Fragments of Modernity (Routledge Revivals)

Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin

David Frisby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415859141
• eBook ISBN: 9781134459926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Fragments of Modernity, first published in 1985, provides a critical introduction to the work of three of the most original German thinkers of the early twentieth century. In their different ways, all three illuminated the experience of the modern urban life, whether in mid nineteenth-century Paris, Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century or later as the vanguard city of the Weimar Republic. They related the new modes of experiencing the world to the maturation of the money economy (Simmel), the process of rationalization of capital (Kracauer) and the fantasy world of commodity fetishism (Benjamin). In each case they focus on those fragments of social experience that could best capture the sense of modernity.

1

Modernité

I am not astounded that Megalopolis which the Arkadians founded in all eagerness, and for which Greece had the highest hopes, should have lost its beauty and ancient prosperity, or that most of it should be ruins nowadays, because I know that the daemonic powers love to turn things continually upside down, and I know that fortune alters everything, strong and weak, things at their beginning and things at their ending, and drives everything with a strong necessity and according to her whim. Mycenae which led the Greeks in the Trojan War, and Nineveh, seat of the Assyrian Kingdom are deserted and demolished … The sanctuary of Bel survives at Babylon, but of that Babylon which was the greatest city the sun saw in its time, nothing was left except a fortress wall, like the one at Tiryns in the Argolid. The daemonic power annihilated all these, and Alexander’s city in Egypt and Selenkos’s city on the Orontes were built yesterday and the day before, and have risen to such greatness and such prosperity because Fortune is favouring them … This is how temporary and completely insecure human things are …

Pausanias Guide to Greece (Second Century AD)

l’évolution social prend la form d’une désagrégation spontanée.

Ferdinand Tönnies

One thing distinguishes modernity from all that is past and gives it its particular character: knowledge of the eternal becoming and disappearance of all things in ceaseless flight and insight into the connectedness of all things, into the dependency of each thing upon every other in the unending chain of what exists.

Hermann Bahr

I

The social theorist who goes in search of a theory of modernity is soon confronted with a paradoxical situation. Social and political theory abounds with attempts to grasp that which is ‘new’ in ‘modern’ society. There is no lack of theories of modernization and the process of modernization, many of which take as their starting point the very ‘modern’ society within which they themselves are located. In particular, sociology now abounds with theories of modernization that refer in large part to the transformation of political, economic and social systems or sub-systems. Sometimes, as Habermas has pointed out with respect to recent neo-conservative social theories of Daniel Bell and others, they are combined with a denunciation of the culture of modernity in order to assert the existence of post-modernity, post-industrialism, post-capitalism.¹ Such theorists betray a desire ‘to get rid of the uncompleted project of modernism, that of the Enlightenment’. Lyotard suggests that, for its part, Habermas’s critique of modernity rests upon the view that

if modernity has failed, it is in allowing the totality of life to be splintered into independent specialities which are left to the narrow competence of experts, while the concrete individual experiences ‘desublimated meaning’ and ‘destructured form’, not as a liberation but in the mode of that immense ennui which Baudelaire described over a century ago.²

This is argued by Lyotard in the context of answering what exactly is ‘le postmoderne’. The literary and artistic context within which the question is posed in turn suggests that Lyotard has already fused modernity with modernism in the aesthetic sphere. His answer is that post-modernism ‘is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’,³ whilst ‘post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).⁴ The implication of Lyotard’s argument is that modernism has not been superseded. But perhaps a virtue of Lyotard’s discussion is that, unlike much aesthetic discourse on modernism, it is not confined to the attention of those who deal solely with art and culture.

The problem faced by a social theory of modernity in this context is that modernity itself becomes subsumed either under modernization or modernism or it disappears altogether as an object of investigation. The splintered and thereby precarious concept of modernity must itself be reconstructed out of its earlier conceptualizations. It would be possible to commence with that academic discipline which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during its struggle to assert itself as an independent discipline often took as its object of study that of which it was a product – modernity. Certainly, the sociology of this period does confront the problem of distilling what is new, what is modern in modern society. Most often, it performed this task by juxtaposing what is new with its opposite. Such a reading of sociology in this period would provide us with Tönnies’s contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Durkheim’s opposition of societies based upon mechanical and organic solidarity, Simmel’s less pronounced contrast between a society with a non-money economy and a developed (capitalist) money economy and Weber’s contrast between all previous ‘traditional’ societies and those based upon modern western rationalism (modern western capitalism).

With pessimistic hindsight, it has been fashionable in much modern sociological discourse to read all these polarities as if they were grounded in a philosophy of history thesis as to the inevitable transition from one to the other in such a way that the source of their dynamic – be it functional differentiation, rationalization, etc. – not merely produced only negative consequences but obscured the complexities of the ‘present’ societies and any counterveiling tendencies operating within them. Yet, to take but one example, and perhaps the least understood, Tönnies emphasized time and time again not merely that features of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft exist side by side in contemporary society but – and this is a crucial thesis of modernity theories – that Gesellschaft ‘is only a transitional and superficial phenomenon’ which one goes into ‘as into a strange country’.⁵ Any reading of such social theories which took the modern society they delineate as being a fixed end state (development or ‘progress’ only existing up to the present) would fail to see the emphasis upon the transitory nature of the ‘new’, sometimes even the recognition that the ‘new’ was already doomed.

Thus, it is important to remember that this transitory nature of the new in notions of modernity was associated with crucial changes in time consciousness – and especially a challenge to the notion of unilinear progress – in such a way that the study of modernity could become ‘a reconnaissance into an unknown realm, that carries with it the risk of sudden, shocking confrontations’ (Habermas).⁶ One possible implication was to see society and social relations in a state of flux, in motion, in ceaseless movement.

Although this view of society took many varied forms in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century and became a central feature of ‘modernist’ artistic and literary movements in the twentieth century, it is clearly not possible to outline all these developments here. Instead, the treatment of some of the key dimensions of modernity will be extracted from the works of three writers, all of whom play an important role in the subsequent delineations of modernity in the writings of Benjamin and to a lesser extent those of Simmel and, more marginally, Kracauer.

In Benjamin’s projected ‘prehistory of modernity’ that was to focus upon ‘Paris – Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, one figure came to dominate his study, that of Charles Baudelaire. His work provided Benjamin with a ‘fresco of modernity’. Yet Baudelaire is significant in the much more specific sense that he gave the concept of modernité its modern meaning in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (written 1859–60 and first published in 1863). Its focus lay in the newness of the present, indeed even to the extent of identifying modernity as that which is new. A second contemporary figure who may be described as a hidden analyst of modernity is, of course, Marx, for whom modernity is a historical phenomenon. Marx’s analysis of the dialectics of a society based upon commodity production not merely sought to grasp what was new about capitalist society but, in searching for the dynamics of that social formation, came to recognize it as historically transitory. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, another writer engaged in what can only be described as a radical critique of modernity in which modern society was viewed as decadent. Modernity, for Nietzsche, came to be ‘the eternal recurrence of the ever-same’. Even this cursory glance at these three writers provides us with conceptions of modernity as the new, the historical (and transitory) and the ever-same. It is to their contributions to the delineation of the elusive concept of modernity that we now turn.

II

La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié, de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable.

Charles Baudelaire

The true painter, will be the man who extracts from present day life its epic aspects and teaches us in lines and colours to understand how great and poetic we are in our patent-leather shoes and our neckties. May the real pioneers next year give us the exquisite pleasure of being allowed to celebrate the advent of the truly new.

Charles Baudelaire

‘No matter what party one may belong to’, wrote Baudelaire in 1851, ‘it is impossible not to be gripped by the spectacle of this sickly population which swallows the dust of the factories, breathes in particles of cotton, and lets its tissues be permeated by white lead, mercury and all the poisons needed for the production of masterpieces …; of this languishing and pining population to whom the earth owes its wonders; who feel a purple and impetuous blood coursing through their veins, and who cast a long, sorrow laden look at the sunlight and shadows of the great parks.’ This population is the background against which the outline of the hero stands out. Baudelaire captioned the picture thus presented in his own way. He wrote the words la modernité under it.

Walter Benjamin

When Baudelaire introduced the concept of modernité in his ‘The Painter of Modern Life’,⁷ he confessed to the reader: ‘I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind.’ He viewed modernity as both a ‘quality’ of modern life as well as a new object of artistic endeavour. For the painter of modern life, this quality is associated with the notion of newness, with nouveauté. Its significance ‘as a conscious aim of artistic production’ is emphasized by Benjamin:

In Baudelaire’s work, the concern is not with the attempt, common to all the arts, to call into life new forms or to gain access to a new side of things but with the fundamentally new object whose force lies solely in the fact that it is new, regardless of how repulsive and wretched it may be. [My emphasis.]⁸

This proposed aim of modern painting – which Baudelaire detected in the work of Constantin Guys and elsewhere in Goya and Daumier – coincides with Baudelaire’s own artistic intention. However, this should not lead us to assume that even in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ or elsewhere in Baudelaire’s writings there exists a theoretical ‘analysis’ of modernity. As Oehler remarks with reference to Baudelaire’s earlier writings:

In the search for his conception of modernity, specific guiding images remain before him, but he is not in a position … to anticipate theoretically his own advance beyond these preconceptions. This further step is only indicated by scenes and sketches that Baudelaire continually adds to his argument either without comment or even in a misleading manner.⁹

Some of these guiding images are to be found, of course, in Baudelaire’s poetry too and are the subject of Benjamin’s analysis almost a century later.

At the heart of Baudelaire’s ‘phenomenology of modernity’ there lies the newness of the present. Baudelaire says: ‘the pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present.’¹⁰ But this presentness is of a transitory nature and this feature gives to modernity its distinctive character since ‘by modernity I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’.¹¹ Indeed, beauty itself is not merely ‘made up of an eternal, invariable element’ but also ‘a relative, circumstantial element, which will be … the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions’.¹² Nonetheless, as Jauss has argued, this aesthetics of the absolutely new was not merely a later variant of the ancient antithesis of the temporal and the eternal:

Just as the transitory, momentary and contingent can only be one half of art that requires of its other half the constant, timeless and universal, so also the historical consciousness of modernité presupposes the eternal as its antithesis … timeless beauty is nothing other than the idea of beauty in the status of past experience, an idea created by human beings themselves and continuously abandoned.¹³

Baudelaire’s conception of modernity and the tasks set for the modern artist ‘liberate the poetic precisely in the fashionable and historical dimensions which classical taste left out of its account of the beautiful’.¹⁴

Yet this very task which Baudelaire set the painter of modern life, namely to capture ‘the ephemeral, contingent newness of the present’ poses a particular problem of method since ‘in trivial life, in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Modernité
• 2 Georg Simmel: Modernity as an Eternal Present
• 3 Siegfried Kracauer: ‘Exemplary Instances’ of Modernity
• 4 Walter Benjamin: Prehistory of Modernity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index