ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how avant-gardist impulses operate in culture after the dissolution of the historical avant-garde tradition by using Alexander Trocchi work. It talks about Trocchi's novel-writing career and explores Trocchi's transition from novelist to cultural organiser. Trocchi's voyage took him from novelist to 'cosmonaut of inner space', the leader of project sigma, an effort to radically reorganize cultural production that was as ambitious as it was elusive. Trocchi represents the earliest British interpretation of Situationist practice, and he stands at the boundary between the historical avant-garde and its dissolution. A common verdict on Trocchi as a novelist is that he deferred writing 'proper' fiction for so long after Cain's Book that it became his greatest novel by default. Trocchi was trying to develop a non-political way of thinking politics, evident in Young Adam's early formulation of the spectacle and Cain's Book's valorisation of play as resistance. Trocchi presented sigma, a social network that was to generate new aesthetic forms.
