Is the Avant-Garde Still Possible? Is Social Change Still Possible? the Particular and the Totality in Dada and Pussy Riot.

If the comment attributed to Fredric Jameson that it is harder to imagine the end of capitalism than the ecological destruction of the world is valid, then time and temporality are important to discuss in looking at the avant-garde and its relation to contemporary political change. What is the role of the avant-garde in this process? This paper will discuss two avant-gardes, Dada, and Pussy Riot, in relation to their use of what we can call the particular, and the totality .

The particular, in art or politics, can stand as a weapon against a totality that has inadvertently denied the very moment on which it depends for its own organic constitution, against a false or dominating totality. In art and politics, this is the capacity and de-reifying importance of critique, exemplified by the avant-garde critique of instrumental rationality,

The first example of the process of particularization accomplished by early twentieth century Dada artists, is illustrated by their practice of an attack on means ends relations through chance artistic practices.

The second example, concerning the Russian avant-garde group Pussy Riot’s performance intervention in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, entails a strategy of intervention on the level of an imagined totality.

An excursus regarding the seizure of the GPO in the Irish Easter Rising illuminates the complex relationships between culture and political change.

This would involve using concepts from Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Max Tomba to redeem repressed or neglected parts of art and political practice. Bloch speaks of the “not yet,” and the “hope principal.” Benjamin challenges seeing history as a continuum. There is an unfinished past which can redeem the present. Avant-garde and political practices involve a critique and a transcendence of the given, and are congealed as images that are recuperable, such as the Paris Commune.