Jencks declared the avant-garde obsolete in an information society

Evidence

In a society where information now mattered more than production, ‘there is no longer an artistic avant-garde’, since ‘there is no enemy to conquer’ in the global electronic network. … Out of their kaleidoscopic creations, it was to be hoped, might emerge ‘a shared symbolic order of the kind that a religion provides’ — the ultimate agenda of postmodernism. In aesthetic cross-dress, Toynbee’s syncretistic dream had returned. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 62

Categorization

• XREF: ‘No more avant-garde because no enemy to conquer’ is the tension Jameson takes up with ambivalence — postmodernism as the end of oppositional art. — connects to: The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 319
• QUESTION: Is Jencks’s ‘no enemy to conquer’ claim genuinely descriptive of the global network, or is it an ideological wish that later events (net backlash, platform monopolies) falsify?

Broader Connections

• The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society #expands (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 319