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Translated publisher's note:
Why are avant-gardes impossible in today's arts? This question would be entirely academic if artists were not themselves still psychologically dependent on the utopian idea of their endeavours' having a pioneering social function. A writer himself, Thomas Raab sets out to trace the causes of the avant-garde in economic conditions, urban demography, and the general orientation of the public. He reconstructs the development of avant-garde movements in the 19th century out of Romantic motives and follows their traces in today's subcultures, the cultural impotence of which is at least contrasted by its economic success. As a small guide for practitioners The Avant-garde Routine demolishes modern illusions about art thereby opening up the perspective of a more powerful illusion: that of a mechanistic self-understanding.

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Translated publisher's note:
Almost forty years ago in his book "The Society of the Spectacle", Guy Debord formulated the last fundamental critique of the era of the entertainment industry. It clearly did not change much, though. The repressive power of entertainment is still contrasting increasingly with the cosy shivers of the entertained.
  How is this possible? Thomas Raab takes an unusual perspective on the phenomenon: Mass entertainment is not a degenerate form of former high culture, but the necessary consequence of the biological design of man, on the one hand, and the economic development, on the other. His empirical search for an evolutionary 'basis of mass aesthetics' leads him from a fictional protocol of a casting show to numerous observations on himself and small children, as well as on the reactions of his cat, to dogs' howling.
  The resulting elements of a new, scientifically based aesthetics help to understand the inconsistent function that the spectacle plays within today's capitalism.

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Translated publisher's note:
In his debut "Behaviour", Thomas Raab takes a particular event as a starting point that not only shattered the Austrian public some time ago, but which was also accompanied by the typical reactions of tabloid journalism: The wife of a recognized Viennese psychiatrist attempts suicide by jumping out of a window at their fourth floor apartment after having thrown out their children. Raab declaredly renounces any research into the details, but instead fakes a family drama which he works up into a behavioural model within an urban-life reality.
  The anonymity of the protagonists transforms them into wildcard characters with an observable procedure for their behaviour within any Central European city. Social structures, cultural processes, and everyday life are described in a reserved language, which, in its alleged austerity, culminates in a cutting humour. The second part of the book is written from the perspective of the hospitalized mother, who seemingly shows her thoughts and feelings in a dense and enigmatic language.
  The subtle composition, the close connection of scientific and poetic language, as well as the empathy of the author with his characters have resulted in an extraordinary debut, illustrating not only the violence and the failure but also the position of love within our society.