Theodor Adorno, Peter Bürger and Oswald Wiener, or How to Apply Neo-Avant-Garde Theory to Neo-Avant-Garde Texts

This article confronts two very influential theoretical texts related to neo-avant-garde with one of the most important manifestations of literary neo-avant-garde: Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1968) and Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Neo-Avant-Garde (1984) are applied to Oswald Wiener’s the improvement of central europe, a novel (1969). The article considers Wiener’s novel as a constitutive artwork that defines the neo-avant-garde’s theoretical and aesthetic presuppositions, outcome, and future. That becomes clear in the confrontation with Adorno’s and Bürger’s theoretical reflections. Adorno seems to idealise artworks as ontological objects in their own right. Contrary to Adorno’s notion of aesthetic form as “sedimented content”, Wiener develops a more sceptical stance towards the scope of artworks, conceiving of his postmodernist novel as the “suicide of an artwork”. Wiener’s novel and his subsequent works do away with the importance of signs and forms, and with their relation to the things expressed. While Adorno endorses a dialectic relationship between form and content, Wiener aims at a functional description of lively thinking, conceiving of neo-avant-garde or experimental art and literature not as an insightful means to gain a better understanding of the human mind. Bürger’s claim that “avant-garde could gain a renewed relevance in a future that we cannot imagine” may be re-formulated with regard to Wiener’s development, transforming his impetus from art and literature into a psychology of thinking which nevertheless retains its artistic basis.