Photo: 
Réseau centré M67, 1961

Isidore Isou

'Taking its cue from the language of quantum physics, where the strange and the real combine in ways reminiscent of avant-garde art, this keynote thinks about the conference theme under a number of headings. The vitality of avant-garde culture continues to yield rich results to research based on close analysis, which can bring out the opaque but extensive semantic network running through and across avant-garde production. But how far should these networks be said to run? What does network theory tell us about the strength and nature of connections between ‘classical’ and ‘historical’ avant-garde movements, on the one hand, and artists and writers working in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, on the other hand, many of whom may have no intention or awareness of a connection to historic avant-garde movements? Should we puritanically reject claims made by various groups operating today in the name of Surrealism and other avant-garde movements, decades after the formal dissolution of those movements? Or is such regeneration and public ownership precisely a part of the open, temporally borderless spirit in which avant-garde practice emerges? What can be said about the thriving academic networks organized around the avant-garde, of which this conference constitutes one among many examples? And in an age of explicit – and often proud – borders and hostility to intercultural exchange, how is the avant-garde featuring in resistance to fascism, racialised violence, genocide, and climate catastrophe, and other features of the global context for the conference? Featuring a questionable live experiment in avant-garde intellectual networks with those attending, this paper will argue for the double-think needed to recognize not only the strength and limitations of avant-garde networks, but also the crucial positive energy of the avant-garde in a world that desperately needs experimental (post-)humanist creativity, across and without borders.'