The Concept of the Radical in Writing

Radical Practice in the 20th Century

The word radical has a radical history. Rooted in the Latin word radix, meaning 'root', in medieval English it was applied to plants and, by implication, to the 'root' qualities of a person or thing – the fundamentals, the essence. When attached to actions in the 18th century, it came to mean thorough: thus a radical reform meant a change which gets to the root of a problem. While the sciences continued to use the word in its medieval sense (even today a radical number is the root number as in a square root, and a radical in chemistry is the fundamental element taking part in a reaction, e.g. an atom), politics in the 19th century changed its meaning to the very opposite of its medieval meaning. Radical change stood for extreme and revolutionary change, and radical was applied to progressive and unorthodox ideas which departed from traditional roots.

This ironic history where a word comes to mean its opposite is useful for the purpose of talking about writing because writing itself has come through fundamental transformations. In medieval times, the power of writing was significantly controlled by hierarchies of religion and governance – it was the tool and weapon of the status quo. (On the other hand, the oral was the medium of the masses.) With mass literacy and mass print production, writing's power dispersed: it moved into the multiple hands of the governed where it worked as retort, not as edict. The radical in writing developed as an escape from notions of one-ness – of tradition, convention, formula, the predicted way of doing – to embrace new possibilities.

The logic of the medieval conception of radix, the root, was focused on the idea of a tap root, a single generative source for a plant; this corresponded with notions of authority and hierarchy at the time. Following Deleuze and Guattari who put rhizomic root systems on the agendas of cultural and literary studies, today a point of origin and growth is more likely identified as an interconnected array, as a multiplicity or matrix, rather than as a singular source. Our current conception of roots, as in the rhizomic patterning of grass roots, sees them as lines of growth outwards into new places and territories still linked to origins. We see them as the investigators, the adventurers, the researchers, those that take nourishing new ground. So, the word radical is still about roots even 600 years after it was first used, but these are different roots. They are exploratory; they are not rooted to the one spot.

The word radical has been applied to the arts and design for almost a century (the OED notes the use of radical in describing the design of a car in 1921), but radical has not been well-defined in this context. It describes works which, in artistic terms, stand apart from the mainstream, use structures that are unconventional and have agendas that are rebellious. It applies to artworks which in political terms are left-leaning and in moral terms seem outrageous because they break rules. At the basis of any use of the term radical in the arts, there is a sense that tradition has been violated, beliefs have been challenged and the comfortable has been upset. The term works as a sort of bogeyman – an indistinctly outlined threat to our supposedly solid understanding of what the arts (and our lives) should be. It is a term that indicates outcasts. It names the sin bin occupants of the arts game.

My concept of the Radical relates to process: I define it as a constellation of particular strategies that produce ground-breaking artistic outcomes. It subtends from political and cultural activism and changing aesthetic and social enthusiasms, and in the arts it expresses itself in processes that reflect new understandings and ambitions, especially those of individuals caught up in bigger social, moral and political change. Perhaps surprisingly, the nature of these radical processes has remained somewhat constant, suggesting that there are conventions associated with the unconventional – that the modes for rebellion have remained somewhat always the same!

Radical practice has been subsumed under other names, especially the avant-garde. The usefulness of that term – avant-garde – is intersected by the birth, uncertain life, and death of several movements in the 20th century – Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Oulipo-ism, Fluxism, and more – all doing radical things and having different radical agendas across artforms. Just what these movements achieved, and how they all fit under the umbrella term avant-garde, has been a contentious topic (see, for example, Brill, 2010; Bürger, 1984; Cottington, 2013; Foster, 1996; Kostelanetz, 1982; Krauss, 1986; Murphy, 1999; Poggioli, 1962; Sullivan, 2012). Especially sensitive for debate is the fact that a key feature of these movements involved practitioners bringing separate artforms and practices together – which has never fitted with the academic or critical departmentalization of Writing, Visual Arts, Music and Performance. Very few university departments, academic or popular journals, publishers, newspaper review pages or sections of shelves in bookshops actually devote themselves to covering all of these arts areas at once – or even combinations of them – as opposed to categorizing and dealing with them separately. Even websites in the hypermedia age persist mainly with focus on segregated artforms. The culture itself, driven by economic and academic factors, has keenly outlawed practitioners' desires to bring artform practices together.

In spite of the regular use of the term radical to describe a wide variety of movements, practitioners and practices since the early 20th century, no single concept for the Radical in the arts has emerged. In this book I use the term Radical to describe a very particular aspect of the concept of the avant-garde and the movements and practices grouped under it. For me, the Radical is the view of the project of revolution in the creative arts since the early 20th century as seen from the inside. In other words, the Radical is the view that the practitioners themselves took. It involves what they wanted to do, the reasons why they did it and the strategies they pursued. It has been a surprisingly consistent set of aspirations for over a century, yet it has been systemically suppressed from the outside and sometimes erased. These ambitions have had nothing to do necessarily with what critics thought or reported was happening, or how academics interpreted practitioner activities. While culture is shaped significantly by what arts practitioners produce, a major part of that shaping is...