ABSTRACT
This chapter provides ongoing research on the “digital” imaginary of the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the French avant-gardes. Theorists such as Peter Burger would probably be glad to interpret this appropriation as additional evidence for the political failures of the avant-gardes. For Guy Debord and the situationists, transparent communication was supposed to be on the side of the revolution. All obstacles to it came from the society of spectacle, which had a monopoly on falseness, lies, ideology and alienation. The spectacle has improved to the point that it now affects everything, leaving no space for new revolutionary struggles and therefore no space for the enactment of transparency, authentic communication or free speech. The utopia of a revolutionary subjectivity has vanished behind spectacular communication, commodification of subjects and desubjectification. The history of the avant-gardes started as a story about transparency and finished like a story about secrecy.
