Perhaps the artist is too busy being original to be avant-garde.
Avant-garde is sort of a critical label attached from the outside.
The culture at large is stunned by something at a certain historical
moment - it strikes a chord or opens a door suddenly - and that's called
"avant-garde". But originality is more intense than avant-garde:
newness at a literally incomparable level.
Mike asks:
Finally, a serious point to Henry: "Both Jones & Mandelstam present
concepts of the "shaped image" as the basis of poetic art which outbid, in
their turn, contemporary theories of the de-centered or non-committable
linguistic sign." I don't follow this - I'm not sure what aspect of what
theory it refutes; does it also imply a critique of the practice of
de-centered poetry?
Henry replies:
Jones links all art with "shaping", as well as to his concept of "extra-utile"
sign-making, a sacramental playing analogous to (but not the same as) the
creation of the universe as a kind of art-work, and to the redemptive
sign-making of the Mass. Mandelstam follows the philologist Potebnia in
describing the linguistic sign as an "inner image" - "the Word is Psyche" -
capable of a sort of an aesthetic free play: the sail or the arch of the
forming poem - "an arch appears in my mumbling", etc.
These concepts of poetry-making, by accentuating the process of "shaping",
differ from totalizing theories of language and text - theories
which DISPLACE or replace aesthetics within the theoretical discourse
of the de-centered sign. I think you could find affinities between
Jones, Mandelstam, Celan & Levinas with different approach:
rather than subsuming art to irresolvable, self-reflexive signs,
the shaping of art would be the evidence of a pre-verbal "index"
of presence, a dialogue (as the Eskin book I referred to earlier
explains).
Henry
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