Value-Form and Avant-Garde
▻http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/value-form-and-avant-garde
What we call the ‘neo-avant-garde’ is the last cycle of artistic production that can still plausibly be said to have made claims in the terms sketched above. It is evidently not a concept that admits of strict periodisation. For simplicity’s sake let us postulate that the neo-avant-garde’s terminal phase, in Western Europe at least, begins in 1957, when Guy Debord and others founded the Situationist International. Most likely it ends in the 1970s – perhaps, for instance, in 1979, the year when the Italian state arrested leading figures associated with the nebulous phenomenon called Autonomia. Between these signposts lies the death of what some theorists (I am thinking particularly of the French group Théorie Communiste) have defined as ‘programmatism’: briefly, the cycle of class struggle – conspicuously coterminous with artistic modernism – that finds its programme in the affirmation of the proletariat as an autonomous pole within the capitalist class relation. Programmatism refers to struggles that affirm the identity of the proletarian subject and hence that frame politics in terms of the growth of class power, as opposed to the immediate abolition of the proletariat as a class of capital. It begins with the workers’ movement in the mid-19th century and ends, if we follow the concept’s originators, in exactly the moment in question, the 1960s and 70s, when new forms of revolt and capitalist restructuring eliminated the basis for a programmatic class politics. Workers themselves then tended to reject mediation by traditional parties and trade unions, while capital decomposed the class through a new global division of labour and intensified real subsumption of the labour process (by which I here designate the imposition of specifically capitalist rationalities through technique and organisation). What does it mean to say that modernism ‘belongs’ in some deep but still-to-be-determined sense to the epoch of programmatism?
It means that we should grasp modernist art’s self-preservative and self-destructive moments in terms of its constitutive relation to the value-form. This is a large claim. All the same, the premises of my argument are simple observations.