Współczynnik sztuki : polska poezja awangardowa i postawangardowa między autonomią a zaangażowaniem

Abstract

This book delves into the problem of various attitudes of some Polish avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, and post-avant-garde poets towards the contradictory policies of autonomy of art and socio-political commitment. The avant-garde authors, including the poets, are generally well aware of their involvement in tilting the balance in favor of autonomy of art or its very opposite: they hardly ever aim at maintaining the balance by means of treating the aesthetic as social-political and vice versa; in fact, it seems to be much more frequent for them to choose between autonomous and applied aspects of the art. The supporters of autonomous approach seem to find a philosophical point of reference in the analysis of beauty conducted by Immanuel Kant, whereas all the theories of art that are likely to merge the aesthetic and social order ultimately draw on Friedrich Schiller’s thought and on his Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man. Both stances described above still attract their adherents among the contemporary philosophers and theoreticians exploring the avant-garde movement and ideas. The representatives of the former school are e.g., Clement Greenberg and Jean-François Lyotard. The latter approach, which is more important in the broader context of avant-garde and more internally diverse, may be epitomized by Peter Bürger and Jacques Rancière. The avant-garde fusion of the aesthetic and social/political is often analyzed in the context of utopia. One of the most important analysts of the avant-garde utopia is Theodor W. Adorno. A supporter of autonomy of art, he simultaneously appeals to its creators to refer to the social contexts in which it functions (thus, being relatively independent of such contexts, the art can afford to be critical of them). According to Adorno, the art is unable to reshape the reality but has a certain subversive potential. In other words, its inability to put the principles of aesthetic utopia into practice can paradoxically lead to emancipation: it can drive the mechanism of social change.The continuators of thinking in terms of aesthetic utopia are, among others, Herbert Marcuse, whose analyses concern the neo-avant-garde art with particular emphasis put on its intersections with counter-culture, and Jacques Rancière who explores the phenomenon of reconfiguration of sensuality by means of certain mechanisms apparently inherent in aesthetic utopia. As regards Polish scholars facing the issue, one should mention Andrzej Turowski, an interpreter of avant-garde Russian art according to which the basic principle of art is the idea of non-mediated agreement. Another example of avant-garde utopia is, in fact, the concept created by Stephen Wright, a proponent of a functional turn. Following in the footsteps of Bürger (who advocated the idea of abolishing art in daily life), Wright understands art as a social competence being inseparable from other life practices and only gradable: it is not so much a collection of objects and events that can be distinguished from the wider continuum, but rather “a degree of intensity” characteristic of all the phenomena that can be provided with a specific (variable in time), coefficient of art. The poetic projects tackled in this book – from the works by Julian Przyboś to cyberpoetry – all refer to the theories outlined above because they conceptualize or, at least, indirectly apply the ideas of aesthetic autonomy or heteronomy. Some poets I discuss belong to the historical avant-garde (Julian Przyboś, Tytus Czyżewski), some represent neo-avant-garde (Miron Białoszewski, Teraz Group, Julian Kornhauser, Stanisław Barańczak) and post-avant-garde (Andrzej Sosnowski, Adam Zdrodowski, Marcin Sendecki, Kamila Janiak, Konrad Góra, and cybernetic poetry). My analysis concerns mainly the contemporary Polish poetry, because it not so obvious if one should see the contemporary art, including the most recent Polish verse, through the prism of avant-garde ideas and notions. Therefore, I put my efforts into determining to what extent such procedure would be productive. The questions at stake are as follows: does it reveal anything new? If so, is it consistent with the different interpretative paths? Or does it open new ones? Nowadays, the discussion about contemporary poetry very often focuses on the issue of commitment, and numerous related manifests arise (some of them bring back the category of autonomy of art). Hence, I found the idea of exploring the issue with reference to the aesthetic concepts typical of avant-garde interesting – if not intriguing. What attracted my attention was, of course, a mixture of autonomy and heteronomy, but also the relationship between the contemporary and past forms of this uneasy blend (the latter have already belonged to the avant-garde tradition). The poets whose works are analyzed in my book are representative with regard to the attitude towards autonomy–heteronomy axis because they were fully aware of the existence and complexity of the issue. However, their struggles against it can be treated as tiny facets of a wider phenomenon whose comprehensive map is still to prepare For Julian Przyboś, the autonomy of art is achieved when “the word is coming out of beyond itself”. It means that autonomy may be defined as a system producing poetic meanings (including the image); the production of aesthetics is a non-aesthetic (economic) concession to life. In Przyboś’s writings, aesthetics is a rule describing “all human material products”. Art, governing the sensual perception of the world, can thus be understood in the context of the aesthetic regime of arts (Rancière) based on the coexistence of art and non-art. In Przyboś’s avant-garde poetry, a balance between the aesthetic and the social/political, which is typical of the aesthetic regime of arts, does not manifest so insistently. At first sight, his romantic-modernist mind and consequent aesthetics (expressionism) seem contradictory and draw on a socially active philosophy of work that may superficially resemble a set of constructivistically progressive ideas. Yet, over time, the poetic and socio-political orders begin to consciously cooperate supplanting the old, anachronistic attitude. They forge a renewed and revolutionary one being fully aware of its relationship with the reconsidered aesthetics. From the contemporary perspective, Tytus Czyżewski may be recognized as a posthumanist poet. His poetic universe is driven by a process of intro-activity: within its realm, all the structures, boundaries, and meanings of individual beings (human and non-human – animal, organic, non-organic, technological, aesthetic, and social), are subject to reconfiguration and reterritorialization (Deleuze, Guattari). In this cosmos, the subject is the “becoming I”, relational and extended towards the non-human. As a result, Czyżewski can be considered an artist involved in the process of aesthetic and social change. In this study, I describe Miron Białoszewski as a representative of a modern (neo- -avant-garde) “aesthetic state” (Schiller), creator of communicative utopia (Turowski), and the first Polish performer. The utopia of the “boundless language” (Foucault) and the privatized language is already a combination of aesthetic autonomy of the hermetic out-of-system / anti-system stance, focused on the absolutized parole of the language and on the social impact of counter-alienation activities. Counter-alienation is also at stake in Białoszewski’s performative actions (from the aesthetic practices of everyday life, through various intermediate forms, such as specific dérives, to the performances in the Tarczyńska Street Theater). His poetic output can also be analyzed in the context of performativity and performance. Although most of the Polish new-wave poets had rather conservative views on art, they were the first Polish literary generation to come up with a program to make art an intermediary between the sphere of culture and the broadly understood social space. The return to reality announced by them (above all by the Teraz Group) can be regarded as a response to the counterculture challenge: it was a neo-avant-garde turn against the institution of art as well as an attempt to transgress its autonomy and “regain” daily life. Therefore, I examine the poems by Julian Kornhauser, written in the 1970s, in reference to the utopian concept of expressing art by virtue of a non-art language and in the context of counterculture idea. In my opinion, Kornhauser’s poetic treatise is not the embodiment of the myth of the first language (as some scholars would like to claim) but rather a project of a socially active language being aware of its sign nature. By contrast, I analyze Stanisław Barańczak’s poetry in reference to the participatory art of the 1970s and in the context of philosophical discussions concerning the neo-avant-garde autonomy and related tendencies, escapist and critical. Against this backdrop, Barańczak’s poetic attitude turns out to be close to escapism. Inasmuch as his works contribute to the Polish national martyrology, they seem aesthetically and politically anachronistic. Post-avant-garde is a very imprecise category. Yet in the subsequent parts of the book, I analyze the works of the poets who could be provided with this label because of their aesthetic and ideological inclination for avant-garde concepts. First, however, I consider when the use of such a category can be considered just and productive. I notice the particular impact of avant-garde ideas on the contemporary poetic experiment, on the so-called poetry of commitment, and on the poetry cooperating with new media (mainly cyberpoetry). But these are almost exclusively continuations and references, not avant-garde projects sensu stricto that would be based on radical separation from the existing state of mind and proposing new aesthetic and social solutions. The examined authors do not deny it. Andrzej Sosnowski thinks of the avant-garde as a continuation of the Baroque-Romantic pattern, with the chief figure of Benjamin’s allegory. Adam Zdrodowski renews the Oulipian procedures and Roussel’s tropological meanings. Marcin Sendecki continues both neo-avant-garde projects that are a response to the feeling of a crisis affecting signs and formalistic avant-garde games whose stake is marvelization. Kamila Janiak enters into a dialogue with the aesthetics and ideology of punk. Konrad Góra rewrites the surrealism into the rules of the poetry of commitment. The cybernetic project by Łukasz Podgórni and Urszula Pawlicka is a remediation of the poetry of Tytus Czyżewski. In each of these cases, the post-avant-garde attitude (that is, the proclivity towards avant-garde ideas, but with the proviso that they are only in some sense binding, cited, rewritten) seems to me to be an important phenomenon also because these projects, so to say, document the mechanisms accompanying the shift of Polish poetry from the autonomist positions of post-modernism to the “post-modernist” involvement. Of course, one cannot claim that the works by Sosnowski, Sendecki, and Zdrodowski (who are widely considered to opt for the autonomy of art) are entirely bereft of traces of aesthetic heteronomy. On the other hand, the poetry by Janiak, Góra, or cyberpoets is not utterly devoid of such categories as aesthetics, form, and experiment. The former authors, especially in their more recent books, tend to slowly regain involvement. As for the latter, autonomy has become the second face of their commitment.