Après the Avant Garde

Letters

Vol. 19 No. 2 · 23 January 1997

From Irving Louis Horowitz

Surely one can write an essay on the post-war avant garde that clustered around Tel Quel without the identification of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Mao Zedong with Roosevelt, Churchill and de Gaulle – the latter three grotesquely thrown into the same mix with Mussolini and Hitler. Clearly, Fredric Jameson (LRB, 12 December 1996) knows better, but to claim that ‘Modernist politics has been organised around ostensibly mass parties with an élite vanguard leadership’ is thoroughly to confuse and confound the difference between democratic and dictatorial regimes. Such a view relativises politics and weakens cultural analysis. Can one even imagine the rise, much less the influence of a publication such as Tel Quel in Communist Russia, Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy as they evolved after a brief revolutionary moment? Even to suggest such a possibility is to invite rebuke and justifiable ridicule. Or is this not what Professor Jameson was trying to assert?

Irving Louis Horowitz
Rutgers University

From Grahame White

Fredric Jameson correctly isolates the key Tel Quel word, théorie, but then fails to elaborate its full significance. It is just this one word, théorie, with no adjectival addition – no Marxist, Maoist, Lacanian, Saussurean … or even structuralist! For the leading (i.e. most frequently published) Tel Quel writers, Pleynet, Sollers, Kristeva, theory was understood in its most pragmatic – one might even argue, anarchic-opportunistic – sense, as providing a textual framework in which to consider a specific object thought to be of relevance at the time of going to print. Few Tel Quel articles were devoted to topics such as Language, Writing, the Signifier, the Signified, the Unconscious, Contradiction, Dialectics and so forth. Most were highly specific: devoted to a particular aspect of Marx, Mao, Freud, Artaud, Sade, or to a particular painter, composer, etc – even to a particular postcard from Freud to Breton.

The epistemological and stylistic issue (clumsy phrase, yes) of theory was raised in a number of divergent ways in both the journal and in the titles published by Seuil in the Collection Tel Quel – which was by no means exclusively devoted to either literary or cultural theory, but included poetry and literary experimentation. It is difficult to glean any scientific ‘theory’ from the typographical jouissances of Denis Roche.

Depending on one’s personal preferences, one can declare that certain contributions to individual issues of Tel Quel were obscurantist, self-indulgent – perhaps even acts of textual poaching. But there was certainly no slogging uniformity of approach. That this was so was, in my opinion, due to this underlying recognition of jouissance in whatever the textual enterprise undertaken. That cultural analysis need not be presented in a coldly analytical, ‘objective’ puritanical style, but that it could be the occasion for textual innovation in its own right – this was one of the main contributions of Tel Quel. Like one of Jean Tinguely’s painting-machines, Tel Quel was eye-catching. It whirred, gyrated, clanked, contorted, made obscene gestures, left traces, spattered the audience … and then spasmically self-destructed. But, by golly, it was damned lively and entertaining. Provocative – and optimistic.

Optimistic, risk-taking, inventive – which is more than can be said for the boring drivel now being pumped out by farts old and young in British academe and their literary journals and periodicals primarily intended for academic consumption. Is that yourselves included? Well, if the cap don’t fit, you look even dafter continuing to wear it, if you think it don’t…

Grahame White
Brighton

From Harold Teichman

Fredric Jameson, in his smooth discussion of the anfractuous trajectory of Tel Quel, neglects to warn prospective readers of Patrick ffrench’s The Time of Theory that it is nothing more than an unevenly microwaved PhD thesis masquerading as theory. Even read in a spirit of jouissance, the first fifty pages or so trudge by in an orgy of name, academy and movement-dropping. Is it too much to ask a reviewer to call an unreadable book unreadable?

Harold Teichman
Rutherford, New Jersey