‘Barbaric Peoples of the Earth’: The Avant-Garde and the Revolt Against Civilisation

Between Vorticism, the post-WW2 Independent Group and the “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibit of 1968, elements of a working-class internationalism emerge that define both the circumstances of a revolutionary art and its methodology, founded upon a confrontation with the aesthetico-political ideology of work as alienated surplus-production. In positioning art-work as “general commodity” (Bataille) against the commodification of the “artwork” as artefact of an impoverished aesthetic labour, the avant-garde subverts the tragic view of history presented by Peter Burger in the supposed failure of the avant-garde to resist appropriation to the “culture industry.” In contrast, the radical tendencies represented by such artists as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Eduardo Paolozzi and Gustav Metzger and persisting in the work of Laura Oldfield Ford, for example, can be regarded as a discourse of irrecuperability, born of the “impoverishment” of aesthetico-political totalisation as it succumbs to the excessive labour required to sustain the illusion of itself. And just as this failure of totalisation is always to some extent an aestheticisation, so too it ultimately constitutes the work of the avant-garde.


Work as Critical Self-Consciousness
With the appearance of Vorticism in 1914, the formation of the post-WW2 Independent Group, and the public confrontation between cybernetics and autodestructive art in the form of the Destruction in Art Symposium of 1967 and the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibit at the ICA in 1968, lineaments of a working-class avant-gardism come into view that define a major polemical axis in modernist and contemporary 'British' art. Constellated around figures like Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Eduardo Paolozzi and Gustav Metzger, this axis represents more than a series of historical contingencies. At its core lies a radical reformulation of the concepts of 'work' and ' class' drawn directly from the circumstances of a revolutionary art, its practice and its methodology. Elements of this development may be seen as describing a synthesis (bastardisation) of Cubo-Futurism, Dada, Surrealism and the Situationist tendency, in disputation with that return to critical purism that culminates in Peter Bürger's revisionist dissertation, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) -a text designed as much to declare an end of the avant-garde as to 'theorise' it (Armand, 2013: 282-4).
Whatever may be said concerning the ambivalence of Bürger's text in those polemics around the so-called postmodern turn in art during the 1970s (see Foster, 1983), what commands our attention in the line of aesthetic inquiry running from Gaudier Armand: 'Barbaric Peoples of the Earth' 5 to Paolozzi and Metzger is how this ambivalence is ultimately rooted in a conception of 'work' that continues to mystify critical theories of art history. And just as the reach of Bürger's argument has been de facto extended via the counter-revisionism of Rosalind Kraus, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh and Yve-Alain Bois (see their Art Since 1900Since , 2004, so it, too, requires renewed critique. Halfway through Theory of the Avant-Garde, Bürger advances what will be a recurring thesis, that -in its historical formulation -the avant-garde had always viewed the dissociation of art 'from the praxis of life' as art's dominant characteristic in bourgeois society (Bürger, 1984: 49). Bürger argues that 'One of the reasons this dissociation was possible is that Aestheticism had made the element that defines art as an institution the essential content of works' -a coincidence that was above all necessary, in Bürger's estimation, 'to make it logically possible for the avant-garde to call art into question' (Bürger, 1984: 49). Two factors need to be immediately addressed here. The first is the somewhat circular argument that emerges around this self-reflexivity of 'content,' wherein an emergent critical self-consciousness of art is simultaneously bound to self-supersession and obsolescence, since the 'element that defines art' can in this relation be one only of anachrony to an art (or technē in general) that calls itself into question. The second is the confusion of Aestheticism, as a determining logic of the meaning of art in 'bourgeois' society, with the abstractive logic of the commodity in general, which should be identified as the real determining force here. Aestheticism is in effect nothing but a mystification of (sovereign) power, while the question of the institutionality of art (and of aesthetics in general) is directly bound to the question of power itself, whose signifying force -in industrial society -is communicated via the medium of commodification (its ideological social 'content,' in effect, substituting as a technē of experience, of 'consumption'). It is, in short, the relationship of metaphysics to technology.
These factors intersect in what has become a quite conventional dialectical reading of the avant-garde, in which a certain false opposition is established between Aestheticism's rejection of 'means-ends rationality' and the historical avant-garde's 'attempt to organise a new life praxis from a basis in art' (Bürger, 1984: Armand: 'Barbaric Peoples of the Earth' 6 49). Yet far from the one negating the conditions of the other, we can see that both are complementary aspects of the same critical impulse and informed by the same abstractive logic. Yet it is only in its most Stalinist manifestations that anything which Bürger might be able to call 'the historical avant-garde movement' herethat is, in its most reactionary appropriation -can be described as attempting 'to do away with the distance between art and life' and to characterise this as still having 'all the pathos of historical progressiveness on its side' (Bürger, 1984: 50) (as if the organisation of 'a new life praxis' and the critique of 'bourgeois society' amounted to nothing but a crude revisionism, through which the dichotomy 'art and life' remains nevertheless preserved and fixed in its meaning). It is not for nothing that this tendency is precisely what Adorno and Horkheimer identify with the operations of a culture industry (Adorno, Horkheimer, 1979: 120-16)in which, as Bürger says, the institutionalisation of the avant-garde 'has brought about the false elimination of the distance between art and life' (Bürger, 1984: 50 -emphasis added).
Unstated in this equation is the question of work. Just as Bürger confuses the organisation of a new 'life praxis' with 'historical progress,' so too he fixes the conception of work within precisely that framework of means-ends rationality against which both Aestheticism and the avant-garde define themselves. Consequently, in addressing the avowed anti-art of what he terms 'Dada manifestations,' for example, the most he is able to do is argue that it ' does not have the character of work'whereas the contrary needs to be grasped in order to understand how the work paradigm (along with the relation between the ideology of work and the category of the work of art) is itself deconstructed by the nascent cyberneticism of the avantgarde. In this regard, also, it is necessary to examine the movement, built into Bürger's schematic, from the ' dignifying' of art-work as anti-labour, to its 'impoverishment' as institutional labour. The otherwise unacknowledged relationship between the ' dissociation of art and life' -as the context of the 'Aestheticist work of art' -and the impoverishment of labour under the social provisions of industrial capitalism, underpins a further misconception about the constitutive alienation of capitalist subjectivity (articulated through the abstraction of labour) (Marx, 1973: 693), of Armand: 'Barbaric Peoples of the Earth' 7 which the ' autonomy' of the avant-garde (vis-à-vis the ' alienation' of art-work) is in effect the critical consciousness. 2 It is here that the significance of Bataille's re-reading of Marx and Hegel must come to bear upon the idea of the avant-garde, as a 'mode of production' of dissipative structures, in which 'production' is itself understood as a means of expenditure.
For Bataille, dissipation and expenditure are not the (negative) consequences of a withering or impoverishment of (aesthetic) labour, but its raison d'être. And not only its 'reason' but in fact its condition (Bataille, 1985: 116). As Derrida has noted, if 'work' for Bataille is the discourse of reason itself (as Bürger tacitly assumes), it is no less the case that in its generalisation as the ideology of labour -enlarged to 'include within itself, and anticipate all the forms of its beyond, all the forms and resources of its exterior… in order to keep these forms and resources close to itself by simply taking hold of their enunciation' (Derrida, 1978: 252) -it necessarily evokes a certain anti-work which, while appearing to be already comprehended by it, nevertheless threatens to exhaust (impoverish) the discourse of work itself. It does this, moreover, not by opposing an idea of alienated labour, but by inscribing, in the same language as this alienation, that which ' exceeds the opposition of concepts governed by its logic' (Derrida, 1978: 252).
It is in this that Bataille situates the real deconstructive potential of this avantgarde (entirely opaque to Bürger's rationale), which does not resolve itself by a simple dialectical gesture of negation, since its movement is one of an excess that is both 'necessary and impossible,' whose effects -as Derrida says -'fold discourse into strange shapes' (Derrida, 1978: 253) that, verging upon the formless, defy recuperation either for an instrumentalist system of value-production or its aesthetic contemplation. The logic of work as dissipation (entropy), and consequently the reconceptualising of modes of production as modes of expenditure, requires a 2 Arnold Hauser offers an important distinction between the autonomy of art and the economic (in) dependence of the artist, noting that 'it was only romanticism's bad conscience that attached such extraordinary value' to the semblance of this division-of-labour, informed by an 'inhibited attitude toward everything material and practical, not the fact that he plies his art for a trade' (Hauser, 1985: 337).
Armand: 'Barbaric Peoples of the Earth' 8 re-examination of the framing of the aesthetic problem as it stands in the work of Bürger and his critics, if only to emphasise what is most radical in this movement.

Alienation and the Avant-Garde
Bürger's complaint about the exhaustion of the historical avant-garde in its institutional iteration stems in no small measure from a perception of the neo-avantgarde's incapacity to produce a shock value that is historically necessary rather than merely faddish (Bürger, 1984: 50). It suggests that art-work needs to be distinguished from an auratic, ritual phase -in Walter Benjamin's terms -as much as from a commodity phase, whose relation to the 'new' is one of a mechanical and otherwise arbitrary reflex. In either case, the distinction rests on an appreciation of the capacity of the artwork -and only indirectly the aesthetic labour of the artist -to produce not only an effect, but a relation to 'historical necessity.' Such 'reified monuments' (Jameson, 1983: 11) of aestheticised labour distort a socio-economic relation into a teleology of the order of an historical materialism.
In thus denying the abstract arbitrariness of the artwork as surplus-value, Bürger remains blind to the standard of auratic kitsch to which avant-garde labour is thereby to be held -as a category of production apparently transcending the constitutive alienation of work in general (that is to say, as a class). Likewise the standard of historical necessity does no more than mystify that ideological social content which is the supposed measure of art's capacity to shock. Yet what of an art work that fails to reify in this way? That fails, so to speak, to correspond -like Nietzsche's laughter -either to some dour fatalistic teleology or to the entropic effluvium of a culture industry driven by rampant inflation, producing neither aesthetic value of 'shock' nor its commodification (as if these weren't already the same thing)?
In the age of Taylorist scientific management, on course for what Harvey Wheeler in 1968 would call the Cybernetic Revolution (Wheeler, 1968: 14), the easy dichotomy between aesthetic non-work and means-ends rationalism is complexified in numerous and subtle ways. Simple binary antagonisms, of the quasi-Hegelian kind favoured by Bürger, had already begun to give way to increasingly logistical structures as the paradigm of a revolutionary movement. Concepts like that of In this conjunction of complexity and abstraction, we see that 'the pathos of historical progressiveness' that supposedly haunts the recursions of the avant-garde is that of Bürger's schematisation itself.
It is not enough to acclaim a certain machine aesthetics or proletarianisation of modernist art as the terrain for marking out a conception of aesthetic labour within a larger revolutionary discourse -as if the movement of the avant-garde were simply a mirror held up to the 'innovations' of the industrial sector (in the false belief, among others, that there are, indeed, independent sectors, or that the institution of art itself -and society itself -is not integral to the operations of modernity as a whole). The question is rather how the avant-garde articulates (produces) this critical logic in the failure of 'historically necessary' production, or non-production. Not as the conservation of a revolutionary style, genre or sense of moment (the 'shock of the new'), but as a general movement of a destabilisation of frameworks.
It is a widely repeated truism that Britain -'birthplace' of the Industrial Revolution -lacked a comparably radical aesthetic movement in response to it, as if the socio-political fact of advanced industrialisation had obviated the need for an avant-garde -just as, though home to Marx's researches on Capital, it somehow obviated the need for a 'worker revolution.' In the face of such complacent selfevidence, it is necessary to point out that the absence of an avant-garde in Britain is a myth and yet this myth has gone some way in precluding the institutionalisation of otherwise isolated aesthetic tendencies construed as little more than footnotes to art history (see Nuttall, 1970, for example). Such is, to a greater or less extent, the case with Gaudier, Paolozzi and Metzger who -along with David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, James Fitton and the Alpha Group, and Richard Hamilton, among others -have conventionally been cast in the role of local adjuncts to the more consequential (and thus more vigorously commodified) tendencies of Futurism, Pop Art and Conceptualism.
More than a conspicuous marginalism links these artists. Metzger had met That such practice is grounded in the re-use of ephemera and the production of categorically ambivalent artefacts, or non-artefacts (performances, interventions, auto-destructions), amplifies an intransigence towards art work as productive of commodification. This intransigence towards 'surplus production,' in which art (inadvertently or otherwise) announces its own obsolescence, was spelled out in a series of manifestos, culminating in Metzger's several statements on auto-destructive art. In the first of these, published in November 1959, Metzger writes: 'Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies… When the disintegrative process is complete, the work is to be removed from the site and scrapped' (Wilson, 2008: 182). As economy-without-reserve, Metzger's auto-destructive art work echoes

The Vortex of Production
Reflecting on Gaudier's 'great achievement' during his four frenzied years in London, Ezra Pound noted: 'It was done against the whole social system in the sense that it was done against poverty and the lack of materials' (Kenner, 1971: 250). The Steyerl's 'poor image' developed out of an extended reflection on Chris Marker and Third Cinema, and is described as ' a copy in motion' -not simply the 'motion' of digital images, or their circulation through the economy of technical reproduction, but the motion of a certain historicity. 'The poor image,' Steyerl writes, 'is a rag or a rip… a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances' (Steyerl, 2012: 32). It is defined by 'low' resolutions, where 'low' needn't correspond to dpi. Most importantly, the poor image 'is no longer about the real thing -the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence.' As Grotowsky wrote in 1965, on the relationship of competing modes of spectacularism: Theatre must admit its limits. If it cannot be richer than film, then let it be poorer. If it cannot be as lavish as television, then let it be ascetic. If it cannot create an attraction on a technical level, then let it give up all artificial technique.
All that is left is a 'holy' actor in a poor theatre. (Grotowsky, 1968: 32-33) Despite appearances, this isn't a mere strategy of 'reaction.' What matters in defining the 'poor image' isn't a degradation of content, but a materiality of degradation itself, out of which arises the possibility of radical co-option. 'By losing its visual substance,' Steyerl proposes, the 'poor image' creates around it a new aura -'no longer based on the permanence of the ' original,' but on the transience of the copy' (Steyerl, 2012: 42 -emphasis added). And we can go further, by insisting that this ' copy' isn't a mimēsis in any straightforward sense, but the material 'itself' in its ongoing co-option -whether Gaudier's pilfered gravestones, Paolozzi's magazine cut-outs, Metzger's Cardboards, or Steyerl's AVIs and JPEGs.
This transient aura is, of course, the counterpart of the aura of the commodityand it is this that confers upon the 'poor image' a critical and not merely artefactual status. It is the aura that shimmers on the event horizon of lightspeed obsolescence: the implosion of value itself into garbage. The 'poor image' evokes negentropy. In it, the alchemical illusionism of the commodity is ' deformed' -via a cybernetics of impoverished labour -into the stuff of an active political constructivism. With it, too, a certain conception of ' art' as cultural antimatter. But this seemingly recuperative movement can't simply be a matter of feeding commodification's shit back to it in the magical form of an aesthetic gold standard called 'the institutional avant-garde,' whose artefacts -like Pierro Manzoni's Merda d'Artista (1961) -ironically advert to the 'puerile utopia' (Baudelaire, 1961: 614) 4 of the deregulated cultural marketplace. 4 Referring here specifically to the cult of art-for-art's-sake.
Rather, it is a question, to paraphrase Courbet, of radical ' democracy in art' (Nochlin, 1989: 3). That is to say, of a certain ' equivalence' of exchange, in which everything is equally abstracted before the law of value-production as irrecuperable entropy.
There is a belligerent egalitarianism that we encounter in Russell's Savage Messiah, viscerally at odds with the museumised cultural paternalism and art-forthe-masses which serves as the target of the film's relentless parody. In a highly polemical scene centred around an Easter Island monolith, Russell depicts the crushing institutional ambivalence of the Royal Academy (masquerading as the There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. (Pound, 1975: 101) This thematic carries over into a formal critique of the work itself. Indeed, the mark of Gaudier's 'greatest innovation,' so Marjorie Perloff tells us, is the 'presentation of movement that is potential rather than actual' (Perloff, 1996: 52). A movement that seems to anticipate, in its directness of attack, a kineticism as yet unachieved -one unbounded by sculptural conventions not only of form but of material, and of a certain material inertia that will come to preoccupy that line of exploration from Calder and Maholy-Nagy to Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman. Yet already in Gaudier, it is a movement vested in the materiality of the 'whole work' as a complex of situations -in which we must include the means and circumstances of its construction as well as its subsequent trajectory in the thought of 20 th -century art: from Gaudier's forging of his own tools and eschewal of modelling, to the cannibalism of quasi-industrial waste into aesthetico-critical 'vortices.' As Gaudier

De-Fetishising Art-Work
Gaudier's dynamism steps away from that of the Futurists precisely in its refusal to relinquish the contemporary lifeworld for a mimetic techno-utopianism, while equally repudiating the retreat into Humanism that was to characterise Bomberg's sometimes reactionary stance following his experiences during WWI. In Gaudier, technicity is never separate from life (even as encountered in the trenches at Neuville-Saint-Vaast), nor is it exemplified in the monumentality of industrialised, militarised social organisation or the march of progress and mass mechanised warfare. If Gaudier's work is to be regarded as 'minor' and/or 'potential' -or, so to speak, poor -this in itself isn't incidental but rather the substance of a praxis whose movement describes a series of vectors: 1. from economic circumstances to an economy of circumstance; 2. from economy of circumstance to critical method (virtue of necessity); 3. from critical method to the materiality of critique (a gravestone, cut brass, a rifle butt); 4. culminating in the deconstruction of the art/life dichotomy as work (the Vortex).

Avant-Gardism and the Cybernetic Predicament
It is this project of wilful 'barbarism,' of a 'revolt against civilisation,' that radicalises the concept of art-work in the line of attack developed from Gaudier to Paolozzi, Metzger, Ford, and which points also to a renewal of Courbet's notion of an avant-garde beyond the spiral of formal innovation and aesthetic novelty into which -in the recursive ' détournements' of postmodernism -it had threatened to descend, and to which Bürger subsequently sees it as inevitably succumbing, post-WW2, in the institutionalism of what he terms the 'neo-avant-garde.' Indeed, the direction in which Gaudier's work points is that of an ' end of culture' itself -whether understood as class, genre, stereotype or division of labour -and a remaking of ' art' from its ruins.
To this extent, commodification isn't a negation but a primordial force (of signifying social separation) that makes possible this movement. It is never a question -in the subsequent tendencies of Paolozzi and Metzger -of retreating from abstraction, as Bomberg had done (in a rejection of Marinetti's bombastic techno-futurist militarism), but of grasping its broadest ramifications as a categorical equivalence of exchange between all constituent elements 7 -aesthetic, social, political, technological, ontological. It was only on the level of abstraction, in fact, that the avant-garde could critique (or in Situationist terms, détourne) the commodity form and the ideological system that has sought to maintain a monopoly over it as the constitutive form of everyday life. Precisely because it is only on the level of abstraction that the categorical reason vested in the commodity is contradicted by it.
It is for this reason that Bürger misconstrues the relation of (anti-) work to the concept of functionlessness. The avant-garde, he argues, counters functionlessness 'not by an art that would have consequences within the existing society, but rather by the principles of sublation of art in the praxis of life' (Bürger, 1984: 51). In other words, by drawing from the equivalence of the impoverishment of aesthetic labour an impetus that directly aligns with that of a broadly social-revolutionary tendency, in which the concept of the social nevertheless remains in a fixed constellation. In Bürger's terms, this means displacing alienation, as the 'content' of art-work, with the sublation of art-work itself (defined in solely 'negative' terms, i.e. functionlessness). The avant-garde thus corresponds to a specific transformation of theory into praxis, of which neo-avant-garde art would be the transient 'false consciousness.' 7 Of which Humanism, also, is one.
Yet it is meaningless under such conditions to continue to insist (as Bürger does) upon the rhetorical distinction between 'art and the praxis of life' (Bürger, 1984: 51). Just as it is meaningless to speak of 'autonomous' art-work as the production of/by 'individualities,' since the production of autonomy (abstraction) is itself the product of a general logic that is both an 'aesthetic' and a 'technē politikē' (since Bürger's 'individuality' is simply a mystification, as we have already seen, of an alienation that is itself constitutive of individual subjectivity). It is the system of abstraction that produces the work of autonomy, and does so -as cybernetics makes abundantly plain -in an ambivalent relation to the Humanism that continues to haunt every art/life dichotomy (as the self-sufficiency of alienated thought and the arbitrary commerce of its significations). 8 The seemingly historical character of these antagonisms already belies the technical character of historicism itself, as what Eisenstein called the 'montage of attractions' (Eisenstein, 1998: 35ff) and what Derrida has called 'the polysemy of technē' (Derrida, 1987: 21 -emphasis added).
Though computers are almost universally synonymous with logic and functionality, and have increasingly become the very paradigm of Reason itself, displacing that of 'Man,' this has been accomplished under the paradoxical sign of a technological mysticism that only appears to be the inverse of a Humanist ' aesthetic.' Which is to say, as the aestheticisation of Reason. In the figure of the computer, the entire history of technical artefacts is aggregated into a unified system of rationalised control and communication: in the period around WW2, what throughout previous history had been regarded simply as prostheses were abruptly transformed through systematisation into something like an autonomous agency in which the two apparently opposed Messianisms of civilisation and progress intersect. Thus while in appearance a centuries-old Humanist standpoint was displaced with remarkably little resistance by a technocentric one, in truth they are indistinguishable. It is no surprise, then, that in the half-century since the foundation of cybernetics as a discipline, electronic digital computers and a rapidly evolving AI have not only 'infiltrated' to the most trivial levels of everyday reality, they effectively constitute the very means of production of reality itself.
How did this happen? 9 Such facets of cybernetics contribute significantly to the view that, rather than representing a break with the aesthetics and positivist science of modernity, it constitutes an extension of it, through the putting to work of the previously unpresentable and irrational in the form of a generalised, technical system. In this, cybernetics bears certain resemblances to the 'positivism' of psychoanalysis, semiotics and the cubo-futurist-constructivist avant-garde. It is no accident that cognition, communication and creativity preoccupied cybernetics from the outset, in the attempt to simulate a human hypothesis, but more-so as analogues to the fundamentally 9 It had long been suspected, contrary to certain organicist and theological notions, that 'life' as previously understood wasn't a category apart from 'technology' -and that what had been called 'mind' devolved not upon vague metaphysical concepts but upon a definable mechanics of self-organisation and self-modification in physical systems. Such an autopoiēsis provided the framework for a 'general intelligence,' whose lineaments might be detected in one form or another universally -whether in the behaviour of other species of ' animal,' or in the biosphere at large, or in the characteristics of subatomic particles -but above all in a continuum with so-called artificial intelligence. This was elegantly demonstrated in Alan Turing's restaging of a certain mimetic allegory -the elder Pliny's famous 'grapes and drapes' test of Zeuxis and Parrhasius. What Pliny presented as a contest between art (technē) and nature is reduced in Turing's Imitation Game to the act of judgement itself: in this case between 'man and machine' (or, considering its -and Turing's -gendered history, trans and machine). What this act of judgement reveals, however, is a fundamental ambivalence, vested as it is in the entirely implicated figure of the artist, the scientist, and the interrogator. A judgement, in other words, situated at the intersection of an aesthetic, scientific and political knowledge more than able to ' deceive' itself -not through some technical insufficiency, but because the very distinction it is supposed to test is a product of its own logical operations. In its capacity to see itself reflected in all things, judgement as such (its fundamental lability) becomes the predicate of a generalised cybernetics.
As in Pliny's allegory, the question is no longer one of content (the what in which 'nature,' or the ' artist,' is deceived), but of a co-dependency of contradiction, paradox, indeterminacy. We might speak, rather, of a kind of mimetic algorithm: not a mimēsis of any thing, or concept (the imitation of 'the human' by 'the machine,' for example), but of mimēsis itself, in the conditional (or rather probabilistic) form of an as if. And this would necessarily include proceeding as if the world were susceptible to a rationality premised upon acts of judgement, decision, critique and ipso facto that this underlying rationality of the world qualifies such acts of judgement, decision, critique as inherently rational. Such is the tautological 'nature' of the cybernetic hypothesis issuing from Turing's 'game,' as a kind of simulacral or trans-Newtonianism. In this way such excluded features of Newtonian mechanics as chaos and complexity are able not only to be modelled but to be statistically and topologically determined in such a way as to permit their representation both within and by series of cybernetic operations. cybernetic problem of 'general intelligence' (an expression which translates equally well to ' everyday life'). Such preoccupations served not only to strategically 'humanise' cybernetics -which in any case had a long pre-history of anthropomorphic curiosities, like Kempelen's chess-playing 'Turk' -but, in its more sinister aspirations, to engineer various beguiling systems of what José Delgado termed 'psychocivilization': the extension of power-through-information, to power-through-behavioural-control, to the eventual production of collective and individual consciousness (Delgado, 1969) The inclusion of artists like Metzger, Bruce Lacey, Nam June Paik and Jean Tinguelywhose various works exhibited strong cyber-critical as well as cyber-positive impulses (through parody, satire and auto-destruction) -appears in this respect a calculated effort to co-opt avant-garde strategies to the service of dis-alienating the public from the abstract technologies of the Corporate-State Apparatus.

Stereotype as Operative Logic
In contrast to what has often been perceived as the dehuminising means-ends rationalism of social cyberneticisation, the construction of satirical-critical 'machines' - As he gets closer to ROSA his infrared beam is activated, and ROSA has a corresponding detector. As he gets still closer, ROSA emits a scream from a tape-recorder stored within her body. MATE has a voice operated switch activated by the scream, and changes direction to avoid contact with her. If, however, the avoidance action doesn't quite work and they contact, Bruce 11 In any case, not a 'scientific' problem: in public discourse the word 'science' is ostensibly meaningless, other than in terms of immediate application in everyday experience. The public-at-large has neither the competence nor the inclination to concern themselves with so-called scientific problems, which must first be represented to them by other means, such as Industrial Fairs, science fiction, and the mass market in gadgets and labour-saving devices.
installed contact switches on ROSA, and when activated (by MATE), she blows confetti everywhere. Bruce goes on to explain that after the courtship, the confetti is symbolic of ROSA and MATE being married. (Hoggett, 2009) Counter-intuitively, an artificial intelligence is one that learns by breaking down, rather than simply through the positive aggregation of data. In their 1972 study of capitalism and schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félixe Guattari identified the operation of 'breakthroughs and breakdowns' with the fundamental drives of what, in an allusion to Duchamp's mechanical bride ('La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, ' 1915-1923) (McLuhan, 1951), they termed ' desiring machines.' For Lacey, such cybernetic allegories remain first and foremost allegories of a heteronormative 'human' predicament: 'Given a brain,' Lacey writes, 'man has the possibility of developing into a sublime, happy, creative, and unique creature, but he is prevented from realising his potential by the severe limitations imposed on him by the environment he has created for himself… ' (Lacey, 1968: 38). To survive in the future, 'he must rebuild his cities, rewrite his laws, and re-educate himself… He must do all of these things to suit his emotional, sexual and psychological needs' (Lacey, 1968: 38).
Lacey's desiring machines, like Tinguely's 'Metamécaniques' and Metzger's auto-destructive/auto-creative sculptures, resembled automatised junk: a critical anti-aesthetic of emergent cyberculture. Tinguely's ' cyclo-matic' and 'metamitic' painting machines and Metzger's ' acid action paintings' were likewise designed not as an aestheticisation of randomness or of quasi-cybernetic processes, but as autopoiētic assemblages of generative perturbation -of breakthroughs and breakdowns. In contrast to the conventional aesthetics of 'machine art' (like Roy E. Allen's 'Patternmaker'), Tinguely's 'metamitics' and Metzger's ' acid paintings' produced patterns that were exactly neither 'regular and repeatable' (Allen, 1968: 40) nor objectively stable, but which produced, as Perloff says, a complete revaluation of form as a means of expression. In this they exploded the myth of a 'primitivist' art informel (the so-called expressive fallacy) as a negation of abstract rationalism. In his stated that ' at a certain point, the work takes over, is an activity beyond the detailed control of the artist, reaches a power, grace, momentum, transcendence… which the artist could not achieve except through random activity' (Metzger, 1964). In doing so, these works likewise exposed the ideological fallacy behind 'functionalist' cyberaesthetics as well as the constructed 'Humanism' of informal or expressive art, which now appeared interconnected 12 (as Willem de Kooning famously insisted, 'style is a fraud ' [de Kooning, 1949]).
Here, too, we see that Bürger's assertion about the avant-garde representing the 'radical negation of the category of individual creation' is contradicted by the abstract ambivalence of Metzger's, Lacey's and Tinguely's work to the very category of individuality (the position of an ' autonomous agency' that can potentially be occupied by anything whatsoever: the agency of a ' class consciousness,' for example, or of 'revolutionary knowledge'). From this seemingly radical position (one which derived, in fact, from the convergence of Marx, Freud, Saussure and others), the avantgarde could be seen to challenge the dogmatic and essentialist tendencies disguised within the institutionalisation of art -as not merely ideological embellishments of power, but as indicative of a foundational logic. Yet it is precisely for this reason that it is wrong to speak, as Bürger does, of a 'failure' of the avant-garde 'to sublate art' into a life-praxis on the principle that its artefacts (its 'manifestations') are subsequently recuperable for a general algorithmics of commodification. 'The revival of art as an institution,' Bürger insists, ' and the revival of the category of 'work' suggest that, today, the avant-garde is already historical' (Bürger, 1984: 57). Such an observation is in any case rendered trivial by the fact that the commodity itself is the formal expression, par excellence, of abstract ambivalence, whose tactical availability to the critique (or production) of 'value' (even as non-value) -as the cybernetic reconstitution of aesthetic labour exemplifies -remains open-ended.
The problem posed by the work of Metzger, Paolozzi, Gaudier et al., is one in which the apparent antagonisms of techno-poiēsis are not discretely dissolved but rather generalised within the logic of work itself (as irrecuperable entropy). Like 12 A pseudo-dichotomy which by 1968 was productive of nothing but cliché in any case.
Nietzsche's laughter, this excessive movement -general, inflationary, satiricalthreatens to destroy its sense (of productive subordination), to dislocate it from a recuperative logic in general, causing the very totalising movement that defines it to appear as what Bataille calls a 'small comic recapitulation' (Bataille, 1943: 60). This concerns also the ability of cybernetic systems, as the mechano-morphic analogue of Gaudier's PALEOLITHIC VORTEX, not only to produce ' active stereotypes' or nascent archetypes, but to represent what History teaches us to call the 'unpresentable' -that indeterminate dynamic with which, in the last instance, humanity vests its innermost drives: as if, robbed of its unique claim upon Reason, it had sought tactical advantage in the irrational. Far from exhausting the idea of an autonomous avant-garde, this movement exposes the dependency of all institutional structures upon an accelerated, convulsive movement of expropriation and recuperation that only bears the semblance of systematicity, but is in fact purely reactive to a paranoid, schizophrenic degree.
In this, Gaudier, Paolozzi and Metzger anticipate the totalising capacity of the cyberneticised Corporate-State Apparatus -signalled by the advent of the Organisation Man (Whyte, 1956) -to produce an abstract reality in which individual and collective subjectivities are constituted as data aggregation which is fed back into the social economy in the ambivalent ritual guise of either ' desiring' commodityconsumption or 'revolutionary knowledge' -where the premium commodity is social being itself, in all its stereotyped idiosyncrasies. In this ideal synthesis of ' art' (technē) and 'life,' the aestheticisation of politics as Benjamin foresaw it is indistinguishable from a mystification of History as 'technology' -where technology doesn't in fact name an autonomous condition of possibility but rather a reinscription of the Humanist paradigm of ' civilisation' by other means. If the avantgarde's 'transgression' of the systematicity of this paradigm is not, as Bataille argues, an ' access to the immediate and indeterminate identity of a non-meaning,' this is because its operations themselves derive from that alienation at the origin of the very conception of the system, of work, of productivity, and consequently of recuperation, institutionalisation, totalisation.
It is at the point at which the reinscription of this paradigm fails that the function of the avant-garde comes into view not simply as critique or subversion but as an excess of production: not in the form of a surplus-value, but of a compulsive dissipation that invests the principle of value itself from its inception and tends to exponential increase. Consequently, the work of the avant-garde can be regarded as a discourse of the irrecuperable, born of the 'impoverishment' of totality as it succumbs to the entropic labour required to sustain the illusion of itself. This irrecuperability is the nondeductable element of art-work itself, regardless of the subsequent institutional trajectories of the so-called artwork, within the historical confines of an avant-gardism. In this, the failure of totalisation -as it slides towards the 'loss of sense' at its horizon -is always to some extent an ' aesthetics' of the sublime, in which the old ontological unity of History and method, envisaged by Hegel, is reduced to that parodic cybernetic conundrum that presents itself in Bataille in the form of the question, 'Who will ever know what it is to know nothing?' 13 Bataille, Georges, 'Le Petit,' Louis XXX, trans. Stewart Kendall (London: Equus Press, 2013).