Avant-garde art communicates by breaking the propositional structure of discourse itself

Evidence

The truly avant-garde works of literature communicate the break with communication. With Rimbaud, and then with dadaism and surrealism, literature rejects the very structure of discourse which, throughout the history of culture, has linked artistic and ordinary language. The propositional system10 (with the sentence as its unit of meaning) was the medium in which the two dimensions of reality could meet, communicate and be communicated. The most sublime poetry and the lowest prose shared this medium of expression. Then, modern poetry “détruisait les rapports du langage et ramenait le discours à des stations de mots.” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 313

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how the sentence as unit of meaning was the medium that let the two dimensions of reality meet.
• XREF: connects to: The avant-garde attacked art’s institutional status, not merely artistic styles — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 233; Art resolves real social contradictions through purely formal means — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1774; Collage and montage serve as the primary form of postmodern discourse. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 346 (+3 more)