Emprende el curso de acción que menos se espere: la estrategia de lo (extra) ordinario

TAKE THE LINE OF LEAST
EXPECTATION
THE ORDINARY-EXTRAORDINARY STRATEGY

People expect your behavior to conform to known
patterns and conventions. Your task as a strategist
is to upset their expectations. Surprise them and
chaos and unpredictability--which they try
desperately to keep at bay--enter their world, and in
the ensuing mental disturbance, their defenses are
down and they are vulnerable. First, do something
ordinary and conventional to fix their image of you,
then hit them with the extraordinary. The terror is
greater for being so sudden. Never rely on an
unorthodox strategy that worked before--it is
conventional the second time around. Sometimes
the ordinary is extraordinary because it is
unexpected.
Robert Greene


The chief characteristic of fashion is to impose
and suddenly to accept as a new rule or norm
what was, until a minute before, an exception or
whim, then to abandon it again after it has
become a commonplace, everybody's "thing."
Fashion's task, in brief, is to maintain a
continual process of standardization: putting a
rarity or novelty into general and universal use,
then passing on to another rarity or novelty
when the first has ceased to be such.... Only
modern art, because it expresses the avantgarde
as its own extreme or supreme moment,
or simply because it is the child of the romantic
aesthetic of originality and novelty, can
consider as the typical--and perhaps sole--form
of the ugly what we might call ci-devant beauty,
the beauty of the ancien regime, ex-beauty.
Classical art, through the method of imitation
and the practice of repetition, tends toward the
ideal of renewing, in the sense of integration
and perfection. But for the modern art in
general, and for avant-garde in particular, the
only irremediable and absolute aesthetic error
is a traditional artistic creation, an art that
imitates and repeats itself. From the anxious
modern longing for what Remy de Gourmont
chose to call, suggestively, "le beau inedit"
derives that sleepless and fevered
experimentation which is one of the most
characteristic manifestations of the avant-garde;
its assiduous labor is an eternal web of
Penelope, with the weave of its forms remade
every day and unmade every night. Perhaps
Ezra Pound intended to suggest both the
necessity and the difficulty of such an
undertaking when he once defined the beauty of
art as "a brief gasp between one cliche and
another." The connection between the avantgarde
and fashion is therefore evident: fashion
too is a Penelope's web; fashion too passes
through the phase of novelty and strangeness,
surprise and scandal, before abandoning the
new forms when they become cliche, kitsch,
stereotype. Hence the profound truth of
Baudelaire's paradox, which gives to genius the
task of creating stereotypes. And from that
follows, by the principle of contradiction inherent
in the obsessive cult of genius in modern
culture, that the avant-garde is condemned to
conquer, through the influence of fashion, that
very popularity it once disdained--and this is the
beginning of its end. In fact, this is the
inevitable, inexorable destiny of each
movement: to rise up against the newly
outstripped fashion of an old avant-garde and to
die when a new fashion, movement, or avantgarde
appears.
THE THEORY OF THE AVANT-GARDE,
RENATO POGGIOLI, 1968