Imagine my surprise, after a week offline flipping pebbles into the
atlantic, to come back and discover the return of the avant-garde. Well,
not really. Such rumble and clatter, like the poor, etc. I had thought
to clatter additionally that a-g is both hopeless as a descriptive term
for the range of practices it claims to encompass and the various
entanglements of contrariety and affinity they bring with them, and that
a-g remains unavoidable as the name of the problem of the relationship
between literary form and cultural politics; and further that we can
hardly dodge historicality by sheer shruggery, not least because pastiche
dogs these blithe forays into the past, and yet that pastiche remains
parasitically bound up with notions of innovation, particularly in the
wake of the historical a-g; and so on and so forth leading to some fencing
around larger issues of aesthetics and modernity, ho hum.
BUT then various messages seemed to prompt the thought that this medium
seems to operate in a performative mode more often than not, and so a
propositional approach might indeed be more fitting; better the virtual clash
of unbending statements, than the tedium of post facto recuperation. Or so
at least the post-holiday slump dictates today. And so, in the name of
pastiche, I offer a faked up and mostly flippant pastry row:
* You are always back where you started: at the autopsy table. This is
originality, these are its parts, its inner parts. One, two, three. It
is the bloodless surgery of redress.
* Pastiche vigor; pastiche surprise. What is our next word for dreck?
* The avant-garde is what you come back to. Every time. It is another
backless mirror: please step forward number four. These are the ghostly
voices that boom in our ears as we stare ourselves down.
* "the microfascism of the avant-garde" -- Gilles Deleuze
* Keep your enemies close and your anguish closer. It is the ivy by which
you thrive, variegated, darkly ablaze.
* "the devil is in the convenience store" -- almost Henry
* Always the invitation to view bibelots. But strolling in idleness
around the exhibits, so lovingly mounted, she began to see the
possibilities of rearrangement. She tripped the alarm and set to work.
* Quickwipe, quickflow, quickset. Whose building blocks, whose boots?
Slamwipe, slamflow, slamset.
* "When I hear the word art, I reach for my politics; when I hear the word
politics, I reach for my art" -- trad. anon.
* Forwards, backwards, sideways; in emergent profusion: a practice of
time. The art of war or the war of art? We raise a banner to defend; we
build a firewall. We repeal borders: we repel boarders.
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