ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the idea that the avant-garde is the first global expression, in the field of culture, of the struggles to "integrate," that is, to dominate the world on the part of several competing imperial and industrialized powers and, also, to resist these attempts locally. It examines how imperialism worked with other political, historical, and cultural phenomena in constituting the avant-garde. Considering the avant-garde not as the moment of sublation of bourgeois art, but rather as a diversity of particular symbolic responses to an historical conjuncture of social, political, economic, and cultural circumstances, one finds that none of these circumstances can be privileged the others. Perry Anderson has argued that the conjuncture in which the avant-gardes emerged produced an "openness of horizon, where the shapes of the future could alternatively assume the shifting forms of either a new type of capitalism, or the eruption of socialism".
