Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real

Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994.

While Hal Foster identifies his research goal as an exploration of neo-avant-garde of the second half of the twentieth century, his research and political agenda is much wider. Its broader scope is rehabilitation of the postmodernist project; but he is also concerned with multiple issues that drove modernist (and post-modernist) project, both in arts and academia, such as questions of subjectivity. In this way, he explores his research object – neo-avant-garde – in its diachronic dynamics (how it positions itself in relation to the past and the future) and synchronic dynamic (how it treats the social reality around itself).

In the beginning of chapter 6, Foster starts by differentiating between two early Soviet cultural phenomena, the one of formalist/constructivist agenda (productivism) – that the artist on the left should ‘side with the proletariat’ in the way that s/he should take possession of the means of (artistic) production in order to make her/his production genuinely revolutionary; here lies a deep distinction with prolekult which, while also aspiring for a revolutionary and anti-bourgeois agenda, occupies a different position, the one of a movement that ‘surpasses’ bourgeois art and culture in their role of educating masses – this is a difference that Boris Groys did not grasp in his analysis of Russian avant-garde as the symbolic predecessor of Stalinism, for avant-garde did not have on its political agenda a desire to ‘enlighten’ and ‘educate’ the working class.

Developing this opposition, Foster argues that neo-avant-garde of the 1960s had a similar agenda, but its object shifted from proletariat to colonial nations. Instead of constructivist/formalist/Benjaminian ‘artist as producer’, artists of the 1960s were ‘artists as ethnographers’.

Chapter 7 works as an umbrella for the preceding analysis (both in terms of epistemology and politics). Foster draws on Freudian theory of ‘deferred action’ in which “subjectivity, never set once and for all, is structured as a relay of anticipations and reconstructions of events that may become traumatic through this very relay. I believe modernism and postmodernism are constituted in an analogous way, in deferred action as a continual process of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts.” (207) As a result, he argues that for modernism, the ‘quintessential questions were: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? They were solved through the appeal to otherness, either subconscious as the other or in form of the cultural other. Therefore, any identification is always alienation – Lacan’s mirror stage (210). Fascism draws its strength from here, from the ever-present possibility that one’s subjectivity is just a play of reflections; ‘fascist subject’ armors him/herself against the chaotic world, “against all others (both within and without) who seem to represent this chaos” (210).