SCUM Without a Subject: Valerie Solanas at the End of the Avant-Garde

The avant-garde, conceptualised as a particular articulation of politics and aesthetics, gains descriptive purchase only when seen as an epochal process that emerges in relationship to a distinct regime of capital accumulation and thus a distinction configuration of social production and reproduction. In this paper, I want to explore what a statement like this might mean, or how it might be true, by reading Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto (1968) as a peculiar limit-point of that avant-garde, which, arriving at the moment of the latter’s dissolution, allows us to witness the end of the conjunction of politics and aesthetics that carried that name, and thus perhaps better limn its features.