In a time of conflicts worldwide, and of the collapse of the economic and cultural ideals of globalization ushered in by the recession, questions raised by the 20th-century avant-garde show renewed relevance and urgency. These are questions of inhumanity, addressed in the attempt to reconfigure the relations of the individual to the community. The avant-garde expresses an urgent need to be rid of the corrupt politics of inhibition and repression. It is a theory as well as a practice of empowerment rather than disempowerment. André Breton in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 decries the power of logic to categorize our sense of self in such a way as to remove the self from its own reach, to alienate people from the uncharted waters of dream, of the unconscious and the transformative energy of its image-making. Memory itself in this light is in the service of a civilization of orthodoxy and conformism, systematically making it impossible for individuals to move away from the restricting questions posed by Cartesian rationalism. Breton urges us in the opening pages of Nadja, first published in 1926, to reach beyond questions such as who am I; how can I confirm my existence through the exercise of rational thought; and to imagine existential questions such as whom do I haunt? What parts of myself have been lost to me so far? What capacity do I have to bear witness to all of myself, and not simply the permitted parts?

But perhaps the pursuit of rejuvenation can simply turn into the pursuit of the new; and an unthinking or anti-analytical break with history in all its forms. Before Surrealism and before the First World War, which so shocked Breton and others, Futurism sought to remove Classical sculpture in general from the focus of attention, and the Victory of Samothrace in particular (displayed then as now in the Louvre) and replace it with the car. In the Futurist manifesto of 1909, published on the front page of Le Figaro, Marinetti appeals to the speed of the car, and its power to take the temporality out of vision and transform time into space. The simultaneity of points of view championed by Cubist painters is cast as hopelessly removed from the immediacy it claims to espouse. ‘Paroles en liberté’, ‘words in freedom’, ‘words without strings’, ‘wireless messages’ – such are the methods and messages of this Futurist energy.

But is pasting hybrid things together a sign of disregard for context, or a further immersion in the labyrinth of provenance and becoming? The visual and verbal-visual collage developed at the same time by Cubist practitioners is driven as much as Futurist artefacts by the desire to re-conceive the subject matter of art, to draw art from the here and now of seeing, from whatever comes into view now. But it does not suggest an aspiration to suppress time. The Cubist aspiration is not simply to re-fashion perception; the issue is not what we think or see, but how. Apollinaire published Les Peintres cubistes in 1913, and there he describes Picasso ‘imitant les plans pour représenter les volumes’.Reference Apollinaire¹ Perspective had always exploited surfaces – ‘les plans’ – to try to give the illusion of depth – ‘pour représenter les volumes’. But in Picasso, Apollinaire sees the capacity to do more than simply subvert that rationalist practice. Cubist art shows what is lost to view because of where we stand, and because of the surfaces we see; but it also shows that what is lost to view is still receptive to the power of form, to the imagination, and a different kind of reason.

But does reason of whatever kind have the capacity to address the central issue raised by the avant-garde, which is the relation of innovation to history? Before I return to Apollinaire, perhaps together we can drop in briefly on a contemporary writer's understanding of that relation, and on the problem of relation at large. Milan Kundera, in his life and writing, is centrally concerned with the experience of the point of view, the telling of history and the witnessing of individuality. In his novel Immortality, first published in 1991, engaging with issues of present day culture and present day exploitation, Kundera refers to the poet Rimbaud, another iconic figure in the European avant-garde; and in particular the last of the poems in Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell). In ‘Adieu’, ‘Farewell’, we read Rimbaud constructing a voice, a voice of his own, a new voice for a new generation; a voice that commands ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’; ‘it is necessary to be absolutely modern’, as it is translated in Kundera's novel.² But to be absolutely modern, Kundera counters, is to be ‘the ally of one's own gravediggers’.Reference Kundera³

To what extent is the spirit of the modern the same as the spirit of the avant-garde? At one point in Immortality, Kundera refers to Jaromil, a character in an earlier novel, to say that he is the ally of his own gravediggers because he abandons his adherence to Cubism and Surrealism, Picasso and Dalí, in favour of the social progress promised by Marxist-Leninism. His friends look on in horror, ‘yes this sight revealed a horror (a portent of the horror to come, of persecution and imprisonment).’Reference Kundera⁴ In such a light, the avant-garde with its fragmentation of the monolithic, the immovable, of egoism and the berths it gives to conservatism and orthodoxy, appears a prime source of resistance and revolt. But in Immortality, Paul is also accused of being the ally of his own gravediggers precisely for adopting in his own rhetoric – that of the media intellectual – the practices of the avant-garde; especially the use of paradox to fragment the established, culturally received positions of his bourgeois audience. These include familiar debating with points such as the relation between high and low culture, genius and tyrant, as well as polemical and real wars. Avant-gardism merges with modernism, as both stand accused of collaborating with their own gravediggers: either in being seduced by the Enlightenment of the day, or by the imaginary power of the fragment to undermine the effects of ideology. Each is the partner of the other. Each affirms the authority of the present; each articulates its own confident effacement of history; each trades on oblivion.

Why then would Walter Benjamin call on Surrealism (as well as Apollinaire) to exhort his readers to ‘a last crusade of the imagination’?Reference Benjamin⁵ Why too does the materialist historian insist on the revolutionary impulse embedded in the idea of art for art's sake? How does he respond to the accusation made to him by Adorno, before the Second World War, and in response to his book on Baudelaire, of lacking any engagement with the processes of mediation? ‘I regard it as methodologically unfortunate,’ Adorno writes in a notorious passage, ‘to give conspicuous individual features from the realm of the superstructure a “materialist” turn by relating them immediately and perhaps even casually to corresponding features of the infrastructure. Materialist determination of cultural traits is possible only if it is mediated through the total social process’ (emphasis in original).Reference Taylor⁶ But to identify our material determination through a mediated understanding of the social process is to confirm our part and our place in that process itself. History is thus further veiled in its own unveiling. Kundera explores that experience in terms of what he calls imagology; which, in Immortality, turns up in the narrator's account of somnolently listening to the radio.Reference Kundera⁷ Put simply, imagology is the battle for supremacy of market driven images – images rather than ideologies – through which our perceptions and sensations are mediated, through which they take form and life, along with our sense of the past and of a possible future. Mediation is flattened, pleasantly loosening the grip of ideology; but loosening also our sense of our own temporality and history.

Benjamin communicates the same doubts on mediation in his readings of Baudelaire. In his essay on Baudelaire's poem ‘À une passante’, ‘To A Passer-by’, which is collected in the Illuminations volume, Benjamin talks of Baudelaire's narrator in the poem being ‘spared’ rather than ‘denied fulfilment’.Reference Benjamin⁸ Which is to say, Baudelaire invents a narrator spared the processing of his responses foretold in the commodities that excite him. Much has been made, not least by Benjamin himself, of the sickly quality of Baudelaire's narrator in this poem, reminiscent of Poe. He is full of ticks, nervous impulses, and extravagantly tense. All these fits and starts are signs, in Benjamin's account, of the unconscious in Baudelaire's text, of the narrator warding off sensation. He wards off and censors the disruptive power of sensation, but also testifies to it. The ironic structure of the point of view in Baudelaire's poetic story-telling allows those two possibilities to coexist. The appeal of the image, of everything fashionable and market-oriented in the female passer-by captures the narrator, but at the same time he fails to be captured by it. Mediation has been suspended. And from the reader's point of view but not the narrator's, a sense of historical moment both unveiled and further veiled is surveyed. As the narrator recedes back into the crowd, the dissipation of his erotic and creative energy provides the poem taken as a whole with its ironic critical drive and content. The reader is confronted both with the power of images and its passing: the pleasure of dominating, the pleasure of silencing history; both equally delusional, equally perverse. Like the narrator, the reader is an observer of the ‘continuum of history’, as Benjamin calls it, only to be re-integrated in it, simultaneously.Reference Benjamin⁹ And Benjamin himself continues to live, as a poetic philosopher of history, the twin, incompatible pressures of transcendence and contingency.

The episode of the passer-by, Benjamin argues, can only take place in a modern city. Within the poem ‘to be absolutely modern’ is thus unavoidable; but so is collaboration with our own gravediggers. We cannot stand outside history, we can only show our integration in it. The moment of revelation, Benjamin's Jetztzeit, is also the moment of its dissipation and its dissolution. To understand the meaning of revelation is to understand the historicity of its passing, its commodification, and the spontaneity of oblivion. The flattening out in Kundera's writing of genres, of the viewpoints of narrator and author, shows his awareness of this individual struggle with voicing and silencing unique to each one of us. Polemically, heuristically, with all the spontaneous illusionism of criticising what he cannot avoid, Kundera misreads the unique voice of Rimbaud's prose poetry. ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’ – an injunction, or a statement of fact? It is necessary to be absolutely modern. In what sense of necessary? In the sense of an injunction to be modern in order to be free? Or is this simply a statement of existential fact: we must be modern, for we know neither our past nor our future, tyrannized as we are by our own point of view – its uniqueness, its appropriativeness, and its passing. Rimbaud's narrator in the poem rails against the uniqueness of his own past, his cultural antecedents, which anonymize him as well as confirm his specialness. Paradoxically, each is desirable; but each is the price of the other, too, each is an object both of resentment and resistance. The allusiveness of Rimbaud's prose-poetic style, its embedded citationalism which anticipates Benjamin's own essayism, suggests an attempt to use speed of thought to evacuate the content of every thought, and the antecedence of every utterance. Still, the exhortation to be modern fails to exceed the statement of fact. It is simply necessary. In bidding farewell to the illusions of genius and art, of low culture revolt, and finally of modern science and modern love, Rimbaud embraces what he has been given – the modern; and with it, his own body. He is now free, Rimbaud writes, to embrace the truth in one body and soul – his own body where his own generation and his own history are buried, translated into the sensations that give them life.Reference Rimbaud¹⁰

Imagine if you will Alberto Giacometti's L'Homme qui marche/Man Walking of 1960. In Giacometti's distinctive post-war style of human representation, seeming to indicate the most fragile essentials of inhabiting a body, this piece shows the man walking with confidence, and yet without secure direction; free and yet blind. It gives some form to Rimbaud's message, and Kundera's, of creativity and history. Giacometti's passage into this style from a Surrealist one tells its own story of the avant-garde, its history, its contiguities with modernism. But I want to end with a return to Apollinaire and to the legacy of his own avant-garde critical poetics. ‘Lettre-Océan’/'Ocean-Letter’ is a calligramme, and although picture-poems have a history, Apollinaire's use of the form is one of his definitively avant-garde inventions.Reference Apollinaire¹¹ Composed in 1913, ‘Lettre-Océan’ might even look like a manifesto of the avant-garde art of the pre-First World War generation, driven as it was by the theory and practice of simultaneity – the incorporation within one self-exploding frame of a multiplicity of points of view. It is made of two world-circles, circles made of words; readers might visually capture each one of them; but not both together. Readers might start with the words, but would then lose the immediacy or im-mediateness of the visual impact. Different passages between mobility and immobility, and different returns to mobility are involved in each case, and repeatedly.

And so readers might begin their textual walkabout anywhere. For as in Baudelaire's ‘À une passante’ as well as Giacometti's Man Walking, there is much walking and passing by in Apollinaire's construction, and the poet, or any poet, himself walks around within the circles of his own construction. He has new shoes we are told, and also shown, and also given to hear; perhaps they hurt him, they certainly squeak, and Apollinaire makes a kind of visual-verbal onomatopoeia of shoes being broken in by walking in circles. But the poet is not just materially situated but symbolically too, perhaps as he walks the streets he stumbles across the rhymes and associations of his trade as Baudelaire had before him and Villon before that. Villon in the 15th century walks the same paths of urban unpredictability as Baudelaire in the 19th century, who walks the same paths as Apollinaire. Along the way, readers are invited to eavesdrop on bits of conversation they might pick up anywhere, which is to say in any modern urban environment. Everything is made available to the poet as he walks in and out of different contexts, flattening the distances between them. And, as readers, that open access is available to us as well, as we merge reading and seeing, and also merge the various symbolic layers in the poem, extending indefinitely, and yet held together in the circles of the poem. These spread concentrically across the two facing pages, denying depth but inviting capture – or facilitating the mirage of capture? The symbolic layers involved include the Mayan circular representations of time; the history of poetry, and of urban modernism; the sun, and its connotations of rationalism and purity; indeed there are two suns, two sources of light, which we might see as two eyes. Their flat, textual seeing is free of the restrictive perspective situating viewers spatially and temporally in relation to a point on the horizon forever beyond their reach. All the mythological, circumstantial and cultural elements of seeing in this moment are made visible, and held together in the symbolic airwaves suggested in the circles as well, and which emanate from the Eiffel Tower, the dominant modernist icon of that time in Paris.

But does this reading of Apollinaire's composition offer us freedom from perspective, or merely involve us still further in its delusions – in the seductive image it offers of total assimilation and total recall? In her early Passages of Modern Sculpture as well as her later work with Yves-Alain Bois, Formless. A User's Guide, Rosalind Krauss seeks to counter the purely conceptual aspect of perspective and its disruptions by reintroducing time into her consideration of the static objects of art. Against conceptual time, she promotes a lived time, which in Passages she also calls Surrealist time, derived and sensed through chance, through proximity, the syntagm rather than the paradigm: chance, the index of lived time. That will provide the basis of a formless art, free at last from the Gestalten and the tragic orthodoxies of civilized vision.Reference Krauss¹² In that light we might read ‘Lettre-Océan’ as a series of open-ended juxtapositions, conversations and dialogues anticipating Surrealist automatism, its resistance to commodification, and its affirmation of association, of lived process.

Krauss's work as a whole is liberating in its commitment to the transformative power of art; and in her capacity to open out her own practices to it as well. But transformation itself is constitutionally paradoxical.¹³ And Apollinaire's poem cannot be reduced either to the conceptual or the formless. It is suspended between the two. It exposes the fantasy of the formless, shows the power of the forms of the known. The free flow of images and the associations that allow it, does not shed its past but buries it, hides it from view in the very spectacle it offers. Who can make out easily the Eiffel Tower which so dominates the poem? There are even two of them there, one in each circle. Who can knowingly lead us from the effects of the Eiffel Tower to the Eiffel Tower itself, and in that way free us from its iconic power? If the poem offers a real time of its own – the literal time of its reading, of deciphering, of the confusion of word and image – it also hovers indeterminately between reading and remembering; between form and the dissolution of form; and between seeing and forgetting. It is Apollinaire's own testimony to the imagology of his day, and to his own experience of Rimbaud's stifled cry for originality from within the necessity of being modern. Taken together, the works discussed here suggest something of the power of avant-garde aesthetic forms, as form, to provoke critical rather than appropriative thought; to embed self-criticism in the pursuit of progress and the ghosts of Narcissus that lurk there; and to make the new not just of the modern, but in the responsibility we may take for what is lost to us in what we claim to know.