The word avant-garde

They were, poor ones, those who were ahead: none of them wanted to.

They were, in general, the most lazy, the least valued soldiers, who knows the least brave or valuable, and then their captain assumed that the loss of him would not be a great loss and he sent them there, to the

avant-garde

.

Because the word vanguard comes,

comilfó

, from the French: la

avant-garde

, the forward guard;

those poor guys who walked at the front of the formation and took all the risks.

It was sad to be at the forefront, until there was a moment when the word slipped into politics and began to gain prestige.

It was somewhere in the 19th century.

It was helped, to begin with, by those volumes by the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, 1820, which introduced the idea that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”

Politics could already be read with warlike words and, however, the word does not appear, yet, in a text that in some way founds and spreads the new avant-garde idea, the

Communist Manifesto

of Marx and Engels, 1848. But it did shortly after , in those years.

So, the parties of change—socialists, anarchists, various revolutionaries—were imagined as a vanguard: they were the fighters who went forward, taking risks so that the rest of their companions would follow them.

It was, above all, a metaphor: its avant-garde consisted of thinking about what the desired society would be like and what means should be used to achieve it.

And convince as many as possible that it was worth trying—and guide their movement.

The idea of ​​the avant-garde spread: in those years anyone who wanted to change something felt “at the forefront.”

Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, making art was making avant-garde art, avant-garde music, avant-garde theater, avant-garde literature.

The avant-garde idea was everywhere and was what was popular: so much so that even a liberal newspaper—and later a county newspaper—in Catalonia took it as its name.

But throughout the 20th century the avant-garde began to disarm and, around 1980 or 1990, the new stopped being a rupture and became a business: the musical avant-garde became pop, avant-garde literature became plaintive memory, avant-garde art became concepts without great art;

It seemed that, suddenly, the only ones who had the avant-garde were fashion and gastronomy—banal and venal substitutes for other arts.

And politics also abandoned the avant-garde idea: its consequences had been disastrous.

Those small groups that believed they knew how things should be only produced, when they triumphed, dictatorships where those few controlled everything, under the pretext that they were the ones who should lead the masses in the right direction.

And the idea of ​​the avant-garde became a bit monstrous and it is very difficult, now, to think of a movement thinking of an avant-garde that leads it.

And it is a problem, because something has to fulfill that function.

Majorities are, by definition, conservative.

Not always by conviction;

many times due to pure and simple lack of imagination.

People tend to think that their world will remain the way it is: they always have.

And the sum of people thinks about it much more, irons out the small differences that this or another individual could contribute.

People continue to live as they did if people or groups of people do not appear to propose something else.

The rupture is, by definition, the product of a few who imagine ways different from those they — like everyone else — learned.

A few women who believed that they too should vote, let's say, when everyone else accepted that they should not.

That is the bad thing, now, about revolutions: that they require those avant-garde that do not know how not to be self-referential and bossy.

Only a few are capable of thinking about a different world.

Only a few thought of a world without slaves, a world without monarchs, a world with women, a world in freedom.

But, in general, thinking differently leads them to think that those who do not think differently are their obstacle and that, therefore, it must be removed: that it is legal and necessary to remove it.

And so these vanguards become the complete opposite of what they should be: concentrations of power, centers of despotism.

But without them nothing serious changes.

Maybe that's why, now, nothing serious changes.

And so it will be until we find some form of avant-garde that is not avant-garde.

That will be, I suppose, the next big change.

Hopefully it doesn't require an avant-garde.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_