ABSTRACT
The radical avant-garde—Dada, surrealism, and situationism—wanted to disrupt, and even overturn, bourgeois society. According to Barthes, if the people examine their enjoyment of a text, they find not only a pleasure that reflects our subjectivity, but also a pleasure of the body. Its members argued that their avant-garde predecessors had been too preoccupied with cultural values, when really a new culture could emerge only following "the triumph of the revolutionary movement". As Debord explained, "it is only inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to appear". Postmodern radicalism takes from the avant-garde a concern to be absolutely modern and yet to change the world. Postmodern radicals insisted on the location of the subject in a social world composed of things such as power-relations. The polarity between a rejection of the real and an adherence to avant-garde sites and strategies governs the most common reactions to postmodernism.
