Modernism and the Avant-Garde

Shore’s own judgments and connections

On Shore's admittedly simplified schema, modernism answers modernity's uncertainty in two waves: a Freudian plunge into the self, then an avant-garde that vaults past it, almost a Hegelian Aufheben.

Put simply Shore, simplifying on purpose: modern art answered the age's uncertainty in two waves. First a Freud-like dive into the inner self, then an avant-garde leap past the self, almost a Hegelian "Aufheben": overcoming something while carrying it forward.

Gregor Samsa's waking as a "monstrous vermin" in The Metamorphosis forces the question of whether any stable self exists, or identity is only a mask with nothing underneath to grip.

Habit leaves us sleepwalking, recognizing things without seeing them; ostranenie, art's estranging device, shocks perception awake, "to make a stone feel stony."

Put simply Shklovsky: habit makes us sleepwalk, recognizing things without really seeing them. Art wakes us up by making the familiar strange, his "ostranenie" or estrangement, "to make a stone feel stony."

The avant-garde recasts the representation question: art is no mirror of life but a hammer for building it, a shift from representing to creating that eventually leaves no ground underfoot.

Put simply Shore: the avant-garde changed the question of what art is for. Art is not a mirror held up to life but a hammer for building it. Moving from showing to creating eventually left nothing solid underfoot.

The avant-garde's trajectory ended in politics: Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, to Mussolini's fascists; most others, the Russians above all, went left, to the Bolshevik revolution.

Put simply Shore: in the end the avant-garde turned to politics. Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, joining Mussolini's fascists. Most others, the Russians above all, went left, joining the Bolshevik revolution.

On Shore's admittedly simplified schema, modernism answers modernity's uncertainty in two waves: a Freudian plunge into the self, then an avant-garde that vaults past it, almost a Hegelian Aufheben.

Put simply Shore, simplifying on purpose: modern art answered the age's uncertainty in two waves. First a Freud-like dive into the inner self, then an avant-garde leap past the self, almost a Hegelian "Aufheben": overcoming something while carrying it forward.

Art has no duty to depict only goodness and beauty; the obscene, the ugly, the erotic and the wicked belong in it too: owning one's perspective means admitting its darkness.

Put simply Baudelaire: art need not show only the good and beautiful; the ugly, obscene, erotic and wicked belong in it too. Shore ties this to owning your own way of seeing, which means admitting its dark side.

First-wave modernism, on Lewis's account, is a crisis of representation: art stops assuming it must mirror the world objectively and asks whether to render it as felt from within.

Put simply Pericles Lewis, a Yale colleague of Shore's, calls early modernism a "crisis of representation": art stops assuming it must mirror the world objectively and asks whether to show it as it feels from inside.

First-wave modernism, Shore would say, carries forward Romantic motifs like Sehnsucht and the irrational naked soul, yet without Romanticism's wholesale celebration of passion.

Put simply Shore's view: early modernist art kept some Romantic themes, like longing for something that can never be reached and a naked soul full of irrational passions. But it stopped celebrating passion the way the Romantics did.

The small circle of Prague expressionists around Brod, Werfel and Kafka, German-speaking Jews in a Habsburg city, were above all prophets of marginality and alienation, Kafka most poignantly of all.

Put simply Shore: the few German-speaking Jewish writers around Brod, Werfel and Kafka in Prague, then a city of the Habsburg Empire, wrote above all about living on the margins and not belonging. Kafka did so most movingly.

Kafka felt estranged from each of his several identities, German-speaking, Czechoslovak, Jewish, and from himself: his diary admits "hardly anything in common with myself."

Gregor Samsa's waking as a "monstrous vermin" in The Metamorphosis forces the question of whether any stable self exists, or identity is only a mask with nothing underneath to grip.

Through a Gregor who can no longer earn his living, The Metamorphosis enters something of a dialogue with Marxism, asking whether a person's identity and worth depend on being productive.

Put simply In Kafka's story The Metamorphosis, Gregor turns into a bug and can no longer go to work and earn a living. Shore sees a dialogue with Marx: does a person's identity and worth depend on being productive?

Where Marx's worker is alienated structurally, by how labor is organized, Kafka's alienation is less structural than psychological: the anguished, powerless outsider who ends up utterly alone.

Put simply Marx and Kafka both describe alienation, feeling cut off. For Marx it comes from how work is organized. For Kafka it is more a matter of inner feeling: the anguished, powerless outsider who ends up completely alone.

Around 1914 the inward plunge into radical subjectivity reverses into a flight out of subjectivity, bound not for where art began but somewhere else entirely.

Put simply Shore: around 1914, art's dive into the inner self turned around into an escape from the self. That escape did not lead back to where art had started, but somewhere completely new.

Language is form rather than substance: a combination of sounds means something only inside a particular linguistic system, so meaning is a matter of relations, not of things.

Put simply Saussure: language is a pattern, not a stuff. A combination of sounds means something only inside a particular language, so meaning comes from how words relate to one another, not from the things they name.

Every state a language passes through has, in Saussure's phrase, an "ever fortuitous nature": languages arise through arbitrary contingencies, not by anyone's design, Esperanto being a partial exception.

Put simply Saussure: chance shapes a language at every stage. Nobody designed languages; they arose through countless accidents. Esperanto, an invented language, is a partial exception.

Nothing natural or God-given ties a signifier to its signified: the word dog refers to dogs only by differing from cat and hog, and by sheer convention.

Put simply Saussure: nothing in nature or from God ties a word (the "signifier") to what it means (the "signified"). "Dog" means dog only because it differs from "cat" and "hog", and because speakers have settled on it.

Marinetti's 1913 manifesto calls for words set free: strip away syntax, punctuation, grammar and spelling rules, play with typeface, so images and analogies pour out unhampered by constraint.

Arranging words on the page into pictures and shapes, through experiments with layout and typeface, dissolves the line separating the verbal from the visual arts.

Put simply Apollinaire: by arranging words on the page into pictures and shapes, and playing with layout and typeface, poetry wipes out the line between writing and visual art.

The word as such, slovo kak takovoe, goes beyond loosening grammar: cut the word from its referent altogether and it becomes a thing, a toy, free to be played with.

Put simply Khlebnikov's "word as such" goes further than breaking grammar rules. Cut a word off from the thing it names, and the word becomes a thing in its own right, a toy free to be played with.

Divorce the word from what it stands for and form is all that remains; at the very least, the old ranking of content above form gets turned upside down.

Put simply Kruchenykh: once a word is cut off from what it stands for, only its form is left. At the very least, the old belief that content matters more than form is turned upside down.

Literary language is special in announcing itself as language: it pulls attention toward the signifier, laying bare its devices, rather than acting as an invisible camera trained on the signified.

Put simply Shklovsky: the language of literature is special because it draws attention to itself as language and shows how it works. It points you to the words themselves, rather than acting as an invisible camera on the thing described.

Habit leaves us sleepwalking, recognizing things without seeing them; ostranenie, art's estranging device, shocks perception awake, "to make a stone feel stony."

Put simply Shklovsky: habit makes us sleepwalk, recognizing things without really seeing them. Art wakes us up by making the familiar strange, his "ostranenie" or estrangement, "to make a stone feel stony."

The Russian futurists' 1912 manifesto would throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others off the "steamship of modernity"; Shore glosses this as sweeping the past away to usher in the future.

The avant-garde's early war on the bourgeoisie was far more Rousseau's quarrel than Marx's: the target was shallow, showy conformism, and any real sense of exploitation came only slowly.

Put simply Shore: the early avant-garde's attacks on the middle class were closer to Rousseau than to Marx. They mocked its shallow, showy conformity. A real sense that it exploited workers came only slowly.

Italian futurism, more than its Russian cousin, was bound up with machines, science, speed, physical vitality and aggression; Marinetti went so far as to find war beautiful.

On Shore's reading, the avant-garde took Nietzsche literally: if God's loss was to be compensated at all, his death had to be embraced without reservation, and whatever was toppling given a push.

Put simply Shore's reading: the avant-garde took Nietzsche's "God is dead" literally. If anything could make up for losing God, his death had to be embraced completely, and whatever was already falling should be pushed.

The avant-garde recasts the representation question: art is no mirror of life but a hammer for building it, a shift from representing to creating that eventually leaves no ground underfoot.

Put simply Shore: the avant-garde changed the question of what art is for. Art is not a mirror held up to life but a hammer for building it. Moving from showing to creating eventually left nothing solid underfoot.

Avant-garde internationalism was not merely circumstantial: once Versailles replaced the multilingual empires with passport-checking nation-states, crossing borders became a deliberate, aggressive act rather than the innocent cosmopolitanism of before.

Put simply Shore: the avant-garde's internationalism was deliberate. After Versailles broke the old many-language empires into nation-states with passports, crossing borders became a pointed, aggressive act, unlike the earlier, innocent sense of being at home anywhere.

Art has never owed allegiance to any nation: it "was always free of life," its color never matching the flag flying over the city's fortress.

Put simply Shklovsky: art has never belonged to any nation. In his words it "was always free of life," and its colors never matched the flag flying over the city's fortress.

Dada is best understood, Shore thinks, in Clark's phrase, as contingency reified: the feeling that nothing is fixed and anything might happen next, turned into a thing in itself.

Put simply Shore thinks Katerina Clark put it best: Dada takes the feeling that nothing is fixed and anything could happen next, and turns that feeling into a thing of its own, "contingency reified."

Dada is rebellion without a program, freedom pursued for its own sake and pointed at nothing beyond itself; as Tzara put it, "the most acceptable system is in principle none."

Surrealism swings somewhat back toward Freud: psychic automatism, a free association of the mind released from every aesthetic or moral consideration.

Put simply Surrealism swings partly back toward Freud. Its method is "psychic automatism": letting the mind run by free association, with no concern for beauty or morals.

The avant-garde's trajectory ended in politics: Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, to Mussolini's fascists; most others, the Russians above all, went left, to the Bolshevik revolution.

Put simply Shore: in the end the avant-garde turned to politics. Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, joining Mussolini's fascists. Most others, the Russians above all, went left, joining the Bolshevik revolution.

Shore reads Mayakovsky's 1930 suicide note, "the love boat crashed against the everyday," as the moment the avant-garde's leap proved existentially unbearable.

Put simply Shore's reading: Mayakovsky's 1930 suicide note, "the love boat crashed against the everyday," marks the moment the avant-garde's leap into a world where anything was possible became impossible to live with.

Looking back years later in On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets, Jakobson judged Mayakovsky a man wholly unsuited to life.

A Slap in the Face of Public Taste Пощёчина общественному вкусу

Russian futurists publish "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste".

Words-in-Freedom (manifesto) Distruzione della sintassi — Immaginazione senza fili — Parole in libertà

Marinetti's manifesto of words in freedom.

World War I, set off by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Marinetti visits Russian futurists; mutual incomprehension.

Kafka's diary entry on having nothing in common with himself.

A Cloud in Trousers Облако в штанах

The Metamorphosis Die Verwandlung

Jakobson co-founds the Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915); Shklovsky, Brik and others found OPOYAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, in Petrograd (1916).

Course in General Linguistics Cours de linguistique générale

Art as Device Искусство как приём

Shklovsky publishes "Art as Device".

Dada Manifesto Manifeste Dada

Versailles redraws Europe into nation-states after four empires fall.

Gga (first almanac of Polish futurist poetry) Gga

Polish futurists write to Mayakovsky proposing an international futurist journal.

Manifesto of Surrealism Manifeste du surréalisme

Mayakovsky visits the Polish futurists in Warsaw.

Mayakovsky takes his own life; telegram reaches the Briks in Berlin.

On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets О поколении, растратившем своих поэтов