Peter Burger - Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde电子版.pdf

Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde Peter Bürger* Definitions hat is an avant-garde?” I understand this question as a provocation. The strategy is not a bad one, because some- “Wtimes a provocation can bring about a surprising clarity, if it causes the addressee to lay his cards on the table. Usually though, this does not happen, and for good reason. Lacan was adamantly opposed to speaking “le vrai du vrai,” arguing that the naked truth was always disappointing. In his Logic, Hegel ridiculed the arbitrariness of defini- tions that are supposed to pin down a concept to specific properties: even though no other animal has an earlobe, it is not an adequate way of defining human beings. And Nietzsche puts it concisely: “Only that which has no history can be defined.” If such different thinkers as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Lacan—I could have also mentioned Adorno and Blumenberg—oppose definitions, then we should listen to them. In fact, it is a practice that runs the risk of depriving the concept of what keeps it alive: the contradictions that it unites within itself. Hegel’s short text Who Thinks Abstractly? makes this clear. A murderer is being taken to his place of execution. For the bourgeois, who subjugates the world via definitions and calculations, he is nothing but a murderer; he is, in other words, identical with his act. For the old nurse, however, who, catching sight of the head of the executed man, cries out, “Oh how beautifully the merciful sun of God shines on Binder’s head,” he is a concrete individual, who has committed a crime, received his deserved punishment for it, and is now partaking of God’s grace.1 To be sure, dispensing with definitions causes problems.