The Legacy of Modernism
The Modern and The Postmodern
The
Modern
The modern: we have
transformed an adjective (modern, as in modern art or modern
style) to a noun, the modern.
What this means is that instead of the rather vague prefix or predicate
that has always been part of most European languages since the Greeks we now
have a substantive topic or subject.
Writing is no longer informed by the degree to which it is more or less
modern but the modern, rather, denotes a kind of ground of conditions from
which modern art, thought, science or writing emerges as response, symptom,
instantiation or manifestation. This is
Karl Marx:
We do
not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the
new world through the critique of the old.
Hitherto philosophers have left the keys to all riddles lying in their
desks, and the stupid, uninitiated world had only to wait around for the
roasted pigeons of absolute science to fly into its open mouth. Philosophy has now become securalized and
the most striking proof of this can be seen in the way that philosophical
consciousness has joined battle not only outwardly, but inwardly too. If we have no business with the construction
of the future or with organizing it for all time there can still be no doubt
about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the
existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries
nor from conflict with the powers that be. (Kolocotroni 5)
What is it about the statement
of this nineteenth century political philosopher that conveys or evokes the modern? We can outline certain assumptions:
1.
Up until now (i.e., 1847) people
have been governed by dogmas about their world that are beyond question.
In other words, a modern thinker
has replaced dogma with critique. What this implies is twofold:
Now, what is historically
specific about this shift in attitudes and ideas is also twofold: first, the
realm of thoughts and determinations has descended from the few
(philosophers, religious leaders, Emperors, kings, princes and other political
icons) to the many. People
generally now have stopped believing in the dogmatic presentation of their
leaders. Secondly, the realm of
thoughts and determinations is no longer considered to be a realm apart from
the empirical world (the world of the people’s experiences and actions). Previously, determination was usually given
a realm beyond ours, beyond time and space and beyond death. By the beginning of the nineteenth century
this realm was called the transcendental. It had lots of other names, of course: variously the divine,
the mathematical, the logical, the noumenal, the essential, the ideal. And actually it is very difficult not to
believe in it in some form or other.
But Marx’s point here is that we should stop believing in things
we can have no knowledge about. These
are the attitudes and assumptions that, in Marx’s writing, manifest the modern. However we should note that, while it is
possible to identify this brand, impression or manifestation of the modern all
over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that is no guarantee that it will
catch on very much. In fact wherever we
look, for every modern we’re bound to find hundreds of people exhibiting
beliefs in or desires for things to believe in beyond this world. There’s nothing like a good, rich,
sophisticated story about origins and destinations to grab the imaginations of
the masses, it seems. And, for all
that, Marx’s critical writings soon, even in his lifetime, began to take on the
role of the story or the myth—what he calls the dogma of the future—so that
they were to become exactly what he had feared—the perverse predictions that he
claims philosophers no longer have the power to produce.
It is this, if you remember,
that Dostoevsky seems to be pitting his underground man against in Notes
From Underground. Utopian visions
of the future—especially for Russia—would be devastating for its people—a person
is not the kind of thing that can be fitted into a scientifically worked out
design. If you put Dostoevsky up
alongside Marx you’ll have an indication of what is at stake for modernism. One thing that the Bolshevik revolution and
its aftermath shows, however, is that the realm of ideas when taken in
conjunction with the realm of historical activities and events is as powerful
as the otherworldly realm of transcendental determinations was always hitherto
thought to have been. The point is as
distinctive as you’ll get for a sense of what the modern might
mean. The modern replaces a way
of thinking that divides the terrestrial world from its extraterrestrial source
and power with a way of thinking that understands this source and power as the
very motor of history, in which we are all inescapably engaged. The danger, now, as I hope you’ll see, is
that history itself looks like it might be applying for the job left
vacant by the sacking of all the other transcendental determinations (in
shorthand: truth—as divinity, logic, reason, Man, mathematics etc.).
Let’s now have a look at the
strange word truth. The
following is a quotation from a writer we know:
A work that aspires,
however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every
line. And art itself may be defined as
a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible
universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its
every aspect. It is an attempt to find
in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of
matter, and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring
and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of
their existence (Joseph Conrad in Kolocotroni 131).
This
is Joseph Conrad, of course, an early formulation printed as part of his
preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897). Now this formulation is actually very
typical of its time but I have to say that in the light of what has gone before,
it does not feel very modern.
But we might bring our historical awareness to bear on our understanding
of it. First—and remarkably—there is
his emphasis on the visual. Not
only does the formulation repeat one of the most common versions of the “ideal/real”
distinction—the one that distinguishes the sensible universe from the invisible
but nonetheless meaningful realm of thoughts—but it does so by referring to the
sensible (remember there are five senses) in terms of the one exemplary
sense of vision. We thus
immediately hear a reference to the impressionists and post-impressionists of
the modernist visual arts. But there is
another way that Conrad repeats this old division: the sensible universe
flutters across his field of vision as transient, temporary and mutable as our
poor old mortal bodies themselves are.
Against this, the truth remains invisible—a permanent, eternal and
tranquil enduring that only the artist is capable of evoking. Significantly, he draws an analogy between
the work of the artist and that of the philosopher and scientist, of whom he
says, “their concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds
and the proper care of our bodies … with the perfection of the means and the
glorification of our precious aims.”
All three seek the truth in different ways and must, he says, make an
appeal—whether about the truth of ideas or of facts. This need to make an appeal is of course crucial, for it directs
us to the question of address—who or what is being addressed by the statements
of philosophy, science and art. Conrad,
significantly (and in this the modern emerges in his writing) doesn’t
distinguish between audiences but between desires and attitudes: science and
philosophy “speak to our common sense, to our intelligence, to our desire for
peace, or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to
our fears, often to our egoism—but always to our credulity” (131). But in an
essential way, the artist is different:
Confronted by the same
enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely
region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the
terms of his appeal. His appeal is made
to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature, which, because of
the warlike conditions of our existence, is necessarily kept out of sight
within the more resisting and hard qualities—like the vulnerable body within a
steel armour. His appeal is less loud,
more profound, less distinct, more stirring—and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive
generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our
being that is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an
acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. (131-2)
The
first thing worth noting here is that the truth attributed to science
and philosophy has been subtly demolished.
The force of Conrad’s irony as always works gently but with devastating effect. The ideas and facts of philosophy and
science are no truer than the visible appearances themselves as they flutter
mutably across the frame of our gaze.
The appeal or the address of art is to whatever lies beneath the heavy
armour of conventional wisdom. In some
ways we’re back with Marx now—incredulous of received truths; but what, then,
does Conrad mean by this alternative form of inner enduring truth, this gift—or
given quality—that is beyond and before acquired or received ideas? The artist, he writes, appeals to:
The subtle but
invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of
innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in
aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other,
which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the
unborn. (132).
Let’s
acknowledge the complexity of the statement, which on the surface might just
seem to be yet another assertion of the bland universality of art—art appeals
to everyone “as evrybody kno.” Rather,
Conrad’s statement can be summarized like this: the mutable world comes and
goes in a constant state of flux, as do ideas, theories and facts, despite
their capacity to become sediment, hardened like the steel of armour plating,
flattering the narcissistic ego and confirming prejudices or replacing them
with new ones. Art on the other hand
addresses that part of us that responds to the addresses of others, to a part
of us that remains essential because it is the relation to the other and thus
includes all possible relations whether to the dead or to the not yet
born. This would be a good point to
stress: as modernity advances an increasing incredulity towards theories about
the world emerges alongside an increasing awareness of the sheer radical
differences of other people. Here we
find that powerful thread of the modern that does not refuse the ravages of
temporality on a finite world, that does not gesture to some fabulous beyond
but locates the enigmatic truth of our existence in an essential but
undetermined relation to the other—at its most basic it would manifest, for
instance, as a kind of caring—but caring at its most basic—a care and respect
for someone you do not know or for something in those you do know or think you
know but which, even in them, you cannot know.
You can think of it is the potential for caring. A potential is like a promise
in so far as it can appear without actually being fulfilled. I can promise you something quite
independently of whether I fulfill my promise.
You need to have the potential before it can be fulfilled but it doesn’t
need to be fulfilled. If it did need to
be fulfilled then it wouldn’t be potential.
Modernism addresses that part of us that is potential for caring.
The
Undetermined in Late Modernism
Now
Conrad is a very subtle modernist, and therefore very powerful, but it’s worth
looking into those starker statements of modernism, especially the apparently
very grim works of late modernism by, to name the only most prominent, Djuna
Barnes, Mina Loy, Samuel Beckett and Wyndham Lewis. Tyrus Miller in his Late Modernism, points out that while
these stark worlds of late modernism can be related back to the experience of
the Great War, they also exhibit an awareness of and concern for an ethical
ground. He observes that in the
confusion between automatism and life, in which both life and robotic activity
turn up consistently as forms of imperfection, an ethical imperative is affirmed:
These writers perceived
as a general state of affairs a kind of all-pervasive, collective, and
incurable shell-shock, from which all suffer and which need not have trench
experience as its precondition (though for many, of course, it did). The distinction between the vital and the
mechanical had become less sharp in the interwar years; the world of things had
never seemed more animated, while the question “does life live?” lost its
apparent non-sensicality for masses of people.
Yet the late modernist writers also discovered the ethical ground for
their work in a seeming imperfection in the process: the arrested state of this
movement towards the efficient robot, the failure to complete this
mechanization of the body through to its end, the comical inability of humans
to consummate the man-machine. (24).
In
other words, this appearance in artworks of what has been called the absurd
has a ground in the perceived need to affirm the uncompleted, the imperfect, or
as I have just called it, the purely potential and always undetermined
aspect of human relations.
I’m
inclined to find support in Miller’s account of late modernism for my sense
that commentators like Art Berman have underestimated the power of modernism in
its resistance to the transcendental and universalizing turns of both Romanticism
in art and fascism in politics. In his Preface
to Modernism, which is both insightful and sophisticated, Berman links what
he calls the early modernist’s transcendentalism (which remains deserving of
praise) to a similar tendency in fascism (which, of course, doesn’t):
While fascism shares
the early modernist’s transcendentalism, it does so not as an internationalized
aesthetics but as a nationalized politics.
Modernism is one of the glories of modern civilization, and fascism is
one of its horrors. The
universalization of spirit in art is not the same as the nationalization of
spirit in culture, but the romantics themselves, at least in Germany, failed to
make this discrimination. That
oversight has contributed to the stupendous havoc in the twentieth century,
although the romantics hardly can be blamed for all that followed—nor can the
modernists, who themselves did not clearly perceive this distinction before
World War II taught everyone how essential it was. (250).
Two
things we might learn from modernism, concerning this point, might be that we
need to learn to read the modern in modernism—that critical
substitution of questioning response for the passive acceptance of
dogma that we find in Marx and that subtle affirmation of potential
against the ephemera of modernity’s authoritative discourses that we find in
Conrad. The second thing would be a
question about how much, and what, if anything, we have been “taught” by World
War II. The writers of “late modernism”
certainly seem to have developed a way of presenting the failure to
universalize as a kind of ethical imperative.
They do it under the sign of laughter—the comic, the absurd, the
satirical—“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” (Beckett). If modernism renders anything universal we
should be cautious of assuming, as so many have done, that the universal can be
elaborated in terms of theme (as nationalism, for instance, always does). Themes identified with modernism have,
significantly, been those of alienation, exile, loss etc. Significantly, why? Because this is how the divisions,
transitions, scissions and splits that characterize so much of modernist
writing can seem. But take the motif of
the night in Djuna Barnes (and in Benjamin and Loy as well). The night is conventionally related to the
day according to a series of fairly well established polarities (clichés,
then).
Night Day
Forgetting Memory
Madness Reason
Woman Man
Moon Sun
Indeterminacy Calculation
The
list, naturally, goes on following a symbolic course that is ultimately the
bane of the Romanticist so I don’t particularly want to go further down there
myself. What Barnes is consistently
drawing attention to, on the contrary, is the power of the transitional. Dr Matthew O’Connor promises to “tell you
how the day and the night are related by their division” (296). Every character in the text is related by a
division or divided by a relation. The
apparent oxymoron becomes the key pattern of the text—going into the night is
like entering the darkness of an unknown tomorrow and it is significant that
the character associated with the night itself, Robin Vote, the somnambulist
automaton, is regarded by each of the other characters in turn (except maybe
Matthew, who awakens her) as a pure potential—the undetermined through whom
they might determine themselves. In
this sense she does reveal them in their absurdity—the frauds, plagiarists,
obsessives that they are—while remaining all the time undetermined, manifesting
only the purity of potential (as opposed to the purity of the master race in
the full automated throes of preparation as Barnes was writing).
The
Postmodern
We
might look for the legacy of modernism—what remains of it—in its brash young
inheritor postmodernism. A short
passage from the philosopher of postmodernism himself, Jean-François Lyotard,
might be a good place to look. In
answer to the question “What, then, is the postmodern?” he gives the following
answer:
The postmodern would be
that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation
itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a
taste that would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the
unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy
them but in order to present a stronger sense of the unpresentable. (82)
According
to this formula I’d say straightaway that—if Lyotard is correct—then the night
in Nightwood is the postmodern in the modern. The one thing that cannot be presented in a
world where the distinction between transcendental and “real” no longer holds
is the potential for future presentations and relations that remain unheard of. This potential is itself not presentable
(to present it would be to determine it and you cannot determine the
undetermined). This would seem to be
the main concern of a postmodernism that finds itself at the heart of
modernism, as its future but not realized as such (the realization would obviously
cancel it out—i.e., determine it). In
which case Modernism is already postmodernism and postmodernism is not
yet.
Reading
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology and the Body: A
Cultural Study. Cambridge: CUP,
1998.
Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. London: Faber, 1962.
Berman, Marshal. Preface to Modernism. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1994.
De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear
History. New York: Zone, 2000.
Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou,
eds. Modernism: An Anthology of
Sources and Documents. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Levenson, Michael. The Cambridge Companion to
Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What is
Postmodernism?” Innovation/Renovation.
Eds. Hassan, I. and S. Hassan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1983.
Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and
the Arts Between the World Wars.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.