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Международный научно-исследовательский журнал
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№ 5 (95) ▪ Часть 3 ▪ Май
52
to realize itself. And anything that obviously inhibits that loop tends to be outcompeted by somethings that inhibits it less. […]
And that is why […] it monopolizes escape. If escape into capitalism is not the escape you want, then modern history is not for
you [5].” In other words, in its ‘bid for knowledge [1, P. 198],’ the avant-garde produces critique and anti-critique under the
banner of resistance with fluidity and resilience of capital and with human agency countered by non-agency, if need be. It is in
this sense that both capital and the avant-garde are the escape “not for us but from us [5].” The avant-garde’s escape machine
may necessitate an ‘operator’, especially when language is perceived mechanically as “a ‘system’ of mechanical transformations,
iterations and reversions [1, P. 203].” An ‘operator’ as a machinic agency automatically coordinating a set of algorithms or rules
with each other in relation between signification and materiality in turn contributes to on-going fluidity and anti-stasis. With
capital anything but stasis, probabilistic rather than deterministic nature of language makes “the nostalgia for the unattainable
[1, P. 200]” impossible to share collectively. The machinic nature of the language allowing the avant-garde to juggle various
forms of temporality, subjectivity and de-subjectificaion thus also functions in ideally capitalistic mode: the idea of escape on
an assembly line and a miniature banner of resistance flapping in the wind above a neatly mowed lawn of a suburban residence
of an intellectual.
Conclusion
The present investigation has looked into the concept of the avant-garde under the conditions of capitalism and outlined the
former as the inherent machinic part of the latter. The early and contemporary conceptualizations of the avant-garde have
foregrounded features of the movement that allowed to place the avant-garde’s potential to sublate the institution of art and to
serve as a self-critique into temporal and spatial planes operative within the movement under the condition of capitalism. The
latter has been approached from the theoretical framework of accelerationism and the propositions of Nick Land. The analysis
thus undertaken has allowed to arrive at several conclusions.
First, it has been shown that temporal rhetoric at the root of the avant-gardist thinking is tied to anthropomorphic illusion of
unmade future and complete past. This makes the avant-garde’s temporally elastic niche to make no more sense than the
approach to any other historically delimited slice of art. On the other hand, the rhetoric of the avant-garde as an anachronous or
dissenting niche temporally or spatially juxtaposed against ‘previous forms of representation’ or ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture has
allowed to define the avant-garde as a rupture in methodological sense only as long as the issue of the agency of such a rupture
is left out of discussion. As soon as such agency enters this rhetoric, ‘the avant-garde’s future or futures’ starts to reveal capitalist
mechanics as its core.
Herein, it has also been suggested that the overall consideration of the limits of a human agency is by far not enough since
the nature of capitalism turns artistic autonomy into the mechanism of virtual enactments of resistance. Even the concept of
‘iterability’ of the avant-garde acquires all features of capital which functions as a self-perpetuating diagram. Resistance or self-
critique becomes a legitimized habitat for legitimized projects of ‘immanent liberation’ because emancipation, as a process of
dehumanization, remains essentially human even when human agency is countered by non-agency. Therefore, the future of
capital and the future of the avant-garde become either a tautology or a theoretical loop. When Land reflects on the possibility
of “the notorious death of capitalism [6, P. 266],” he notes that “death is not an extrinsic possibility of capital, but an inherent
function [6, P. 266].” In the similar manner, Armand contends that “[i]t’s hardly surprising that within a culture dominated by
commoditisation, a critical poetics is intimated to be impossible [2, P. 16].”
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