PART I
RETHINKING
MODERNIST
STUDIES
ONE
DEFINITIONAL EXCURSIONS
What is modernity? What is or was modernism? Why is the energetic, expanding, multidisciplinary field of modernist studies so filled with contestation over the very ground of study? Definitional activities are fictionalizing processes, however much they sound like rational categorization. As such, I will begin with three stories, allegorized but rooted in my own experience in an evolving field.1
STORY 1: WHERE HAVE ALL THE REBELS GONE?
Imagine a young woman starting graduate school in 1965 in an American land-grant university. Remember the suburban dream of the 1950s for middle-class (white) girls: the penny loafers and saddle shoes, the poodle skirts and prom chiffon, the cheerleaders and Elvis screamers, college for the MRS degree, the station wagon and four kids. No books. No art. No ideas. No passion. Conformity was the name of the game. Conformity and materialism. Then. The first butts of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Fuck. Shit. Sex. Pot. Buttons. Pierced ears. Long hair. Unisex style. Civil Rights. Vietnam. Pigs. Feminism. Gay Rights. Welfare Rights. Union Rights. What was âmodernismâ to a graduate student in English and American literature in the heady days of the 1960s? Modernism was rebellion. Modernism was âmake it new.â2 Modernism was resistance, rupture. To its progenitors. To its students. Modernism was the antidote to the poison of tradition, obligation.
STORY 2: WHAT DOES A CYBERPUNK REALLY WANT?
Picture an aging scholar in 1995, past the half-century mark, entering into her first graduate seminar on modernism in a land-grant university. âWhat was modernism?â she asks. A circle of eyes and silences. A couple to the side shift uncomfortably. She has cropped purple hair and kohled eyes. He wears fishnet stockings and thick buckled Pilgrim heels. A tidy tail of silky golden hair flows down his back. So thin in black, so pale in whiteface, they are their own shadows. They know âwhat modernism was.â Modernism was elitism. Modernism was the Establishment. âHigh Cultureâ lifting its skirts against the taint of the âlow,â the masses, the popular. Modernism was the supreme fiction, the master narrative, the great white hope. To its pomo descendents, modernism is the enemy. Postmodernism is the antidote to the poison of tradition, obligation.
STORY 3: WHATâS A POOR STUDENT TO DO?
Listen in on an exchange between two scholars, the one graying and the other balding in the wisdom of their senioritiesâshe a cultural critic, he a social scientist. Children of the 1960s, teachers of the 1990s. It is 1995; their manuscripts pass back and forth through snail mail. âWhat was modernism?â they ask, both acknowledging it as a historical phenomenon but neither willing to assert that it is fully over and done with. For both, modernism both was and is. But what was modernism? She knows. It is the (illusory) break with the past, a willed forgetting of tradition, continuity, order. It is the embrace of chaos. It is the crisis of representation, fragmentation, alienation. It is indeterminacy, the rupture of certaintyâmaterial and symbolic. It is the poetics of modernityâchangeâand the aesthetic inscriptions thereof. (Pace cyberpunks, for whom modernism no longer âisâ as it recedes into the deadness of postmodernismâs past.)
He knows too. Modernism is state planning. Modernism is totalization, centralized system. Modernism is the Enlightenmentâs rational schemata. âProgressâââScienceâââReasonâââTruth.â Modernism is the ideology of post-Renaissance modernityâconquestâand the inscriptions thereof. (Pace cyborgs, modernism still lives in the danger of ever-forming centralized hegemonies and utopian totalitarianisms.)
Moral of the Stories
Just what is modernism in an exchange where the word means not just different things but precisely opposite things?
âââ
The opposition of meanings produced over time (from story 1 to story 2) morphs into a binary of oppositions existing across space (story 3). In toto, the stories represent a conjuncture of temporal and spatial oppositions. So. Letâs move from storytelling to another kind of conjuncture: parataxisâthe juxtaposition of things without providing connectives. Parataxis: a common aesthetic strategy in modernist writing and art, developed to disrupt and fragment conventional sequencing, causality, and perspective. Parataxis: the opposite of hypotaxis in linguistics, thus the opposite of hierarchical relationships of syntactic units. Parataxis: a mechanism of the âdream workâ in Freudâs grammar for the unconscious processes of disguised expression of the forbidden, indicating unresolved or conflicting desires.
PARATAXIS 1
âą âModernism ⊠is the one art that responds to the scenario of our chaos.â3
âą ââWho says modernity says organization,â it has been remarked.â4
PARATAXIS 2
âą âWe have seen that the creators of modernist works are negative demystifiers: they unmask absolutism, rationalism, idealismâand all illusions.â5
âą âBut I do not think we shall begin to understand modernism unless we look at the way it was seemingly compelled, over and over, at moments it knew were both testing ground and breaking point, to set it selfâŠthe task of Enlightenment, or the task of bourgeois philosophy, in its ruthless, world-breaking and world-making mode.â6
PARATAXIS 3
âą âIndeed Modernism would seem to be the point at which the idea of the radical and innovating arts, the experimental, technical, aesthetic ideal that had been growing forward from Romanticism, reaches formal crisisâin which myth, structure and organization in a traditional sense collapse, and not only for formal reasons. The crisis is a crisis of culture.â7
âą âWhat is âhigh modernismâ then? It is best conceived as a strong, one might say muscle-bound, version of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress associated with the process of industrialization in Western Europe and North America from roughly 1830 until the First World War. At its center was a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws. High modernism is thus a particularly comprehensive vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be appliedâusually through the stateâin every field of human activity.â8
PARATAXIS 4
âą âTo be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the worldâand, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we areâŠ. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, âall that is solid melts into air.ââ9
âą âThe paramount figure in modernism is that of the static and abstract model separated from the dynamic ebb and flow of reality. This figure is that of the Cartesian âI,â of the abstract natural rights of the French Revolution, of Kantian reason, of the unsuccessful blueprints of the worst of orthodox Marxism, of city grids, of Corbusierâs machine Ă habiter, of Habermasâs ideal speech situation.â10
PARATAXIS 5
âą âIntrinsic to the condition of modernityâŠ.has been a rejection by and within those [Enlightenment] narratives of what seem to have been the strongest pillars of their history: Anthropomorphism, Humanism, and TruthâŠ. In France, such rethinking has involved, above all, a reincorporation and reconceptualization of that which has been the master narrativesâ own ânon-knowledge,â what has eluded them, what has engulfed them. This other-than-themselves is almost always a âspaceâ of some kind ⊠coded as feminine, as woman.â11
âą âI will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse ⊠making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth ⊠: this is the Enlightenment narrative, in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political endâuniversal peaceâŠ.â12
PARATAXIS 6
âą âIf it is possible to talk about âmodernismâ as the major movement in Western literature (and art in general) of the first half of the twentieth century, I would argue that it is also possible to talk about âmodernist form,â a shorthand term used to designate that cluster of stylistic practices ⊠: (1) aesthetic self-consciousness; (2) simultaneity, juxtaposition, or âmontageâ [and] ⊠âfragmentationâ; (3) paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty; and (4) ⊠the demise of the integrated or unified subjectâŠ. I would add ⊠: abstraction and highly conscious artifice, taking us behind familiar reality, breaking away from familiar functions of language and conventions of form ⊠the shock, the violation of expected continuities, the element of de-creation and crisisâŠ.â13
âą â⊠certain schematic differences âŠâ
Modernism | Postmodernism |
|
Romanticism/Symbolism | Pataphysics/Dadaism |
Form (conjunctive, closed) | Antiform (disjunctive, open) |
Purpose | Play |
Design | Chance |
Hierarchy | Anarchy |
Mastery/Logos | Exhaustion/Silence |
Art Object/Finished Work | Process/Performance/Happening |
Creation/Totalization | Decreation/Deconstruction |
Synthesis | Antithesis |
Presence | Absence |
Centering | Dispersal |
Genre/Boundary | Text/Intertext ⊠|
Hypotaxis | Parataxis ⊠|
Signified | Signifier |
Narrative/Grande Histoire | Antinarrative/Petite Histoire |
Master Code | Idiolect |
Genital/Phallic | Polymorphous/Androgynous |
Origin/Cause | Difference-Differance/Trace ⊠|
Metaphysics | Irony |
Determinacy | Indeterminacy |
Transcendence | Immanence14 |
PARATAXIS 7
âą âModernity, therefore, not only entails a ruthless break with any or all preceding historical conditions, but is characterized by a never-ending process of internal ruptures and fragmentations within itself.â15
âą âThe belief âin linear progress, absolute truths, and rational planning of ideal social ordersâ under standardized conditions of knowledge and production was particularly strong. The modernism that resulted was, as a result, âpositivist, technocratic, and rationalisticâ at the same time as it was imposed as the work of an elite avant-garde of planners, artists, architects, critics, and other guardians of high taste.â16
Moral 1
As terms in an evolving scholarly discourse, modernity and modernism constitute a critical Tower of Babel, a cacophony of categories that become increasingly useless the more inconsistently they are used. We can regard them as a parody of critical discourse in which everyone keeps talking at the same time in a language without common meanings. When terms mean radically different or contradictory things to people, then their use appears to threaten the project of scholarship/teaching altogether.
Moral 2
As contradictory terms resisting consensual definition, modernity and modernism form a fertile terrain for interrogation, providing ever more sites for examination with each new meaning spawned. As parody of rational discourse, their contradictions highlight the production of meaning possible by attention to what will not be tamed, by what refuses consistency and homogenization. Their use ensures the open-ended ongoingness of the scholarly/pedagogical project whose first task is to sustain the continuation of interrogation, to ensure, in short, its own perpetuation.
âââ
Modernisms is one thing, but modernism as absolute contradiction is quite another. Definitions spawn plurality in the very act of attempting to herd meaning inside consensual boundaries. Definitions mean to fence in, to fix, and to stabilize. But...