Modernism: where we need to return or what we need to leave behind?

Among the various factions or branches of the Left (where/if they exist), but especially among intellectuals in the U.K., modernism is held in high esteem above other eras and cultural movements.

This thread is for discussing modernism. Is the "modernism" favored by many a fantasy or did it really exist in the way they describe it? Was modernism the beginning of something great or a failed project?

(Please let's avoid derailing this thread by flinging accusations of "fascism" or namecalling theorists you don't like. There are other threads for that.)

I was feeling especially stir crazy, Polystyle, since I've been trapped upstate for a while now under a couple of feet of snow. Luckily it all melted yesterday and I've ventured out.

poetix said:

For Fredric Jameson, however, postmodernity is the recoding of modernism's lines of flight as a "cultural logic": "legitimation through paralogy" becomes another technique for capitalist expansion, for the opening up of new markets or the elaboration of new financial instruments. The modernist impulse to "make it new" has become tied to a cultural fetishisation of novelty - latest Hot New Theorist! - while the once menacing and rebarbative negations of modernist aesthetics ("There's no more pap. You'll never get any more pap...") are pressed into the service of "creative destruction", first as shock tactics and then as apologetics for the resulting social and institutional precarity.

Any "return" to modernism must acknowledge and negotiate the traps laid for it by this "cultural logic"; in Badiou's terms, it must go beyond an attempt to resuscitate the long-defunct utopianisms of the twentieth century, and establish a "fidelity to the fidelity" which upholds their initial radicalism - or, in Lyotard's terms, their commitment to the unpresentable, the differend and "the honour of thought".

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This seems exactly right.

Something that I've never understood about the modernism fetish is that it is so focused on culture-- Soviet art, in particular, in many cases--that the supposed politics of the modernist fetishist take a backseat to an empty formal interest in clean lines, minimal design, and the art of the destructive gesture (which is, in the final analysis, quite amenable to being entombed in the gallery-insitution, rather than resistant to this).

As far as I can tell, there was nothing especially resistant to elitism, commodification, or capitalism in modernist art. Of course, I don't believe art should bow down to populism-- but there's something a little off about castigating the class system in one breath and ignoring the fact that art under capitalism becomes just a form of commerce, perhaps even a uniquely destructive one, since it is based on the sale of luxury goods (cf the diamond industry), the value of which is measured by how rarefied, unattainable, or difficult (rather than expensive) to produce and hard to interpret they are as art objects/commodities. Under modernism, even moreso than it is now under postmodernism, art was key in maintaining social status, false consciousness, and in individuating class experiences. Art was something one had to be refined enough to understand, which entailed education, and in those days before federal student loans, money and breeding (Jews/blacks/women unwelcome).

The proletariat may have been deified in modernist (esp Soviet) art, but they had no access to it. Art played an important role in keeping them out, keeping the discourse in the hands of elites.



Part of the argument that's made in favor of modernism relies heavily on the notion that a "vital" political system (one that is presumably more capable of suborning their revolution) is always matched by a thriving arts or cultural scene, which for some reason always means a scene that fetishizes the new in the form of the allegedly radical, gestural disavowal of convention. I find myself at odds with those who really seem to believe that nothing new happens anymore, who fail to realize that, in fact, formal developments in the arts have come at faster and faster clips since the technological revolution, much faster than they ever did. (During the classical period in music, little more than a few slight harmonic variations and instrument tweaks were achieved over hundreds of years.) Their insatiable hunger for "the new" is a symptom of what Virilio would call the "acceleration" of cultural production, not some saintly yearning for modernism's conceptual purity and political efficiency.

If the quick assimilation of formal innovations into a culture were some measure of that culture's political vibrancy and ability to churn out radicals and more/better discourse, we would actually be much farther ahead of the modernists right now.

Agent, can you say a little more about paramodernism when have a chance? I'm curious--I think I know what you mean but I'd love to read more about it.

poetix said:

I don't think modernism had a single univocal class coding - and there's plenty of interesting traffic between "elite" modernism and other currents (Joyce for example seems to have been important to just about everyone). So I would reject Bourdieu's sophisticated version, as much as John Carey's crass, reactionary version, of the accusation that avant-gardism in any form is always about the consecration of elite tastes.

Partly it hangs on an equivocation over the meaning of "elite": does one mean established social castes, or just any group which consciously separates itself from received taste and opinion? The latter sort of "elite" tend to make odd shapes against the backdrop of existing social stratifications, comprising all sorts of misfits. Their relationship to egalitarian politics is accordingly somewhat vexed...

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The relationship between art/culture and an "elite" is obviously problematic and it's impossible to use these words as if it's not.

But doesn't it seem that modernism was not particularly conducive to blasting through false consciousness or institutional classism, especially in its emphasis on "high culture"?

To feel that rush that used to come with "the new" is certainly something most people are nostalgic for, I just don't believe the story modernist fetishists tell about how we got here really jibes with what happened.

poetix said:

It really depends on which modernism you mean, and what manner of cultural elevation is being proposed. Beckett for example I don't think of as particularly "high" in the sense of (say) "high church" or "high ceremony". Or Pinter.

For the prole art threat, you want what k-punk calls "pulp modernism" I suspect.

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Points for the Fall reference. J/k.

Usually with the modernist fetishists the height of modernism and its redemptive powers lay in dada, Russian constructivism and public housing architects/architecture.

I notice that a huge part of what they think has been lost is "public space" as a sacrosanct/conceptually pure discursive category.

When I think of PC people, I usually think of modernist fetishist social realists, who in American academia beat this "public space" drum incessantly.

Agent Nucleus said:

i've been out of town for a week. this is a good conversation, lots to say here. in terms of prole or working class modernism, i think the Ash Can painters and some of the American communist poets (especially Kenneth Fearing) are outstanding. Still definitely modernist, very experimental, but none of the high art pretense that's associated with high modernism. Something that's been lost in the negationist histories of modernism is that a lot of radical modernists (Brecht, Tzara, even Joyce to an extent) saw modernist experimentation as a way to undermine bourgeois values and aesthetics. More importantly, the experimental techniques (especially those invented by the Dadaists, the Surrealists, etc) could be used by anyone.

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But any art technique can be used by anyone who can understand it and afford to replicate it, the problem is--where do I get the patronage to fund my work, how do I become well-connected enough to be visible, how do experimental techniques trickle down?

I remember I took a course on modernist collage that traced the influence of Heartfield's and Hoech's appropriation of the visual semiotics of advertising on art and (in turn) advertising. Collage as a medium consisted of a feedback loop of influence between modernism and advertising.

As far as modernist theater goes, I do like Brecht (who has always had a considerable following in the U.S.), and the expressionist playrights (Kokoschka esp) if they count. There was a lot of potential in theater until film sort of ousted it from its privileged position.

"Paramodernism" is a term coined by Donald Theall. It is basically a strain of modernism and postmodernism that develops within the tradition of radical modernist experimentation (everyone mentioned above) but goes way beyond what we usually associate with modernism. Basically it's an alternative to postmodernism that develops WITHIN (not against) radical modernist theories, aesthetics, and experimental techniques. William Gibson, for example, identifies himself as a paramodern.

Incidentally, I'm looking to start a journal called "paramodern" or something along those lines, that kind of expands on Theall's theories (which are derived from McLuhan, Deleuze, Bataille, Klee, and especially Joyce, who Theall sees as THE theorist of media and communication). I'll post a CFP in a month or two, we're still at the drawing-board stage. Ideally, I'd like the journal to be a kind of throwback to the independently published radical modernist journals of the Dadaists, the Surrealists, the Situationists, De Stijl, etc etc. Meaning a balanced mix of critical theory and original art, fiction, poetry, and maybe film and web interfaces ( would love to distribute it as a CD-ROM). I have a few people on board with this project already: Dr. Lee Kwo (experimental postmodern SF writer), David L. Tamarin (Bizarro author), and Christie Vozniak (actor/model and collaborator on a psychogeography project i'm working on for the Eyedrum gallery in Atlanta). If you are interested in this idea, and especially if you want to contribute something, message me and we'll work something out. Again, I'm looking for theory, original art, original poetry and fiction, and really anything else. I'm not trying to start a movement or a collective or anything, just trying to create a forum where current artists and thinkers to exchange ideas.

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This sounds fun. I'll have to read Theall. In the meantime I can think of quite a few people who would at least want to read this if not write for it.

poetix said:

Their relationship to egalitarian politics is accordingly somewhat vexed...

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There's also the question of whether Marxists are even really "egalitarians", so this further complicates things insofar as some strains of modernism are considered more in line with a Marxist agenda...

Personally I think "equality" is the wrong word, "equity" is a little better...

Mr. Tea said:

This thread seems to have focussed mainly on art and aesthetics so far, but AN's point above seems to apply just as well to the political dimension. Weren't fascism, communism and liberal democracy all, in some sense, 'modernist' movements or ideologies? Of course fascism was highly reactionary, but it also deified science, industry, efficiency and (what it saw as) progress, which seem to be key aspects of modernist thought. Or perhaps exaggerated caricatures of modernist thought, I don't know.

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Yeah, it's really tough to work out the extent to which culture followed politics, or politics culture, during what Agent would called paramodernism. In a way, I think you may be onto something--modernism, either politically or in the arts, seems beholden to exactly the same logical positivism that eventually went bust, thanks to a couple of pretty hideous wars. (cf Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, the science "narrative")

Marx's utopia was an industrial one. He may have been able to read the post-modern global economic writing on the wall, but he wasn't able to theorize a utopia that wasn't thoroughly wrapped up in industrial modes of production and the ethos of efficiency. Why anyone would think that a return to his ideals exactly as we read them is the only way to end class warfare or resist post-modernism is beyond me, really.

There is a certain sort of post-Marxist intellectual who holds up high modernism as an example of what a culture of political progress should look like. I think Marxist and modernism ideals are interesting in the same metaphorical way Poetix thinks we should use Lacan/psychoanalysis. One thing we've inherited from Marx and certain Marxists is a new economic vocabulary, it just doesn't seem that the best possible way to make use of this is to take some sort of vulgar Marxism to the streets (real or virtual).