AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH
35
motionless Alexandrianism, an academicism in which the really
important issues are left untouched because they involve contro–
versy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the
small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the
precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically
varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is pro–
duced: Statius, mandarin verse, Roman sculpture, Beaux Arts
painting, neo-republican architecture.
It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the decay of our
present society that we--some of us-have been unwilling to accept
this last phase for our own culture. In seeking to go beyond Alex–
andrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced
something unheard of heretofore: avant-garde culture. A superior
consciousness of history-more precisely, the appearance of a new
kind of criticism of society, an historical cJiticism - made this
possible. This criticism has not confronted our present society with.
timeless utopias, but has soberly examined in the terms of history
and of cause and effect the antecedents, justifications and functions
of the forms that lie at the heart of every society. Thus our present
bourgeois social order was shown to be, not an eternal, "natural"
condition of life, but simply the latest term in a succession of social
orders. New perspectives of this kind, becoming a part of the
advanced intellectual conscience of the fifth and sixth decades of
the nineteenth century, soon were absorbed by artists and poets,
even if unconsciously for the most part. It was no accident, there–
fore, that the birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically–
and geographically to<r-with the first bold development of scien–
tific revolutionary thought in Europe.
True, the first settlers of Bohemia-which was then identical
with the avant-garde-turned out soon to be demonstratively unin–
terested in politics. Nevertheless, without the circulation of revo–
lutionary ideas in the air about them, they would never have been
able to isolate their concept of the "bourgeois" in order to define
what they were
not.
Nor, without the moral aid of revolutionary
political attitudes would they have had the courage to assert them–
selves as aggressively as they did against the prevailing standards
of society. Courage indeed was needed for this, because the avant–
garde's emigration from bourgeois society to Bohemia meant also
an emigration from the markets of capitalism, upon which artists
