It adopts a posture of pneumatic adaptation- often, exacerbation- that I associate with this old challenge of the young Marx- to make petrified social conditions dance by singing them their own song. My garde is neither avant nor rear in these ways, but caustically imminent. And David also mentioned the involvement and idea of postmodern of the resistance- in other words, in a position of stern refusal of the status quo. The avant garde is usually located in two ways only, as vanguard in a position of radical innovation, or as resistant. In the first instance, this project is an intervention in the familiar field of theories of the avant garde when it tries to open a third line in these accounts. And David mentioned this last term already. So this paper- it's not really a paper- it's the beginning of a project on three strategies that appear intermittently in the 20th century avant garde, which I call the bathetic, the brutal, and the banal. Mostly, he made fun of me, which I took to mean the same thing eventually. In a way, Dominic traumatized me, Susan anesthetized me, and David critiqued me. I also want to test it out here, because some of its themes run back to my time at Cornell to what I learned from friends like Dominic LaCapra in Trauma, Susan Buck-Morss on Anesthetics, and David Bathrick on Benjamin and Bloch.

In a way, what Picasso does to his Damozel, my artists today do to themselves. But it follows on some of the things that Jay said yesterday- I think, nicely. This talk is rough, just a series of notes, really. I promised I would shoot myself when I got to the age where I needed reading glasses, but maybe after this talk, you will wish that I had. This is the moment where you find out of all my dirty laundry.

Can we have the lights lower? Thanks, David. HAL FOSTER: Let's see if we can get an image, I hope, somewhere. The Gorgon's Head of a Boundless Terror Smiles out of the Fantastic Destruction- and here's a semicolon- Modern Art and the Mimetic Process.

SPEAKER 1: This is a production of Cornell University.ĭAVID: Now let me just give the title of the lecture.

Hal foster what comes after farce