embedded forms, though it can also be construed (not unlike pastiche) as a deflection of direct experience by way of these forms, despite the illusion of historical engagement. With respect to this ambiguity of intention between parody and pastiche, the New York poets, often cited as neo-Avant-garde heralds of postmodern developments, illustrate the sometimes critical, sometimes disengaged, attitudes of various avant-gardists with respect to history. In this way, we are reminded of Burger's thesis that avant-garde engagement is rooted in aestheticist disengagement. As we have seen, Said sometimes describes this sensitivity to history with such terms as "actuality," "direct experience," and "immediacy," all of which add another dimension to his sense of the historical, indicative not only of the real complexity, even contradictory nature of the historical attitude, but of the avant-garde attitude as well. This is because one finally has to ask, if only to deepen one's understanding of the issue, how, precisely, the Avant-garde and its practitioners actually define their relation to history. Although members of the Avant-garde are conscious of its role in history as a cultural preparative of the future, certain exigencies, actualities, of avant-garde production would seem to work against this notion. Many an avant-garde sensibility seems to be less about anticipating the future, in a way that highlights the Avant-garde's historic mission, than about redefining the present, reconstituting the present moment as an actually lived "event," a moment that implies a kind of sensory immediacy and a virtual forgetting of history.

Postmodern Reformulations of Avant-garde Strategy and the Question of Narrative

In a chapter of his book L'Inhumain: les causeries sur le temps (1988), postmodern theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard examines the relation between the Avant-garde and the Sublime, locating the latter in the former's literary and plastic attempts to capture the lived immediacy of the Now, the sublime moment of shock in which one seems, as it were, most alive. Lyotard gives this experience-entity various names--such as the Heideggerian Ereignis or "event"--suggesting its compatibility with phenomenological moments of being, the stream of consciousness, or Bergsonian duree--that preconscious, pre-intelligible zone of being in which past and present are continually, intuitively coalescing. But more to the point, this moment of sensory shock is radically different from those that follow, those in which the theoretical faculty battens down on experience to assign it a value in a rational system; but the Ereignis also differs from the terrifying, perpetually anticipated moment of ontic annihilation that seems always to threaten the Now, the Being-Event. This threat is what makes the Being-Event supremely sublime for Lyotard and what makes it the tenuous and ever-diminishing zone of aesthetic attention for the Avant-garde. As Lyotard sees it, the avant-garde artist--his prime example is Barnett Newman, though other Action Painters and Surrealists also seem exemplary--"attempts combinations that allow the event" (The Inhuman 101). In doing so, the avant-gardist strives to represent the unpresentable, or the Sublime, as a result of which the broader social community no longer recognizes itself in such endeavors and dismisses them as incomprehensible, indeterminate, and incommensurable. "Incommensurable" is Lyotard's special word for whatever remains heterogeneous or essentially unassimilable to the sensus communis or to the ideology of the "decision makers" who strive to incorporate everything into an operational totality. And with an ominous pessimism that recalls Adomo's sense of the totally administered society, Lyotard reveals how the decision makers succeed in achieving this operational totality through what he calls "terror": the entire apparatus of compulsion in the struggle for maximum efficiency of the system (The Postmodern Condition xxiv).

Among other instances of Avant-garde works that exemplify this striving after the Event in a way that implies aesthetic autonomy not from life but from "the system," Lyotard offers the example of Paul Cezanne, whose question "What is painting?" resonates within Lyotard's own question of "What is it Now?" Cezanne once described his use of color as "little sensations," an epithet Lyotard expands upon to mean "elementary sensations without history" (The Inhuman 102), or sensations--elemental, instinctual, barbarous--that somehow get beneath the radar of habitual, traditional, or "universal" perception (what art theorist Norman Bryson designates as the fiction of "universal visual experience" [Bryson 6]) and thus evade the system of total efficiency enforced through terror. What this implies, of course--with reference to Lyotard's famous report on knowledge, The Postmodern Condition--is that these elemental sensations that were constitutive of early avant-garde antagonism compare favorably with Lyotard's "petites histoires," social and cultural phenomena that evidence a postmodern incredulity to modern metanarratives, the so-called grand narratives. The Avant-garde, then, anticipates the postmodern. And while these little histories provide what may be the last remaining enclaves of autonomy within the world system--private language games and other modes of dissent--they are as cultural islands, separate and incapable of concerted opposition or broad-based resistance, because they are impervious to consensus, which is seen as another vehicle of terror. This equivalence between consensus and terror is argued despite Jurgen Habermas's contention that "legitimacy is to be found in consensus and discussion" (The Postmodern Condition xxv), or, as Habermas argues in "Modernity versus Postmodernity," through the reintegration of the specialized discourses to create a new, postmodern public sphere, which is simply the fuller realization of the modern public sphere (Habermas 98).

In "Representations of the Intellectual," Edward Said offers his own assessment of Lyotard's postmodern thesis and, by implication, the postmodern reformulation of certain avant-garde theses. After discussing Joyce's Stephen Dedalus as emblematic of the modern intellectual (and whose motto--silence, cunning, and exile--coincides, for the most part, with avant-garde practice [Poggioli 3]), Said goes on to assert that

   The purpose Of the intellectual's activity is to advance
   freedom and knowledge. This is still true, I believe,
   despite the often repeated charge that "grand narratives
   of emancipation and enlightenment," as the contemporary
   French philosopher Lyotard calls such heroic ambitions
   associated with the previous "modern" age, are
   pronounced as no longer having any currency in the era
   of postmodernism. According to this view grand narratives
   have been replaced by local situations and language
   games; postmodern intellectuals now prize competence,
   not universal values like truth or freedom. I've always
   thought that Lyotard and his followers are admitting
   their own lazy incapacities, perhaps even indifference,
   rather than giving a correct assessment of what remains
   for the intellectual a truly vast array of opportunities
   despite postmodernism. For in fact governments still
   manifestly oppress people, grave miscarriages of justice
   still occur, the co-optation and inclusion of intellectuals
   by power can still effectively quieten their voices, and
   the deviation of intellectuals from their vocation is still
   very often the case. (RI 18)

In this statement Said echoes an earlier, though less caustic, response to Adorno's own pessimism about the capacities for resistance to the world system among different intellectual communities. Said also seems, according to the terms of Lyotard's argument, to be very much on the side of Habermas with respect to continuing the modern project of enlightened public discourse. Clearly the grand narratives of enlightenment and emancipation have truth value for Said, predictably demoting Lyotard's posture to that of seeming to recommend a withdrawal from any kind of concerted public activism and into the autonomous, but probably illusory, sphere of pure art and language games. Indeed, Lyotard's preoccupation with the Event in his discourse seems to relegate the activist dimension of the Avant-garde to a minimum, if not zero. As Said goes on to say, "there can be no escape into the realms of pure art and thought or, for that matter, into the realm of disinterested objectivity or transcendental theory" (RI 21).

But Said pays, I think, short shrift to the ways in which Lyotard's argument also challenges many of the same powers--powers of political and cultural hegemony and homogenization--against which Said also struggles. By identifying terror as the source of these powers, Lyotard makes clear it is the market imperialists and their apologists who have debased the narratives by appropriating and distorting their terms. As the spin-doctors of empire twist the grand narratives into crude rationalizations for their own agendas, a natural skepticism of the rhetoric of freedom, enlightenment, and science sets in. Attention is turned to local situations, petites histoires, verbal dissimulation or Nietzsche's "youthful secret languages" so symptomatic of avant-garde practice (Poggioli 36), all of which encode and mask authentic human aspirations, spaces in which a modicum of genuine freedom or knowledge might still be obtained at a distance from the surveillance mechanisms deployed by the system in its relentless, narcissistic drive to convert all conspicuous opposition into the mirror of its own interest. The fear of consensus is really a fear of clandestine or coded disenfranchisement, like peace treaties cynically enacted in the hope of facilitating land removal later on. Indeed, much of Said's own discourse seems preoccupied with similar abuses of narrative, and he warns, in "Holding Nations and Traditions at Bay," how the intellectual must work conscientiously to show how group and national identities are not "natural or god-given ... but ... a constructed, manufactured, even in some cases invented object, with a history of struggle and conquest behind it ..." (RI 33). Thus Said himself recommends narratives of "skepticism and contest" against the easier ones of consensus. He goes on to cite, among others, Kirkpatrick Sale who has argued that the once virtually sacred assumption in the United States of American exceptionalism now appears, thanks to the critical consciousness of more recent American Studies scholars, "hypocritical and racially based" given the systematic "pillage and genocide" that were necessary to create the new republic (RI 37). The traditions and symbols of other national entities are also examined in Said's work, prompting a cautious skepticism concerning all such "grand" narratives of national identity, no less with respect to new postcolonial states as with older Western ones. Echoing the great anti-colonial intellectuals Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire, Said writes:

   [A]lthough there is inestimable value to what an intellectual
   does to ensure the community's survival during periods of
   extreme national emergency, loyalty to the group's fight for
   survival cannot draw in the intellectual so far as to narcotize
   the critical sense, or reduce its imperatives, which are always
   to go beyond survival to questions of political liberation, to
   critiques of the leadership, to presenting alternatives that are
   too often marginalized or pushed aside as irrelevant to the
   main battle at hand. (RI 41)

In his willingness always to criticize, to risk marginalization, to stand aloof from the national enthusiasms of leaders and decision makers, their apologists, and followers, Said's activist intellectual upholds certain narratives and undermines others depending on the application and merit of each. But, like many an avant-gardist, he must be prepared to stand outside the unquestioned institutions, to work against the grain of the accepted discourses to which so many uncritically adhere, because in the end, the intellectual is a kind of perennial exile whose first loyalty is to his own critical integrity, and whose presence in any collectivity almost always has an unsettling, destabilizing effect. From the standpoint of Lyotard, however, this integrity may mean nothing more than the rationalistic re-articulation of the discursively-resistant cultural object (a form of petite histoire) into the fabric of a humanistic discourse, thus making it a potential resource of the dominant ideology. While the original motives may have been unimpeachable, the work of the critic may thus contribute to the terroristic homogenization of formal difference, of stubborn singularity, of undefined otherness. Indeed, this partly explains Lyotard's identification of immediacy with the Event insofar as it demonstrates the slipperiness of direct experience, its inherent resistance to all representation, especially linguistic representation of which criticism is a privileged example. Ironically, Lyotard's criticism is no less vulnerable in this regard, thus rendering the problem, as it were, insoluble, if not simply false. For Said, experience may be "immediate," "direct," "actual," but it is ultimately presentable and representable, albeit with extreme critical care. And because of this representability, or at least because of the necessity of representation, direct experience has a history that can be examined, if not always explained. Thus, narrative and history are not necessarily "terrorizing" if pursued in the spirit of critical consciousness, a consciousness that can successfully reinvest the signs and figures of representational discourse with the kind of urgency and conviction that actually help to confront institutional terror, not assist it. Therefore, Said seems to say, if history is terror according to Lyotard's terms (The Inhuman 102), then is that not an argument for knowing history and confronting it? Nowhere does Said's adherence to enlightenment values seem to preclude their re-examination. Indeed, as he suggests in The World, the Text, and the Critic, the critic's methodological independence depends on a vibrant distrust of the "traditional continuities" of nation, family, biography, Zeitgeist. Instead, like the surrealist responding to "le hasard objectif," the critic must "improvise ... in acts of an often inspired bricolage, finding order out of extreme discontinuity" (WTC 146).

An instance of this "inspired bricolage [that finds] order out of extreme discontinuity" can be seen in one of the few art reviews Said wrote. An exhibition of the art of Mona Hatoum at London's Tare Gallery (2000) provided Said with an opportunity not only to discuss the work of a fellow Palestinian exile, but to apply his critical acumen to a body of work (installations, sculpture) that concretized its concerns through the medium of the avant-garde objet trouve in various assisted, assembled, or accumulative modes of presentation. Many of Hatoum's works employ a range of objects conventionally associated with "the home" or "the everyday," but in a way that suggests the disorienting effects of exile or the alienating effects of modernity. The result, for the viewer, is a surreal sense of menace attaching to the otherwise comforting normalcy of mundane objects: doormats made of needles, coiled bed springs without mattresses, stainless steel cribs, erratically flashing lights arranged among kitchen utensils on drop-leaf tables and placed between wire enclosures, gigantic rotary vegetable shredders one might fit into, maps made of steel filings and glass, bars of soap arranged on the floor and embedded with the contours of a map representing the dismemberment of the West Bank.

In his review, Said's method contributes to this quality of accumulation and dislocation by offering a surprising narrative supplement to the physical immediacy of these items. Through a discussion of Jonathan Swift, T. S. Eliot, and their relevance to the work at hand, Said partly frames, partly enhances Hatoum's work, but without detracting from the concrete assertiveness of her project. Thus he provides a critical narrative that avoids the reductiveness of mere explanation but helps open up the works to the critical richness they already imply as objects. Said's astute perception of the Swiftian coordinates of Hatoum's critical reinvestment of the found object suggests that the novelty of such plastic strategies is itself historically embedded as a kind of parodic re-scaling, re-positioning, and juxtapositioning of distant realities as found in Gulliver's Travels. Thus the epistemological displacements and critical misanthropy at work in Swift's oeuvre are shown to have avant-garde, postmodern, and postcolonial valencies and cogencies. At the same time, both Said and Hatoum insist on the secular and unredeemed aspect of the objects' being and history, an insistence that repudiates the reductive mythologizing of the decision-makers, the empire-builders and their apologists, who would erase difference, nuance, and complexity, to secure the continuities of "acceptable" tradition. In this regard, the perspective of the Palestinian exile who is consistently placed outside these reassuring recuperations indeed makes "the entire world as a foreign land" and the comforts of home a cruel joke. For him or her, such found objects can offer "neither rest nor respite" ("The Art of Displacement" 7) without, perhaps, some critically compensatory narrative of their own.

Orientalism and the Avant-garde

Another way in which avant-garde appropriations and aestheticizations of direct experience both interrogate and mortify the Western tradition, and thus seem to correspond to Saidian discourse, can be found in the movement's conspicuous attempts, especially in the plastic arts, to achieve a new, "elemental" kind of expression. This ambition often required the creative utilization of non-European forms in a deliberate effort to "barbarize," as it were, Western art and thereby challenge its conception of the beautiful. If the Avant-garde seems to contradict its own anti-traditionalism in its free, yet intellectually justifiable, appropriations of forms from other traditions, its maneuvers are shown to be consistent when one considers--as Poggioli explains--that

   The Avant-gardes turn their attention almost exclusively
   to Negroid sculpture and the art of savages [sic], prehistoric
   graffiti and pre-Columbian and Indian art; they
   turn ... toward cultures remote in space and time,
   almost to prehistory itself. This particular mode of
   rediscovering remote and forgotten traditions is not
   contradictory to what has already been said about avant-garde
   anti-traditionalism, precisely because the Avant-garde
   can evaluate archaic traditions better than official
   art and conservative criticism can, if only by way of
   polemical reaction to the erroneous interpretations and
   evaluations of the academy. (12) (Poggioli 55)

In this preoccupation with the pre-Classical, as well as African, pre-Columbian, and Oceanic forms, (13) the Avant-garde distinguishes itself from the Romantics, whose own retrospectivism is much broader, including not only the literary and academic study of the "barbaric and the exotic" (Poggioli 55), but of the medieval and oriental as well. These Romantic interests were based on assumptions--not dissimilar to those of the Avant-garde--that these other cultures and periods represented a non-materialist alternative to a materialist West in need of spiritual or at least cultural regeneration (Orientalism 115). However, with respect to the medieval and oriental, the avant-gardist remains skeptical of "romantic notions of spiritual and cultural inheritance" (Poggioli 47), seeking instead cultural alternatives that destabilize Western assumptions of what constitutes the human. Thus the Avant-garde is more likely to embrace, not oriental forms (which it associates in part with the monotheistic traditions it scorns in Western culture), but the apparently shocking (for the time) and putatively de-humanizing pagan or "savage" forms produced in other parts of the world, at other times in history. And while it may share with Romanticism--not to mention with Said himself--a modern sense of historicism (the idea that cultures, if left to themselves, have distinct and unified histories), the avant-gardist seeks, almost perversely, to intervene in Western history through a kind of formal alternative (and thus, indirectly, via Otherness), in order to shock the West out of its materialist complacencies and the imperialist propensities accompanying them.

The Avant-garde's attraction to the Other, then, is in many ways anti-orientalist because it distrusts the reductively rationalist and classificatory methodologies that characterize such academic study. At the same time, insofar as the Orient itself seems to confirm orientalist assumptions that it can be reduced to patriarchal, monotheistic religion, it is met with the same contempt the Avant-garde holds for the Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly in these religions' shared discomfort with the (mostly female) body and the need to regulate human sexuality through the discredited, "filiative" institution of marriage, as the Avant-garde considers it. The Avant-garde, like Communism, simply dismisses all religion as a political opiate for the masses and as institutionalized superstition. When the Avant-garde is attracted to the Near East, for instance, it is so by virtue of everything that is eccentric and unfamiliar about it, especially its vestiges of a pre-Islamic culture. Not surprisingly, most modernists and avant-gardists have been more responsive to pharaonic Egypt than to its Islamic heritage--to animism, Buddhism, and Tantrism than to the varieties of Muslim religious experience, though Sufism has made occasional inroads along with other mystical traditions. As to the contemporary East, most elements of the Avant-garde have shown themselves sympathetic to, if not actively supportive of, whatever attitudes, impulses, or ideas may have contributed to the struggle against Western imperial control (this is especially true of the Surrealists and the Beats who were staunch opponents of such adventures as the Moroccan, Algerian, and Vietnam Wars of the twentieth century).

Said's mostly accepted, indeed critically-acclaimed, work on Orientalism raises interesting questions with respect to his views--though never fully expounded--of the Avant-garde and its aesthetico-poetic production. While the orientalist is correctly judged for tendentiously deploying a system of representation vis-a-vis the Orient that simplifies, reduces, and essentially deforms a whole world to satisfy preformed cultural assessments or even hegemonic aspirations, the Orient itself is necessarily polemically recast as virtually un-presentable. It is a valid maneuver given the "un-presentability" of the Occident as well, despite millennia of attempts. And if the difference between Orientalism and such "Occidentalism" is that the latter has produced many brilliant "failures" while the former has yielded mostly mediocre to bad "successes" (successful in the sense of reinforcing a particular, and mostly unchallenged attitude in the West toward the Orient), it only goes to show that self-representation, as opposed to other-representation, may have always been deemed the more significant task of the Western theorist. This perhaps inevitable imbalance confirms and explains Said's dissatisfaction with the critically undisciplined efforts to represent the Orient, so many examples of which were based on the premise that any such undertaking was not only possible, but relatively easy--an endless cycle of textual reproduction of a supposedly unchanging and ahistorical Other.

On the other hand, the Avant-garde's attempts to complicate the entire notion of representation, to highlight and accentuate the possible un-presentability of direct experience--the Event, the Now--as some inherently sublime, unknowable thing that ontologically refuses, as it were, to be assimilated into a universal discursive system, are met with predictable skepticism on the part of Said, whose critical instinct is to dismiss these endeavors as essentially self-enclosed formalisms, or "language games," that in fact have little to do with direct experience, and instead strive for a kind of ahistorical status like that of the autonomous art object. The Avant-garde's theoretical justifications--particularly those formulated by Lyotard--seem to have been rejected as so much inflated rhetoric, if not mere noise, in support of an untenable aesthetic insularity, despite claims of radical engagement. What for some constitute serious engagements with the actual or the real, for Said can often be brought down to a persistent narrative mode: Kantian aesthetics and the demand for artistic autonomy. But if this at first implies that Said himself is being merely reductive in his assessments of "alternative" systems of representation (even as he cultivates his own anti-hegemonic position that, ironically, often utilizes the avant-garde strategies of bricolage, self-conscious critical alertness, and a general aesthetic openness to experience), one should quickly reconsider, since Said himself has always expressed appreciation, and a vital one, for aesthetic brilliance. This sometimes extends to orientalist texts--such as those of Flaubert or Nerval--which he distinguishes and analyzes with extreme critical sensitivity, though fully acknowledging their quotient of orientalist prejudice.

Conclusion

Literary scholar and aesthetician W. J. T. Mitchell has also called attention to the worldliness and sensitivity of Said's multifaceted and endlessly challenging critical oeuvre. In an interview of Said on visual art, Mitchell characterized his friend as a "high modern aesthete" (Bove 47), a label Said did not object to. Mitchell went on to ask how Said reconciled or negotiated his "respect for the formal autonomy of the arts" with his political activism--two things that many see as inherently opposed. And while he did not demur from describing as "a mystery" the ineluctable appeal of certain works of art even in light of the heinous political postures their creators sometimes assumed (his example was Wagner), Said insisted that, far from nullifying the aesthetic value of such works, his critical attempts to reconnect them with political, historical, and ideological circumstances should actually be seen as an enhancement, a way of making their aesthetic dimensions all the more meaningful, even if that meaning is sometimes painful to acknowledge. Said's tolerance of the aesthetic--a tolerance, I think, that also extends to a number of avant-garde works--is indeed part of what makes his critical attitude all the more persuasive, serious, and profound.

In the end, both the avant-gardist and the cultural critic partake of a kind of self-imposed exile that makes them, as Said has written of exile in general, a kind of social pariah or leper (RI 47). This association of the work of the modern intellectual with cultural sickness--whether invoked by reactionary bigots or such sophisticated thinkers as Lukacs himself--marks another zone of identification for the critic and the avant-garde practitioner. Both pursue strategies that unsettle the complacent, mostly silent, majority: the Avant-garde through seemly incomprehensible acts, works, gestures, and affronts; the critic through always incisive, sometimes deeply challenging, analyses of issues or practices that are often simply taken for granted. While the one may use a language (or language game) of exclusion and calculated discontinuity to confound its audience, the other employs a clearer, but no less demanding, critical discourse. Yet both antagonize through a form of staged confrontation, either as aesthetic object-event, or as institutionalized public discourse (the latter venues of which are often controled by the "decision makers," whether in the university, the media, the publishing house, or the public forum). Far from meeting these critical or aesthetic overtures with any kind of appreciation, the public--or certain sectors of it--usually reacts with incomprehension, hostility, or scorn--as if to the impertinence of mental pathology or physical rot. Such impertinence seems always to threaten the listener/viewer's sense of identity, well-being, and good sense. But the still-functioning myth that holds these agents of the new (or alternative) in tense proximity is that of the sickness that brings health, the madness that yields insight, the irrelevance that captures the truth of a thing. The real sickness, both figures seem to say, is the "normative" response to modernity, the uncritical, anaesthetized assimilation to the everyday, the forgetting of the Now and its history. It is the genuine critic and the committed avant-gardist--their contending discourses and anti-discourses--that promise the unpleasant, though necessary cure through strategies of intellectual fortification.

Works Cited

Ashbery, John. Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987. N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

Bove, Paul A., ed. Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1998.

Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.

Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Habermas, Jurgen. "Modernity versus Postmodernity." Trans. Seyla Ben-Habib. A Postmodern Reader. Eds. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. Albany, N.Y.: State U of New York P, 1993). 91-104.

Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle, Wash.: Bay P, 1983. 111-25.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity P, 1991.

--. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap P, 1968.

Said, Edward W. "The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoum's Logic of Irreconcilables." Mona Hatoum: The Entire World as a Foreign Land. Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd., 2000.7-17.

--. Musical Elaborations. N.Y.: Columbia UP, 1991. (Referred to in text as ME.)

--. Orientalism. N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1979.

--. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2000. (Referred to in text as RE.)

--. Representations of the Intellectual. N.Y.: Pantheon, 1994. (Referred to in text as RI.)

--. The World, the Text. and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1983. (Referred to in text as WTC.)

Viswanathan, Gauri, ed. Power. Polilics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said. N.Y.: Vintage Books, 2002.

Notes

(1) Said describes affiliation in the following terms: "The only other alternatives [to filiation seem] to be provided by institutions, associations, and communities whose social existence [is] not in fact guaranteed by biology, but by affiliation" (WTC 17). Said's description sounds very similar to Poggioli's description of avant-garde practice: "The modern artist replaces that particular environment, determined by his family and social origins, with what the French call milieu artiste. There, sect and movement become a caste: hence a social fact in a primarily psychological way, motivated by vocation and election, not by blood or racial inheritance or by economic and class distinctions" (Poggioli 31).

(2) Burger makes this point clear after quoting Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": "Here, the loss of aura is not traced to a change in reproduction techniques but to an intent on the part of the makers of art. The change in the 'overall character of art' is no longer the result of technological innovation but mediated by the conscious acts of a generation of artists" (Burger 29).

(3) Poggioli also uses the term "critical consciousness" to express the Avant-garde's link to a historical situation that thus accounts for its unprecedented emergence (Poggioli 167).

(4) Poggioli writes: "But what best validates the ... infantile avant-garde antagonism is that the new generation (that of the avant-garde artist) opposes the old generation, the academy and tradition, by means of a deliberate use of an idiom all its own, a quasi-private jargon. This tendency calls to mind the theory sustained in a paradoxical essay by the youthful Nietzsche. According to his theory, metaphor--that is, the idiom of poetry--would have originated in the desire of a group of youths to distinguish themselves by a kind of secret language. Their language would be opposed to the prose idiom, since that was the means of communication in the old generation and, in the patriarchal society it dominated, the sign of authority and an instrument of power" (Poggioli 37).

(5) Said, however, puts some critical distance between himself and Lukacs in the essay "Between Chance and Determination: Lukacs's Aesthetik" where he describes Lukacs as "incapable of being led to writers who shattered literary values, like Rousseau or Artaud ..." (RE 63).

(6) Said's insight is partly confirmed by the Avant-garde itself through a plethora of supplementary manifestos and polemics.

(7) Said's description of modern "characters" is echoed in the lifestyles and works of various avant-garde personae such as Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Apollinaire, Duchamp, and Stein.

(8) I base this observation on two passages from Reflections on Exile: 1. "Anyone who is really homeless regards the habit of seeing estrangement in everything modern as an affectation, a display of modish attitudes" (RE 182); and 2. Said's frequent citation of Hugo de St. Victoire: "The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his" (RE 185). This second quote suggests that exile is indeed a state of mind and one that is virtually recommended for the modern intellectual, who lives, as Adorno's example attests for Said, in a condition of permanent in-betweenness, or intellectual restlessness (RI 56-57).

(9) Two classic examples are Tristan Tzara's description of how to write a poem and Andre Breton's description of automatic writing.

(10) Poggioli's Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia was published in 1962.

(11) As John Ashbery once wrote: "One finds it difficult to imagine how [the work of Picabia, Arp, Schwitters, and Duchamp] could ever have been construed as anything but a high form of art" (7).

(12) Including, one presumes, academic Orientalism in Said's sense of the word.

(13) Forms which, in the early twentieth century, were often considered "junk" and thus comparable to the objet trouve.