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.
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".
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.