Speculations on a Third World Avantgarde

Abstract

If there are those who argue that the European avant-gardes of the twentieth century took their leads from sources outside Europe (Brecht and haiku, Picasso and Africa, or Eisenstein and Mexico, for example), the possibility of a ‘Third-World’ avantgarde as such does not find support in Theodor Adorno’s writings on aesthetic theory or, for that matter, in Roberto Schwarz's discussions of aesthetics. But is there a dialectical perspective from which one might argue for the relevance of the avant-garde as an aesthetic and political configuration relevant to the Third World? In the entirely different space of a reading of Hegel, Adorno (1962) in fact gives us the lineaments for such an argument with the figure of skoteinos, or darkness, the unintelligible, obscurity—which it is the task of criticism to eliminate. Schwarz’s important take-up of Adorno’s themes suggestively circle around the “highs and lows” of self-conscious aesthetic experimentation in places like Brazil, though the task of this essay will be to expand Schwarz’s premises in order to think about the role that experimentation plays in returning the avantgarde to its constitutive mission of bringing art back to life, a mission that I suggest is finally discernible only when the ideal of the avantgarde leaves its modernist entailments behind.