29of cultural advance—if the price of obtaining mastery over the future is one’s own
destruction, it is fully prepared to pay it. It is in this masochism that what Poggioli
calls the agonistic phase lies: it wallows pathetically in morbid pleasure at the
prospect of its own downfall, in the conviction that it is there that it will find its
supreme fulfillment. In so doing it also complies with the military metaphor implicit
in its name: it is the fate of the avant-garde to be slaughtered so that others will have
the opportunity to build after them.
From this description the avant-garde emerges as the embodiment par excel-
lence of a transitory concept of modernity. It comprises the most radical expression
of a “culture of crisis.” In Calinescu’s words, “Aesthetically the avant-garde attitude
implies the bluntest rejection of such traditional ideas as those of order, intelligibility,
and even success... art is supposed to become an experience—deliberately con-
ducted—of failure and crisis. If crisis is not there, it must be created.”^6 According to
Peter Bürger, however, the intense energies of the avant-garde did have a program-
matic intention. Bürger, whose interpretation is based mainly on an analysis of
dadaism and surrealism, argues that the avant-garde was concerned to abolish the
autonomy of art as an institution.^7 The negative logic of the avant-garde has in his
view a clearly defined aim: to put an end to art as something separate from everyday
life, as an autonomous domain that has no real impact on the social system. The
avant-gardists aimed to achieve the “sublation” of art in practical life: “The avant-
gardists proposed the sublation of art—sublation in the Hegelian sense of the term:
art was not to be simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where it would
be preserved, albeit in a changed form.... What distinguishes them... is the at-
tempt to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art.”^8 The avant-garde, then, does
not so much have in mind the integration of art with the currentpraxis of life, with
bourgeois society and its rational plans. It aims rather for a newlife praxis, a praxis
that is based on art and that constitutes an alternative for the existing order.
The issues and themes around which the modern movement in architecture
crystallized are related to the avant-garde logic of destruction and construction. Here
too what was involved first of all was a rejection of the bourgeois culture of philistin-
ism that used pretentious ornament and kitsch and which took the form of eclecti-
cism. In its stead the desire for purity and authenticity was given precedence. All
ornamentation was regarded as unacceptable; instead, authenticity was required in
the use of materials, and it was thought that a constructional logic should be clearly
visible in the formal idiom.^9 In the twenties these themes also acquired a distinct po-
litical dimension: the New Building^10 became associated with the desire for a more
socially balanced and egalitarian form of society in which the ideals of equal rights
and emancipation would be realized.
The architectural vanguard nevertheless did not become as uncompromising
and as radical as its counterparts in art and literature. Most architects never re-
nounced the principle of rationality, even if it stood for a bourgeois value. As Michael
Müller has pointed out, the protagonists of the new architecture were not in principle28