In the tradition: Amiri Baraka, black liberation, and avant-garde praxis in the U.S

Baraka is observing in Coltrane the Adornian turn to theory-as-praxis--the endless, "open-ended," "anti-aborptive" contemplation as the only viable form of political praxis--and its connection to a metaphysical or theosophic turn: not to African or Aztec spirituality, but to "Eastern cosmology." The crucial insight in this critique, however, is the relation of the Adornian turn with a changed relationship to audience: Coltrane drifted from the "tough street sound," the sound to which working-class blacks once related. Baraka describes the historical moment in which Trane and the black jazz avant-garde were connected with revolutionary mass struggle:

   We heard him blow then, long and
   strong, trying to find something, as
   Miles stood at the back of the stage
   and tugged his ear, trying to figure out
   what the fuck Trane was doing. We
   could feel what he was doing.... That
   Five Spot gig with Monk was Trane
   coming into his own.
   After Monk, he'd play
   chorus after chorus,
   taking the music apart
   before our ears, splintering
   the chords and
   sounding each note,
   resounding it, playing
   it backwards and
   upside down trying to
   get something else.
   And we heard our own
   search and travails, our
   own reaching for a new definition.
   Trane was our flag.... They [the new
   black jazz avant-garde] all could play,
   and the cry of "Freedom" was not only
   musical but reflected what was going
   on in the marches and confrontations,
   on the streets and in the restaurants
   and department stores of the South.
   (Autobiography 176)

The aesthetic process described here does not give primacy to "unlearning language" (referential, rational), as Mackey emphasizes: That razing would lead to "pure" form, "pure" process necessarily without goal (telos) or object--the Adornian negative (11)--or else it leads back to the prelinguistic, the precapitalist, the mythic, the metaphysical. No, this unlearning is specifically "to find something else," something usable, that speaks with and to the black masses--the "affirmative" which Adorno can't admit, the Constructivist raising impulse to which Dada struggled to relate. The process is a form of Brechtian refunctioning in which the relationship of artist (avant-garde) to mass audience (main arm) remains vital.

When we consider Baraka's revolutionary nationalist avant-gardism in terms of its audience-to-artist relationship, the contrast with what is visible as Modernist or Avant-garde in the contemporary publishing or academic scene becomes quite stark. The poetics of the strong majority of critically and institutionally recognized American avant-gardes of the twentieth century share a common relationship to audience: elitism. In some cases (e.g., L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) this orientation is marked by bourgeois alienation or estrangement. That is, the avant-garde artist (usually alienated genius) necessarily stands apart from the masses, who cannot help but be vulgar or robotic since the monolithic system of capitalism absorbs everyone. In other instances, the artist-audience relation is practically feudal or worse. The poet becomes a Priest, Spiritual Leader--whether mythic (witness Baraka as Imamu, or Olson as Maximus), religious (Eliot and the Church), or occult (Yeats and Pound into their private systems, the Beats into Zen orientalism)--and the feudal culture comes with feudal social relations between artist and audience.