"Romantic Politics and Revolutionary Art: The Manifestos of the Avant-Gardes"

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Romantic Politics and Revolutionary Art: The Manifestoes of the Avant-Gardes

by Anthony J. Cascardi

© Anthony J. Cascardi

 

                                                                                    “Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.”

—Filippo Tommasso Marinetti[1]

 

The main subject of this essay is revolution in art and the manifestos of the avant-gardes, but I want to begin with a text that is neither a manifesto nor, properly speaking, situated in the avant-gardes, in order to provide a broader frame of reference for some of the questions that these manifestos raise. The text is Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, written in 1793 and published in 1795, and I begin with it because it offers what is in some ways the most clear, and certainly one of the earliest, modern articulations of the hope for political transformation by aesthetic means. I think it also provides evidence that many of the preoccupations of romanticism lasted well into the 20h century and were integral to some of the movements we associate with “modern art.” Now that premise is not in altogether new. No less a figure than Octavio Paz proposed this much more than 30 years ago in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures, The Children of the Mire, in terms that have now become quite familiar:

 

Both [romanticism and the twentieth century avant-garde]... rebel against reason, its constructs and its values; both grant a cardinal place to the passions and visions of the body–eroticism, dream, inspiration; both attempt the destruction of visible reality in order to find or invent another one, magical, supernatural, and more than real. Two great historical developments alternately fascinate them and tear them apart: for Romanticism, the Jacobin Terror, and the Napoleonic Empire; for the avant-garde, the Russian Revolution, the purges, and Stalin’s despotic bureaucracy....artists as well as the critics were well aware of these affinities. The Futurists, Dadaists, Ultraists, and Surrealists all knew that their rejection of Romanticism was itself a romantic act, in the tradition which Romanticism itself had inaugurated, that tradition which seeks continuity through rejection....All were conscious of the paradoxical nature of their rejection, namely, that as they denied the past they prolonged it, and in so doing confirmed it; none of them noticed that, unlike Romanticism, whose rejection initiated this tradition, theirs brought one to a close. The avant-garde is the great breach, and with it the ‘tradition against itself’ comes to an end.[2]

 

And yet Paz did not quite get at the heart of the self-limiting character of the avant-garde’s belated romanticism. Moreover, his account leaves unexplained the fact of avant-garde art’s ambition to make art be a force of radical political transformation and does not help explain that ambition’s ambiguous fate. I want to suggest that the form and the rhetoric of such an ambition, if not the political content itself, were defining features of the manifestos of the avant-gardes–most visibly in their problematic commitment to the principle of absolute freedom and in the assertion of a non-conformism that itself became de rigeur.

But first to the background. In the second of the Letters on Aesthetic Education Schiller makes the crucial, underlying claim that “if man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic.”[3] For Schiller, this was because the category of the aesthetic was linked to Beauty, which was in turn thought to be a route to Freedom (Letters, 9). The “problem of politics” to which he referred is this, the construction of freedom, and one of the principal obstacles to it, as he saw it, was modernity itself. The historical “progress” that produced modernity also brought with it a cultural decline, the symptoms of which are a division of powers and a separation of knowledge-spheres that destroyed the inner unity of human life. “It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound upon modern man,” Schiller writes.

 

Once the increase of empirical knowledge and more exact modes of thought made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of the State necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance” (33).

 

But since modern society is itself the problem, its political transformation must be brought about indirectly, by aesthetic means. And with example of the French Revolution and the Terror clearly in mind, Schiller also hopes that art will provide a non-violent basis for such change. As for the power of the artist to effect radical political change, the requirement is that he (or she, but in Schiller’s mind really only he) must resist the forces that hold the actual world in place–in the end, paradoxically, by resisting actuality itself. “Let him leave the sphere of the actual to the intellect, which is at home there, whilst he strives to produce the Ideal out of the union of what is possible with what is necessary” (Letters, 57). One of the many questions that follows from this view is whether the artist can produce this Ideal in actuality, or merely in semblance. Schiller refuses to decide and opts for both: “Let him express this ideal both in semblance and in truth, set the stamp of it upon the play of his imagination as upon the seriousness of his conduct, let him express it in all sensuous and spiritual forms, and silently project it in the infinity of time” (Letters, 59).[4]

If I engage Schiller at some length it is in part because the ideas set forth in the Letters exerted a tremendous influence on some of the most important theories of modernity, beginning with Hegel and going on to Max Weber’s ideas about the differentiation of value-spheres and Lukács’s critique of reification. As recent a critic as Fredric Jameson takes up the line of Schiller’s Letters in his own Lukácsean description of reification as “a fragmentation of the psyche and of its world that opens up ... semi-autonomous and henceforth compartmentalized spaces”: “lived time over against clock time, bodily or perceptual experience over against rational and instrumental consciousness”; “‘originary’ or creative language over against the daily practice of a degraded practical speech, the space of the sexual and archaic over against the reality—and performance—principles of ‘le sérieux’...the separation of the eye from the ear.”[5] This account comes as part of Jameson’s early study of one of the thorniest of modernist writers, Wyndham Lewis, whose Vorticist works and Blast manifestos can be regarded equally as symptoms of the problem of reification in modernity and as attempts to mount an aesthetic defense against it. For Habermas, by contrast, the importance of Schiller’s Letters lies in its vision of the communicative underpinnings deemed necessary for any aesthetically reconciled world.[6] Moreover, Habermas sees a decisive difference between Schiller’s views and the aesthetic practices of the avant-gardes. “Schiller’s aesthetic utopia,” he argues “is ... not aimed at an aestheticizing of living conditions, but at revolutionizing the conditions of mutual understanding. Over against the dissolution of art into life–which the Surrealists later programmatically called for, and the Dadaists and their descendants tried provocatively to achieve—Schiller clings to the autonomy of the pure appearance....he expects of the joy in aesthetic appearance a ‘total revolution’ of the ‘whole made perception.’ But the appearance remains a purely aesthetic one only as long as it foregoes all support from reality” (PDM, 49). Interestingly, Habermas then goes on to invoke Herbert Marcuse as a more plausible heir of Schiller than any of the aesthetic revolutionaries of the avant-garde because he accepts the fact that art must remain within the framework of appearance; it can be a reconciling social and political force “only so long as [the artist] conscientiously abstains, in theory, from affirming the existence of it, and renounces all attempts, in practice, to bestow existence by means of it.”[7] But without a substantially more complex theory of aesthetic appearance, this view amounts to little more than a strategy for the political containment of art. Politics requires action, and consigning art to the realm of appearance would seem to guarantee that it cannot be political.

Indeed, the difficulty of achieving revolution by aesthetic means faces an obstacle that Habermas scarcely takes into account, and this is the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere itself, the evolution of its powers and its identity by virtue of its separation from the spheres of political and social praxis. (This is of course one of the obstacles against which the avant-gardes wanted to rebel.) If it is true that modern life has indeed been carved up into a variety of separate spheres, and that its inner logic rests on their independence from one another, then neither art, nor any other domain for that matter, can have sufficient leverage over the whole of social relations to transform them all. Insisting that art remain within the realm of semblance and appearance, and not enter the world of action, would scarcely afford a remedy for the problem of its perceived unreality–its unreality, that is, when measured from the standpoint of politics, or science, or religion. Which is why, I would argue, the aesthetic revolutionaries of the avant-gardes were drawn to find ways out of the impasse in the development of Schiller’s romantic ideals not by example or by argument but by what can only be described as the power of the aesthetic fiat. Whether explicitly or implicitly (and mostly quite explicitly indeed), the manifestos of the avant-garde rebel against art’s seeming inability to get directly at politics even while they continue to reflect that fact; the vehemence of their rhetoric suggests their own frustration at the political confinement of art when it was their goal for art to make radical political change. Indeed, the manifesto came to function as a proxy for the work of art itself. Certainly the genre proved to be as interesting as some avant-garde artworks. When, not too long after its publication in Le Figaro, Marinetti declaimed the 1909 Futurist Manifesto from the stage of the Teatro Alfieri in Torino preceding a performance of his play Les Poupées electriques, the audience all but disregarded the play and responded to the manifesto instead.[8]

Marinetti’s first Futurist Manifesto was published in Paris on February 20 of that year and came for all intents and purposes come to define a genre which nonetheless tends towards a maddening degree of subdivision. Each one typically identifies itself with an aesthetic subcategory, which, taken together, seem to represent so many different sects of a church internally at war. Indeed, the panorama of the manifesto and its world would not be complete without an appreciation of the intensity of these internal differentiations and distinctions--as if each new set of practices required a distinct platform of views and could only be legitimized insofar as its identity could be outlined programmatically and proclaimed out loud. The manifestos of Futurism and Cubism, of Cubo-futurism and Surrealism, of Tactilism, Ultraism, Creationism, Simultaneism, Dadaism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Machinism, Plasticism, Presentism, Primitivism, Imagism, Suprematism, and a host of others, define a period which was, as Mary Ann Caws so aptly described, a “century of isms.”[9] The voice of the manifesto is typically bald and bold. Unlike the essay, it is a loud and relatively unsubtle genre, contradictory but un-dialectical in nature; its tone is like that of like an alarm or an outcry. Consider the emphatic, nearly violent typography of Wyndham Lewis’ “Blast” Vorticist manifestos, which also bring the manifesto into the ambit of concrete poetry and nearly to the threshold of performance art. Just as with concrete poetry, what the manifesto announces is (ultimately) itself.

Why this investment in the announcement of self and what might this rhetoric have to do with the desire for political change? Whether it is in the Surrealist Manifestoes of André Breton or in the creacionista manifesto of the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, in the Ultraist manifestos, or the Dadaist screed written by Tristan Tzara and his friends, the deepest wish of the avant-garde tracts was for a degree of freedom that could only be characterized as radical and absolute. Anything less would leave the world incompletely, insufficiently, transformed. To attain such a level of freedom would require the rejection of the world as it had come to exist and, with that, the establishment of an entirely new set of aesthetic techniques that could shape the world anew. Huidobro’s Creationist manifesto, “Non Serviam,” rejects nature itself and the power that nature has held over art, while Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (like so many others) embraces technology as the force through which art can re-make the world. In the words of Breton in the first Surrealist manifesto, the principles of revolutionary art must be freedom and imagination. “The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me...; “Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.”[10] Breton’s definition of Surrealism hinges on the notion of a radical break with established practices and techniques.

 

Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our complete nonconformism clearly enough so that there can be no question of translating it, at the trial of the real world, as evidence for the defense. It could, on the contrary, only serve to justify the complete state of distraction which we hope to achieve….This world is only very relatively in tune with thought, and incidents of this kind are only the most obvious episodes of a war in which I am proud to be participating. Surrealism is the ‘invisible ray’ which will one day enable us to win out over our opponents” (MS, 47).

 

Especially in the Manifesto of 1924 (the first one), Surrealism displays a series of features that could readily be described as romantic in its hope for radical change.[11] Surrealism opposes the real insofar as reality is “hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement” (MS, 6). “Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable,” writes Breton (MS, 9). In place of the “real” Breton asserts the priority of something that is more than real, i.e. of the super-real, to which we can only have access aesthetically—by means of the imagination, the marvelous, and of dreams. “Can’t the dream be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?” he asks (MS, 12). As opposed to the novel, and to prose, which Breton regards as aesthetic means for the enforcement of the real, he envisions poetry as a source of a liberating spontaneity (MS, 14, 30). In the framework that Breton invokes, conventional language is saturated by, and necessarily works to sustain, the status quo; only unrestricted speech can lead to lucid thought (MS, 33)—hence his fascination with the arbitrary, hallucinatory forms of writing that can be accessed through the procedures of automatic writing, (écriture automatique). At the core of Surrealism, Breton’s Manifesto proclaims, is psychic automatism:

 

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern (MS, 26).

 

Breton aims in this manifesto at retrieving psychic force, not establishing communicative rationality, as Habermas might hope:

 

The idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places” (PDM, 139).[12]

 

Clearly there are ways in which Breton’s Manifesto depends upon loosening conventional attachments to the ideal of autonomous art. And yet there are obvious problems associated with any attempt to approach freedom through a vision of the aesthetic that regards art as aligned with pure irrationalism. Most famous, perhaps, is Breton’s description of the simplest Surrealist act as “dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd” (MS, 125). In a footnote he adds: “I believe in the absolute virtue of anything that takes place, spontaneously or not, in the sense of non-acceptance” (MS, 125n). I will return to this question in some concluding remarks. For now I would simply observe that Breton’s wish to abandon the will may in fact result in its replacement by what D. H. Lawrence intuitively called the “inhuman will” (cited in Perloff, Futurist Moment, 88).

But first I want to address one of the underlying structural problems that the avant-garde manifestos encounter: that if art is to become political, the artist has to change the conditions which impede it. But this in turn requires that art must already be what it wishes to become. For Breton this presented a true impasse. The problem of revolutionary art, as he saw it, is that, at the present time, the writer must be a product of the bourgeoisie (MS, 155). There is a further diagnosis of this problem in a short piece that was published in Partisan Review in 1938 under the title “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art.”[13] As Breton explained in La Clé des champs, this essay was the product of discussions that he had with Trotsky and the painter Diego Rivera during a visit to Mexico—and that while Trotsky contributed most of the piece he did not sign it. “Our aims,” it declares, are “the independence of art–for the revolution [and] the revolution—for the complete liberation of art!” (Art and Revolution, 129). How we achieve a revolutionary art for which revolution is required poses a more difficult set of questions. The diagnosis of the conditions generating this impasse is nonetheless clear in the essay.

 

In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible. From this follows of necessity an increasingly manifest degradation not only of the work of art but also of the specifically ‘artistic’ personality” (Art and Revolution, 123). (Specific reference to the conditions in Hitler’s Germany and its purge of artists.)

 

And yet the vision of the artist represented in this particular work is remarkably old-fashioned, even romantic. The best political art, for Trotsky, turns out to be something not so far from aesthetic art. “The writer by no means looks on his work as a means. It is an end in itself and so little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence of the existence of the work” (cited in Trotsky, Art and Revolution, 126).

The earlier manifestos of the avant-gardes saw things in quite a different light. They attempted to break the barriers impeding revolutionary art by presenting themselves as acts, and by understanding speech acts as themselves works of art. They were, in many ways, anticipations of what now goes by the name of performance art. Take, as an example, the proclamation entitled “Contro Venezia Passatista” (“Against Past-Loving Venice”), printed on leaflets, 800,000 of which were dropped from the top of the Campanile in Venice on July 8, 1910 just as the Sunday crowd was returning from its weekly excursion to the Lido.

 

We renounce the old Venice, enfeebled and undone by worldly luxury, although we once loved and possessed it in a great nostalgic dream. We renounce the Venice of foreigners, market for counterfeiting antiquaries, magnet for snobbery and universal imbecility... We want to prepare the birth of an industrial and military Venice that can dominate the Adriatic sea, that great Italian Lake. Let us hasten to fill in its little reeking canals with the shards of its leprous, crumbling palaces. Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for cretins, and raise to the heavens the imposing geometry of metal bridges and howitzers plumed with smoke, to abolish the falling curves of the old architecture. Let the reign of the holy Electric Light finally come, to liberate Venice from its venal moonshine of furnished rooms (cited in Perloff, Futurist Moment, 103)

 

The manifesto wanted to be anti-bourgeois, and anti-historical, but clearly it required history and the bourgeoisie against which to rebel. In the manifesto world, there is no creation without an equal and opposite measure of destruction. (“We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice,” FM, 22). And while much of its rhetoric was designed specifically to épater, some of its tactics–such as the use of boldface type and collage--were borrowed from late 19^th-century advertising. The manifesto sought to be esoteric, but it was also spectacle and required a mass audience for its success. (Marinetti himself wrote “We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot,” FM, 22). The demeanor was undisciplined, the behavior intentionally bad: no conventions of expository prose, no evidence, no argument, no analysis. But it was also a highly prescriptive genre, full of indictments, accusations, and demands. Indeed, the key ingredients in the making of a manifesto, according to Marinetti himself, were “violence and precision”--“de la violence et la précision,” as he says in a letter to the Belgian painter Henry Maasen (in Perloff, Futurist Moment, 81). “No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece” says the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 (FM, 21). The “precision” Marinetti invokes means that even while proposing wholesale changes in the practice of art, the manifesto’s pronouncements must never be broad. If the past is to be rejected, the rhetoric of the manifesto requires that it be rejected in detail, with specificity and precision: “l’accusation précise, l’insulte bien définie” (Perloff, Futurist Moment, 82).

The violence in this formula poses a challenging series of questions, which brings me to a final set of remarks. What are we to make of the fascination with the new that leads to the enthusiastic embrace of technology, of howitzers, and of war? This is a far cry indeed from Schiller’s desire for a form of aesthetic education that would make the modern world, and human life, reconciled and whole. Is the violence of the manifestos merely rhetorical, a matter of style and tone and metaphor, or is it meant to transpose itself into something actual, something “real”? Breton’s description of the simplest surrealist act would seem to answer that question in one way, and yet Breton also seems to have understood such violence itself as carrying an aesthetic force, hence as something other than simply real. As far as Marinetti and the “rhetorical” violence of the manifestos is concerned, it is important to observe how directly he aligns a fascination with technology and the cult of speed with a glorification of war. “We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed” (FM, 21); “We will glorify war–the world’s only hygiene–militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman” (FM, 22). Art itself is drawn into this fascist vortex, not in the final analysis as the agent of change that the Futurists might have hoped it would be, but as an index of the sheer force of will–an inhuman will at times, indeed–through which these young aesthetic rebels sought to engineer a brave new world by ordaining a radical change in the nature of art. “Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice” (FM, 23). How ironic and strange that the avant-gardes proved to be so right in foreseeing new practices of art and so wrong as far as the content was concerned. This is something that some of the most influential institutional critiques of the avant-gardes generally do not generally see. In Theory of the Avant-Garde, for instance, Peter Bürger argued that avant-garde art count not succeed in translating life into art because art had to be given back over to its institutions, which liquidate its revolutionary goals.[14] He furthermore argues that the neo-avant-garde only confirms this fact, that neo-avant-garde art is autonomous art “in the full sense of the term, which means that it negates the avant-gardiste intention of returning art to the praxis of life” (58). His words echo those of Marcuse, which were articulated in The Aesthetic Dimension as part of a brief commentary on Andy Warhol, the Factory, and other rapprochements between modern art and contemporary capitalist culture (“The artist’s desperate effort to make art a direct expression of life cannot overcome the separation of art from life,” 50). Adorno likewise pointed out the diminishing force of the “new” that was essentially to avant-garde art.[15] But the rhetoric of violence which the avant-garde manifestos embrace is the symptom of a deeper, and perhaps insurmountable difficulty inherent in any attempt to legislate changes in social practice by aesthetic means. It is in fact a sign of the perils associated with the aesthetic revolution for which Schiller had such high expectations. In August of 1793 Schiller wrote a long letter to his patron in which he set the hopes of his “aesthetic education” in direct contrast with the political history of his times: “The attempt of the French people,” he wrote with regret, “has plunged, not only that unhappy people itself, but a considerable part of Europe and a whole century, back into barbarism and slavery” (Letters, xvii). It was not, of course, the assertion of human rights that caused him dismay, but the violent consequences of the revolutionary means used to being them about. It is ironic indeed that the manifestos of the avant-gardes should have run aground on this very point, because one of Schiller’s explicit goals was to avoid the violence associated with the French Revolution and the Terror that followed. If the manifestos of the avant-gardes are any measure, art came to repeat politics in a sometimes disheartening way. The attempt to engineer political change through art turned out to be far more fraught than Schiller might ever have believed.