Andrew's Wiki
Gender Modernity

Intro

• We have periodized the “modern” via a narrative that uses gendered terms; this narrative gives your ideas formal coherence by using certain groups (historical movers) that are symbolic and that are gendered
  • How you do so not only affects what you write, but determines the assumptions you make about the social process
  • Ex: she critiques Marshall Berman’s reading of Faust as modern (for he shows the growth and destruction of modernism, its freedom and yet its tendency to go to a bourgeois domination of nature and people) as leaving out Gretchen as “the dead weight of tradition and conservatism that the active, newly autonomous, and self-defining subject must seek to transcend” (2). So that all modern agents are male (and free from the family, making Berman’s another one of the narratives of modernity as the “competitive masculinity” of “oedipal revolt” of “individual society”)
    • Her critique is trenchant and well-taken!
  • counter Ex: Gail Finney, “intimate relationships emerge as a central arena within which the contradictions of the modern are played out” (3) “centrality of familial ties and and identities—as mother, daughter, wife—in the construction of modern forms of subjectivity” making “the so-called private sphere…radically implicated in patterns of modernization and processes of social change” which show “private feelings” to be a part of “social change”
    • where woman aren’t just the “product” of modernity but embodying all its facets
    • images: the feminist, the hysteric, rebelling against patriarchy and oppression; esp in fin de siecle; Lulu of Franz Wedekind and the silent film of it, Pandora’s Box
  • Putting these examples together, you see that a male modernity looks like “dynamic activity, development, and the desire for unlimited growth” (industrialization, control of nature) while a female modernity looks like a new person “both more passive and more indeterminate, a decentered nexus of textual influences, social roles, and inchoate psychic impulses.” (neat!)
    • Felski points out both of these “recur across a range of both popular and academic…texts” in which modernity is either masculine rationalized productivity or feminine decentered hedonism. And that some people have put them together in their view of modernity: Adorno and Horkheimer
      • women for them are escape of enlightenment, which Felski damns as “emphasis on the fundamental masculinity of the social” that is “collective subject of history” (esp Freudian repression where male is the repressive source, woman is “repressed and undifferentiated nature”)
      • thus “does not allow for any independent conception of female identity, agency, or desire…reduced to the libidinal, inexpressive, or aesthetic, the repressed Other of patriarchal reason.” 7 where you are only ignoring “women’s varied and complex relations to processes of social change” in a “Totalizing system” of thought, no “distinctive roles” for women
    • Help for my modernism question?
    • So this shows that m’ity not always has to be characterized as revolt from relations
• So we can’t have recourse to ANY single myth or “grand philosophical summation” 7 instead, “analysis of its varied and competing representations”
  • she’s not against all modes of generalization (ie she recognizes that she’s w/in feminist tradish, a mode of inquiry that is a tad totalizing): “the difference is one of degree rather than kind” 8
• Pay attention to the way that the past men and woman explained themselves vis a vis social life and history
  • ie “elaborate the mobile and shifting meanings of the modern as a category of cultural consciousness” 8
    • there you’ve got an irreducible polyphony
• Modern is complex and ambiguous! 9
  • So why do you even use it as a term? “to draw our attention to long-term processes of social change, to the multidimensional yet often systematic interconnections between a variety of cultural, political, and economic forms” 9 basically of understanding social change
  • and b/c “the idea of the modern saturates the discourses, images, and narratives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” “profoundly shaped by logics of periodization” and “narratives of innovation and decline” 9
• She says feminism has done a lot w/spatial distinction (private/public) but needs more historicity
• Gender is “a central organizing metaphor in the construction of historical time” 10
• Instead of accepting men’s views as paradigmatic, look at “texts written primarily by or about women” 10 and give “feminine phenomena…a central importance in the analysis of the culture of modernity” and then see what modernity would look like

Modernity

• She notes that the discussion of modernity goes back and forth between order/chaos, stability/transitory
  • People on the Unity Side
    • “stability, coherence, discipline and world-mastery” (Bryan Turner on Max Weber)
    • “rational, autonomous subject” and “absolutist, unitary conception of truth” (Susan Hekman, Gender and Knowledge)
    • Progress, reason, democracy
  • People on the Chaos Side
    • “discontinuous experience of time, space and causality as transitory, fleeting and fortuitious” (David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity
    • “culture of rupture,” relativism, ambiguity (Matei Calinescu, Five Faces 91)
    • “disorder, despair and anarchy” (Bradbury and Mc Farlane? 41)
• Or even being modern means most of all being anti-modern (to “define oneself in explicit opposition to the prevailing norms and values of one’s time”) (Marshall Berman, All that is Solid, intro)
• She says “there is no magical means of resolving this semantic confusion” 11
  • However we can clear up some of the problems if we understand that people are either using modernity as Enlightenment or as opposite of Enlightenment
  • Plus it can be diff in diff intellectual traditions, in different fields (political theory, literary theory, sociology, philosophy, which all have diff “temporal coordinates” for modernity 12)
    • Hence mity is “collection of interlocking institutional, cultural, and philosophical strands which emerge and develop at different times and which are often only defined as ‘modern’ retrospectively.” 12 “not a homogeneous Zeitgeist which was born at a particular moment in history”
• Definitions
  • Modernization: “complex constellation of socioeconomic phenomena which originated in the context of Western development…scientific and technological innovation, the industrialization of production, rapid urbanization, an ever expanding capitalist market, the development of the nation-state, and so on.”
  • Modernism “specific form of artistic production, serving as an umbrella term for a melange of artistic schools and styles which first arose in late-nineteenth-century Europe and America. Characterized by such features as aesthetic self-consciousness, stylistic fragmentation, and a questioning of representation, modernist texts bore a highlight ambivalent and often critical relationship to processes of modernization.”
  • French Modernite: “general experience of the aesetheticization of everyday life, as exemplified in the ephemeral and transitory qualities of an urban culture shaped by the imperatives of fashion, consumerism, and constant innovation.”
  • Modernity: “overarching periodizing term to denote a historical era which may encompass any or all of the above features…includes a general philosophical distinction between traditional societies, which are structured around the omnipresence of divine authority, and a modern secularized universe predicated upon an individuated and self-conscious subjectivity.” 13
    • so Tonnies and Marx are people who helped people become more conscious of the presentness and the pastness of the present, like Darwin
    • modernity both descriptive and normative, that is, you can be pro or against modernity, wherein the “Symbolic force” of the word comes from its “Enunciation of a process of differentiation, an act of separation from the past” 13
      • hence “double-edged:” modernity can mean rebelling against social organization and mores (cf Fr Rev where we accept no authority but our own human reason, which is critical and even self-critical; autonomy and equality, not hierarchy) YET “implicated from its beginnings with a project of domination over those seen to lack this capacity for reflective reasoning (imperialism, patriarchy) (so that enlightenment looks like its opposite b/c just creates new bonds instead of destroying them)
      • so an appeal to the modern could mean these new types of power and domination OR resistance from them (me: the battle is over, was modernity’s autonomy a one-time enunciation that set the standard forever, a freedom from one specific thing, or freedom from everything, including itself)
• “Modernist and avant-garde movements sought to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions and dogmatic complacencies, refashioning the idea of the modern to signify ambiguity, uncertainty, and crsis rather than an uncritical ascription to a teleology of Western progress and an ideal of reason” 14
  • were bourgeois is “old new” and we are “authentically new”
  • where you have a slight revision of the ideals of modernity: “revitalized the promise of innovation as liberating transformation implicit in the idea of the modern to forget an array of critical oppositional identities”
• Modernity is a shifting term used to justify wildly diff aims and movements
• There is a version of the word “modernity” deployed by people pro-postmodern that refers just to Kant through Marx, a philosophical movement of rationality
  • too “monolithic” b/c you had “appeals to science, rationality, and material progress coexisted with Romantic invocations of emotion, intuition, and authenticity as well as alongside self-conscious explorations of the performative and artificial status of modernity” not a “homogeneous cultural consensus” 15 (an interesting triple approach)
• Women: “struggles for women’s emancipation are complexly interwoven with processes of modernization” 16

Women

• Why have men been seen at the core of modernity? Its key figures only men: public sphere, flaneur, stranger, dandy (this assertion will get demolished in the next ten years, Felski! but at the time it was true we were thinking about them in the male perspective then, perhaps)
• Mostly b/c the “modern” has been identified with “the public” 16 thus they are “situated outside processes of history and social change”
  • Women bear the burden of being the unalienated part of the world, with their connex to nature and the family and the home, “natural self-presence” 17
  • Hence feminism has considered that “industry, consumerism, the modern city, the mass media, and technology are in some sense fundamentally masculine, and that feminine values of intimacy and authenticity remain outside the dehumanizing and alienated logic of modernity.” 17
    • my reaction: cf this Feinburg Cohen book about Professional Domesticity kind of blindly saying that the home must be about community; and then also this makes me think about Harriet Hume who is able to make the man self-aware of the things he was doing in the public sphere that epitomize instrumental reason
  • NO WAY, says Felski: you can’t identify a whole historical period just as “manifestation of a single, unified, masculine principle” 17 modernity is shaped by conflict, she says, including that of women negotiating their environment

Private Public Sphere

• She cites Poovey’s Uneven Developments for the basic sphere stuff
• The separation of spheres was temporalized when women were conceived as representing past, men the present (b/c nonfiction and fiction of the time said that women are “less differentiated and less self-conscious…more rooted in an elemental unity” 18
• Private and public recently in scholarship seen as not quite stable
  • Entrance of working class women into industrialization (although I personally would like to remind such arguments that women were FROM THE BEGINNING part of the industrialization process, and that the later story that women replaced men in factory jobs is actually just a product of the increasing rhetoric of the division between the spheres; not just b/c of the change of machinery to make it more delicate, less about crude power management; it’s a problem b/c you have thus forgotten about mining, which was from the beginning female and male occupation)
  • consumerism (women in public sphere)
  • feminists and reformists
  • the figure of the prostitute
• “There can be no separate sphere of women’s history outside the prevailing structures and logics of modernity” (urbanization, industrialization, mass media, time-space changes)
  • And in fact they had distinctively feminine relations to them…so that’s what she wants to uncover: “distinctly feminine encounters with the various facets of the modern”
  • “what counts as significant is altered” as we reevaluate the trivial or “regressive” or ignored: “feelings, romantic novels, shopping, motherhood, fashion” 22
  • also we should look at women in supposedly male spheres
  • and the “hybrid identities” that result from all of this movement

More about Modernism

• The literary term (as opposed to modernity), about 1890-1940 tho’ some of the qualities came both before and after it as well
  • Emergence of modernism “linked to the appearance of symbolism in France and aestheticism in fine-de-siecle Vienna, whereas in England and America modernist tendencies are usually supposed to have manifested themselves somewhat later, from around the time of the First World War.” 22
• “broad and heterogeneous range of styles rather than a unified school” 23
  • but she gives Eugene Lunn’s characteristics of modernism
    • “aesthetic self-consciousness
    • “simultaneity, juxtaposition, and montage
    • “paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty
    • “dehumanization of the subject.”
  • which she says “explained with reference to the crisis of language, history, and the subject which shaped the birth of the twentieth century and left an indelible mark on the literature and art of the period”
• And her own set of characteristics, 26
  • “disruption of hierarchical syntax
  • “and of linear time and plot
  • “its decentering of the knowing and rational subject
  • its fascination with the aural and rhythmic qualities of language”
• Any political significance? IN EUROPE “frequently linked to an explicit social agenda…radical aesthetics was intimately intertwined with avant-garde politics.
  • key concept, “ostranenie,” defamiliarization f Russian formalism: “literature’s capacity to disrupt automatized perceptions and draw attention to the materiality of language as a set of signifiers” 23 thus art connex w/social change
  • “by disrupting the mimetic illusion of realist and naturalist traditions and articulating through its very form the radical contradictions and ambiguities which characterized modern life” you could destroy “political complacencies and ideological dogma”
• What of England? More often “openly conservative and quietist” “opposition to social concerns”
  • Personally I’d say the policing of modernism’s boundaries is responsible for that one.
• Feminist Looks at Modernism
  • Some people critique macho, machismo of some modernism (and only focusing on say the avant-garde reproduces this bias)
  • Some people say that even male writers had a subversive system that aligned itself with what was considered feminine (ie Joyce’s Molly Bloom chapter(
  • Now we recover more female modernists
  • Some people find modernism as key to cultural subversiveness during modernity
• HOWEVER, “modernism is only one aspect of the culture of women’s modernity” 25

Modernism Seen as Truer Realism

• “while purportedly rejecting the reflectionist frame of a realist aesthetic, it nevertheless assumes that modernism in some sense offers a truthful representation of the radically indeterminate and fragmentary nature of the social. In this sense, the modernist texts becomes the privileged bearer of epistemological authority, crystallizing in its very structure the underlying fissures that the realist text glosses over. Modernism is elevated over realism paradoxically because it is a truer realism; going beyond the superficial stability of surface literary conventions, it reveals that reality is fluidity, fragmentation, indeterminacy.” 25-6
  • Me: perhaps it will be okay if I am so gauche to say that the diff really between realism and modernism is something as bland as … point of view? (number and depth of characters) the narrator (a diff regime of necessary knowledge)?
    • realism: reality from the bird’s eye perspective of rational Enlightenment (wow, this is my own special accomplishment! I’m going to add the stuff about maps and perspectivalism and apply it to realism.); modernism: reality from one individual’s point of view (down on the streets view of life like de Certeau), or a combination of both techniques
• Part of fragmentation of modernism is “the fragmented and incoherent workings of the unconscious” 26
  • feminist critics: “interpret the fissures and contradictions within modernist texts as eruptions of a libidinal desire that threaten to disrupt the fixed structures of a phallocentric system” 26
  • a transgressive, non-linguistic reality that uncovers repressed truths, thus challenging the bourgeois linguistic order 26
• Alain Corbin, A History of Private Life vol 4, “notes the relative stability of religion, custom, and traditional networks of kinship and affiliation in nineteenth-century Paris, suggesting that claims for the radical transformation of social life under capitalism are often exaggerated.” 26
  • this matches some stats I’ve seen about the statistics over industrial participation
  • her comment: “strands which were not simply reflected but were in part constructed through the different discourses of a particular period” 27 “thus our own sense of the modern as a period of radical instability and constant change is itself at least partly indebted to the prominence of iconoclastic modernist artworks in received histories of twentieth-century culture; a reading of other kinds of texts may in turn engender a rather different view of the relationship between stability and change within the modern period.”
    • consequence? well, instead of just accepting their word that they were subversive, check them against the contemporary “particular discourses and different axes of power” so that for example if you look at radical claims of some modernists you see continuity w/bourgeois culture in its masculinity, its rejection of feeling, emotion 27
    • she says you see that something that looks subversive is really just complicit in a diff context; just as say Woolf and Stein reflected their own rather elite milieu, and can’t speak for other groups of women
      • “such concerns are not of course completely absent from modernism, but they are typically mediated and refracted through an aesthetic lens of irony, defamiliarization, and montage specific to an artistic and intellectual…elite” 28 (what about K M? her sentimentality might be a part of her diff relation to working class; K M’s liminal figure, coded by other modernists as of lower class, of mass entertainment, of base sexuality, could give us insight about the worry of taint from mass culture…hmm she was in films…)
• Notes the “stigma attached both to representational art forms and to the regressive, sentimental texts of mass culture” 28 and 29 “mass culture that has often been depicted as sentimental, feminine, and regressive”; that’s not nuanced, she complains
  • We cannot “equate modernity with modernism” or take “experimental art [as] necessarily the privileged cultural vehicle” for gender or indeed for any literary criticism or history 28

Method

• Lots of genres: sociology, non-fiction, modernism, realism, naturalism, melodrama, political speeches
• Takes hint from cultural studies not to opposite high work of art and popular art, where one is “inherently ambiguous and self-critical” while the other is “reproduction of monolithic ideological standpoint” 29 all texts of every sort in a relational “web” of discourse
  • Each diff type of lit nonetheless often has distinct way of taking up a cultural concept 30
• Fin-de-siecle works b/c that’s when you have the loud dual discourse of progress and decay
  • b/c that’s when the conflicting theories of the modern “received their first systematic articulation”
• Topics, part one (gender ideas of male writers)
  • Early sociology does equate modernity w/ “masculine sphere of rationalization and production”
    • oh man her looking at this as a specific perspective to take on really goes against my own acceptance of the economic last analysis
  • Image of the female consumer seeing modernity as “irrationality, aesthetic,s and libidinal excess” 30 in the “voracious female consumer” 31
  • Investigates the claim of “literary modernity as linked to the feminization of (men’s) writing” 31
• Topics, part two: “how did women position themselves in relation to the logics of temporality and the social, political, and aesthetic values associated with the modern?” 31
  • Popular romance: with its characteristically modern trope of wishing to be elsewhere (nostalgia)
  • Feminists’ understanding of time: evolution and revolution
  • the French decadent Rachilde, “links between sexual perversion and the aestheticization of identity” 31
• she’s being feminist, she says, b/c she figures out relationship between discourses and power
• Assumption: “the political meanings of particular discourses, images, and clusters of representation are not given for all time, but may vary significantly depending on the conditions of enunciation and the contexts in which they appear.” 32

Commodities

• “Commodities are revealed not simply as material objects but as complex symbolic artifacts whose social meanings derive from the unfocused dissatisfaction and indistinct longings characteristic of modern experience” 90
  • I find this to be unsatisfying: it doesn’t explain commodities as economic or material, and it’s about lack, not plenitude
• “sensuousness, luxury, and emotional gratification as feature of modern life” through addressing middle class women as consumers: a “feminization of the public sphere…threatening to bourgeois men” trained on “self-restraint and a repudiation of womanly feelings” so men’s relationship was “ambivalent”
• Fears about female consumption
• New experience via “democratization of luxury” and availability of products not available to them before
  • “empowerment” but also “constraint” b/c encouraged “Self-surveillance” and “new networks of social control”
• “heterogeneous forms of desire could be deflected and channeled into the imperative to buy ever more commodities” 90
• Felski sees “abili for the expression of misogynistic attitudes towards women” in critiques of capitalism 88
  • You can critique women for irrational consumption whereas you are the rational man of constraint and reason
  • And men who understand these desires are seen as womanly
• Responds to arguments about consumerism being democratizing b/c “affirming the abstract equality of individuals” as consumers “break down fixed and seemingly natural hierarchies” such as Birken’s Consuming Desire
  • Her response: Sure, consumerism of women reflects their “rising expectations” incl political ones and devpt of public freedoms
    • However, the dangers are their: surveillance and social control
• “The department store, then, was a paradigm of a new kind of urban public space linked not to an ideal of political community and rational debate but to the experience of sensuality and the commercialization of desire.” 68
  • Kleptomania now codified: women are helpless in the face of their uncontrollable desires
    • Yet of course this is necessary for the unchecked growth of capitalism: it is just another expression of the “unstoppable progress unleashed by capitalist development” but here seen as “regressive” as modernity “unleashes” “infantile irrationalism of unchecked desire” 69
    • and shopping also seen as “sublimated expression of sexual passion” (Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, a novel of department store shopping clearly codes the pleasure of shopping through the images of orgasm; and they are seen as controlling the salesmen… and in his novel Nana it leads to “her lovers’ ruin” 74 “reckless sensuality”)
• Nana also of course the negative attention b/c of “leveling of class distinctions” 75 where the shopping ladies or theatre, races, balls, soirees, scenes have social divisions running all into each other
  • notes that “female desire…lacks an object” which is the “most disturbing about this female desire” 77 “river of wastefulness” and “indifference toward money and what it can buy”
  • Although I would talk about Nicholls’ account of consumption here rather than agree her
  • Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism 85-90: “the spirit of modern consumerism is defined by an unfocused and insatiable longing which latches onto a succession of objects in a potentially endless secrets.” she says b/c you want the gratification, not the object
• So, she gets towards saying that women are represented via shopping as the negative pats of modernity here….