Vale Postmodern Thanatogenics? Towards an Aesthetic Proto-Avant-Garde (Critical THEORY‪)‬

In augmenting the illusion of reality with moments of aesthetic alterity, the avant-garde serves its communities through representing to mass culture that which is uncanny, unconscious or forgotten. In dying (through assimilation) the avant-garde paradoxically lives (through assimilation). Early-twentieth-century manifestations of the aesthetic avant-garde serve as a model of functionality in proposing a proto-avant-garde, able to evolve from some of the postmodernist theoretical discourses via a process of mutation. Though postmodernism may appear to have locked the dialectic with totalising paraliteratures and a thanatogenic (death-bringing) modus operandum, it is a mistake to suggest that new moments of an aesthetic avant-garde are unavailable in the twenty-first century. **********