The human subject of aesthetic “experiments”—in the sense of “experimental” literary forms and practice, often associated with the avant-garde—is a potentially revolutionary or radicalisable political and social subject. Many experimental avant-garde poets and post-war concrete poets were operating on the assumption that poetic, linguistic and disciplinary transgressions enacted in their poetries would generate psychological and ideological changes in their readers. By breaking the linguistic contract and unmasking its arbitrary and convention-based foundation, the encounter with the avant-garde text is to create rupture, to “shock” readers, to make them question their habitual perception strategies and assumptions about literature, language and, crucially, more wide-ranging socio-political conventions by implication. This belief in the psycho-political transformative power of experimental literatures has been developed further in the realm of post-structuralist theory, most notably by thinkers such as Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault. What is at stake in experimental literature, according to them, is not just an exploration of new possibilities for poetry and thought that lie beyond the cognitive boundaries imposed by “ordinary” language, but also a potentially socio-politically revolutionary insight into the constructed nature of our value systems and social conventions.
The disruptive function of avant-garde works is frequently produced by programmatic violations of poetic, linguistic and cognitive-perceptual conventions. These violations include the generation of logical paradox, semantic incongruity, syntactical fragmentation and vacillations between word and image genres that require the reader to shuttle between different perceptual strategies, that is, reading and viewing modes. Whilst the avant-garde experiments are attempts to push further the boundaries imposed by convention on artistic expression, they are also, as discussed earlier, attempts to produce a more critically aware, self-reflexive and in many cases politically radicalised subject.
Biggs is sceptical about the association which is sometimes made between creative practice in contemporary emergent media and the idea of the “avant-garde”; he has argued that the absence of a homogenous mainstream or bourgeois culture in contemporary society (due to the rise of globalisation and multiculturalism), precludes the existence of an effective avant-garde, a position in accord with Peter Bürger’s arguments for the historical nature of the avant-garde project.
The disruptive function of avant-garde works is frequently produced by programmatic violations of poetic, linguistic and cognitive-perceptual conventions. These violations include the generation of logical paradox, semantic incongruity, syntactical fragmentation and vacillations between word and image genres that require the reader to shuttle between different perceptual strategies, that is, reading and viewing modes. Whilst the avant-garde experiments are attempts to push further the boundaries imposed by convention on artistic expression, they are also, as discussed earlier, attempts to produce a more critically aware, self-reflexive and in many cases politically radicalised subject.
Biggs is sceptical about the association which is sometimes made between creative practice in contemporary emergent media and the idea of the “avant-garde”; he has argued that the absence of a homogenous mainstream or bourgeois culture in contemporary society (due to the rise of globalisation and multiculturalism), precludes the existence of an effective avant-garde, a position in accord with Peter Bürger’s arguments for the historical nature of the avant-garde project.
