Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

18 Jelena Stojanović
the collectives under scrutiny in this chapter strove to resist, or rather sought
to reverse. Their primary if nonetheless utopian task was to negate the rhetoric
that there were two avant-gardes 3 —one political, the other aesthetic—
that are in turn divided along imaginary lines of demarcation and positioned
by mutual subordination and subservience. This same utopian drive led them
to challenge both ofWcial Marxist doctrine and institutionally established,
artistic avant-gardism. They strongly believed that international collectives
provided, inadvertently perhaps yet uniquely, the underpinning for both the
aesthetical and the political avant-garde, and that the very existence of collectivism
profoundly challenged any form of specialization, spatialization, or
demarcation. As the Situationists explained in a text written almost twenty
years later and coincidentally entitled, irony notwithstanding, “The Fall of
Paris” (“La Chute de Paris”), the internationals and truly international collectives
simply never existed and their time has yet to come. 4 Hence, these
art “internationals,“ or more to the point, “internationaleries” in a droll
rendition offered by Christian Dotremont, were inherently ambiguous formations,
and their ambiguity was itself a form of negation and critique meant
to subvert the dominant modernist discourse and its embedded cold war
thinking. Simultaneously however, in a positive move, it sought to rescue
whatever remained of public, collective subjectivity and the radical, political
potential of internationalism. Therefore the very term internationaleries,
and even more importantly the cultural practice it gave rise to, might be
described as a “grotesque” manipulation of the modernist trope of international
avant-gardism.
My use of the term grotesque is based on the writings of Mikhail
Bakhtin who deWned it as an ironic, performative tactic with a very important
social role insofar as it both critically preserved and negated signiWcant
contemporary issues at “moments of danger.” 5 It is this dual Wgurative/dis-
Wgurative function of the grotesque as a rhetorical tactic that reverses or
inverts the intended and established uses of internationalism. To “degrade”
means above all not so much to propose new modes, as much as to expose
the lack and inconsistencies of the old ones including art, the avant-garde,
and even collective practice itself. Hence, the grotesque is a collective act
that culminates in a carnival, a “borderline between life and art.” 6 Furthermore,
Bakhtin maintains that insofar as the grotesque is also a speech act it
is a spatial tactic as well. Its aim is nothing short of the reordering and rearticulating
of the world as in a dialectical “change of gears.” As an upsidedown,
inside-out movement the grotesque is probably best exempliWed by the
well-known Situationist tactic of détournement. True to the logic of the grotesque,
it was deWned in deceptively simple terms as a “reversal of perspective.”
7 Through this grotesque mode of action the international collectives