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Temporal and Spatial Planes of the Avant-garde
As noted by Nick Land on Hermitix podcast, the treatment of time represents one of the ‘comical’ cases of confusion. Apart
from the consequences for the concepts of free will and determinism - in other words, autonomy versus subordination,
subjectivity versus subjectification - the metaphysical perception of time, according to Land, is a hopeless undertaking as it
attempts to perceive time as an object in time, either efficient or final, neither of which represents rigorously critical ap proach.
“When you stop trying to put time in time, then you are no more confused by convergent waves and divergent waves, or finalistic
processes then efficient processes; both of those things are making equal sense and, if taken in exclusion of the other, they make
equal nonsense. The notion that the future is somehow unmade and is incomplete and the past is complete is anthropomorphic
illusion [5].” It is this sense that the avant-garde in its temporal perception whether within or beyond chronology appears to
function as an object within objectified time and, hence, its peculiar and temporally-elastic niche appears to make no more sense
than the approach to any other historically delimited slice of art.
Yet, the programmatic aspect of the definition of the avant-garde “to confirm the institution of autonomy and accomplish
the rescue of art under capitalism [12, P. 246]” is another consequence of the avant-garde’s anthropomorphic perception of
temporality. The attempt to counter this ‘objectified’ conception has been made in attributing the avant-garde a certain sense of
anachrony linked to the advent of the machinic of the post-industrial age: the machine’s transcending ‘the human will-to-
progress’ and acquiring auto-poesis and its own discursive power, according to Armand, results in the disjointedness in the “time
of production [1, P. 197]” and anachrony. In the first place, once anthropomorphic plane is transcended by the machinic, the
concept of anachrony becomes theoretically reductive because it places the processes posited beyond ‘the human will – to –
whatever – and – not –only -progress’ back into the objectified time loop. The same loop ensues when the avant-garde, “whose
claim to being somehow before the time [is tied to] an inherent anachronism of political economy and the experimental sciences,”
is further oriented towards “the unrealized and the ‘unrepresentable’ at the limits of received knowledge [which] is always
accompanied by a dependency upon previous forms of representation and conceptualization in order to formulate, precisely, an
idea of what the limits of the knowledge in fact are” and is perceived as ”counter-historical movement [1, P.197].” If, on the
one hand, we are departing from the machine’s transcending ‘the human will-to-progress’ which essentially conditions the states
of disjointedness of time and production anthropomorphically, the whole project of realizing ‘the unrealized and the
unpresentable’ as posited against ‘previous forms of representation’ appears to be possible only in objectified time slices. On the
other hand, breaking the overall time into historical stages indeed qualifies the avant-garde as “counter-historical-movement”
and also signposts time as an object. Despite the avant-garde’s fluid temporal borders, only in its temporally-objectified sense
its feature of being ‘before the time’ is conceivable. Thus, departing from such contingent nature of the avant-garde’s definition
and juxtaposing it against other levels of cultural production invariably result in ‘back-to-square-one’ time loop despite the claims
of its temporal elasticity and resilience.
Another illusion of escaping a theoretical loop is the avant-garde’s spatially rather than temporally disjoined niche. This
spatial niche no longer operates on the terminology of ‘previous’ or ‘current’ forms of representation but resorts to the concepts
of ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘popular’ culture and suggests to look into “avant-garde works themselves, which on closer inspection
reveal real levels of discord and dissent from the expectations of the popular text and therefore are resistant to assimilation [13,
P. 293].” Herein, the proponent of such view suggests that “the avant-garde continues to exert its renunciative force even in
conditions of (partial) assimilation and general marginalization. It is more fruitful to look at the avant-garde as a kind of residual
placeholder for art’s autonomy and, as such, it is better understood as a spatial concept rather than as a supersessive procession
of formalized groups or movements [13, P. 293].” Paradoxically, though, such ‘residual placeholder’ is anyway juxtaposed
against temporally pinned ‘expectations of the popular texts’ and hence is also an illusory escape from the planes of
objectification.
The overall undertaking of the avant-garde within or beyond the rhetoric of an autonomous niche or ‘supersessive
movement’, ‘anachrony’ or ‘unrepresentability’, ‘assimilation’ or ‘renunciation’, ‘dissent’ or ‘marginalization’ foregrounds its
temporally and spatially vulnerable nature. Empirically speaking of representation as a mimetic method, the avant-garde may be
considered a rupture in methodological sense. Such perspective may account for the avant-garde reliance on and juxtaposition
against temporal (‘previous forms of representation’) and spatial (‘high’ and ‘low’ culture) planes as indeed a rupture in the
method may occur at any point of time, objectified not excluded, and at any spatial level. However, as soon as the issue of the
agency of such rupture enters the discussion, temporal elasticity, resilience and the overall rhetoric of ‘the avant-garde’s future
or futures’ starts to reveal capitalist mechanics at its core. The explanation for that may lie in the fact that “[t]hose seeking to
defend the human management of social processes (where 'man' speculatively unites with the God of anthropomorphic
monotheism) can have no project [6, P. 230-231]” but to restore that very mechanics the avant-garde attempts to subvert.
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