Andrew's Wiki
Modernism Culture Market

Intro

• Ultimate horizon: where in 1920s there was a distance between avant-garde and (what he decides to conceive as) ordinary society, but by today, it’s gone: his proof? “Just look around you.”
  • Periodizing seriously needs help form Marxist and economic analysis
  • Modernism also happened in tiny groups who believed they were far away from the everyday, “Self-imposed apartheid”
    • (Why can’t someone finally admit that this is the result of a canonizing procedure?) (notice he focuses on Pound here)
• A G: he notes they to want to blast bourgeois morality; that they are always SAID to want to be an elite small group unto themselves apart from public
  • How does he want to change this myth? By redefining our notion of elitism, esp in its relation to rest of world
• Their Elitism
  • “not” defenders of culture OR misogynists, reactionaries, of fascists “in any way that counts” (geezus christ what a statement)
• “The modernist bohemias were the social places where an unrestrained market society first began to reveal itself in its most concrete social forms, including offering a social space in which the gender and sexual emancipation that characterizes fully developed market societies could begin. By the end of the twentieth century, the culture intrinsic to market society had spread from the avant-garde enclave to society at large…”
  • modernism “peculiar to market society”
  • “societies organized around the activities of exchange…generate a distinctive culture”
  • “the culture of everyday life in the early twenty-first century has been profoundly influence by the modernist avant-garde in the early twentieth centure”
    • I’m Sorry, But You Just Said the Casual Relation was the Opposite of This. First you say that the culture is caused by the market, but then you say that contemp culture is b/c of modernist culture? Sorry.
      • Also you don’t understand that market society was developing during 18th c. Or that the exciting chains of finance capital were being developed b/c of imperialism and slavery of the 18th c and Victorian era.
      • I’m going to have to address my theory of understanding the capitalism of modernism. And my theory that the modernists were tapping into parts of the economy that weren’t yet universal. And this is the proper timeline. And I have my own thesis, that their reaction to it was therefore not one of complicity or reaction but of PROPHECY.
      • And the modernists’ understanding of industry and mass production was one that was informed by their privileged position in the economy: that’s a certain kind of elitism. And the reason why we can understand this early a g is b/c we too have a similar relationship to the productive forces of our time: just as they thought they were diff from the factory workers in Nottingham or Manchester so too do we separate ourselves from our neo-con subjects doing our factory work for us
• “the culture of everyday life in our time has come to be pervaded by the culture of the early avant-garde” and he says that’s what we really mean by postmodernism (modernism in the masses) – so are you going to back this up by any true understanding of capitalism?
  • How, he asks can it happen that cultural forms developed in a marginal, highbrow culture work in mass culture in postmodernism?
    • “the attempt to ground values in dissenting cultural forms…can sometimes function ideologically to secure and legitimize the very values the counterculture sought to oppose” well duh you could’ve read that in Raymond Williams or Jameson
      • for him apparently things are made in one kind of capitalist formation and then can wander off independently after that: that’s not consistent, buddy.
    • he says this process is Nietzsche’s nihilism: “that the highest values devalue themselves” as “the inner logic of decline” (Will to Power) a process in which values become valueless
      • Just wondering, if all of the high values are gone in the contemporary world, how did you just say that? Clearly he thinks that spontaneity and freedom in personal relationships means nothing right now except a slogan to sell a bag of Cheetos.
      • wow, now HE is elitist, saying that b/c the values are in the masses, then they’re devalued
      • even though he said that he “intend[s] no value judgment” when he uses the term
      • and he agrees that nihlism means that “Being” is reduced to “Exchange value:” again, he’s taking these dead writers at their word, as if they’re correct, forgetting that it was POLEMICAL and not DESCRIPTIVE.
• So I agree that modernism is the culture of postmodernism, but here’s the thing: he doesn’t have the historical or economic gun-power to make this argument LOGICAL and coherent. And the way he’s making an argument about elitism is very worrisome. (he ends up sounding like the people DURING MODERNISM who were sounding off about how art has become commercial; for example he sounds like Simmel in Philosophy of Money when he talks about how “mandate and mechanisms for assessing value have been uprooted…repositioned within the variables that provide the capitalist market with its uniquely mobile ways of ascertaining the price of commodities” and rehearsing stuff about the end of feudal practices, yet what we should be doing is historicizing Simmel)
• “Market society:” “this new kind of social order that arises when a society is organized around the activities of economic exchange” 8
• Why do we take for granted the artists’ claims that all values were being uprooted, that chaos was come again? I think part of their vehemence comes form the fact that chaos wasn’t coming ENOUGH. Why did Marinetti wish for war? Why did Pound Yeats seem to embrace eugenics or fascism? B/c things weren’t happening fast enough. Naturally society was changing but part of it was a wish to MAKE IT GO FASTER. Notice how futurism is about, you know, the future, and we forget that fact once we’ve made a link between futurism and modernism. That it’s future LEANING, not always passively OBSERVING what’s going on in modernity.
• His Periodization
  • “It was, at first, a slow process of change, quickening in tempo as the nineteenth century gives way to the twentieth. AT the turn of the last century, the modernizing energies of market-driven capitalism unleashed in the 1800s had reached explosive levels of acceleration.”
  • And yet, I say, what truly changed about modern capitalism around turn of century was much less the means of production than marketing: that is to say capitalism’s REPRESENTATION of itself to itself. You are trusting representation to be a plain old historical fact again.
    • I am all about uneven development. The reason why going to “Town for the day” was so appealing was b/c for that day you could live the day of a modernist bohemian. And that’s it. Look at E. M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady, where she yearns for the freedom of her vacation life with her advanced friends whereas her reality is a stuffy home in the country worrying about money and sick children.
      • You try to say that modernists are elitist by chance, as if it’s a temperamental thing, and that’s one reason why we have so much trouble determining why they sound snobby and yet the weird times when they’re NOT snobby. I want to say that the modernists and their milieu were living in a DIFFERENT TIME PERIOD in terms of capitalist development.
      • It’s one way to describe their elitism: that they were actually a part of a different economic group. Their reaching out to the masses – Pound’s series of books to educate the public and his radio addresses; the moments in Woolf or Mansfield when a lower class family or woman is depicted sympathetically – it shows they aren’t always jerks. But yet they are separate. In some way that’s b/c they have such a diff class point of view. And why? b/c they experience modernity first, experienced it diff. (very much b/c of the metropolis!)
• Then he says, “Forget the class struggle, forget the ballot box, forget representative government, the market is now the drive shaft of the historical process” and has been for last 200 years.
  • I’m sorry but don’t you understand how these things are all interrelated with the market? that representative democracy is a free market of the government? You clearly don’t know that Marx started out critiquing religion.
• How did capitalism change world? “the capitalist revolution has been cellular. Each cell worked through, always on a local level, revolutionary changes without overt coordination of the whole process by a centralized steering mechanism.”
  • And then he says that “the revolution was made in tiny increments, a time at a time…not, in Marx’s phrase, by a ‘thunderbolt from Elysium’”
    (Brumaire 226) and that they happened by shrugging in to old forms “social forms that belonged to feudalism and other precapitalist arrangements”
    • Yes but why then do you say that for capitalism “the enemy was the settledness and intertia of the past?”
    • Yes of course but then why do you assume that the masses and Bloomsbury had access to the “Same” capitalism?
    • It’s interesting how he chooses certain sources to be suspicious of (Marx) and others just to accept wholesale (Nietzsche)
• He rejects Butler’s notion that capitalism is inherently patriarchal. He says that’s b/c capitalism is blind to gender, sexuality, race, etc. HOWEVER he forgets that capitalism in its infancy had to be coddled in certain ways: slavery and imperialism, for example; having wives as unpaid labor, supplemented by a pattern of false representation of the leisured bourgeois housewife. Actually, racism and misogyny were crucial to the development of capitalism. You can’t write out those facts, the material ways that capitalism works, just because now it seems to have reached a supposedly “purer form” that ignores these things insofar as ignoring it will help profits. You are writing out history in favor of a narrative that is too abstract and too teleological, despite your nifty little “Cell” comparison that if you took it seriously would lead you to my conclusions.
• Here’s something interesting about the market stuff in modernism: people seem to believe that you make an artwork, and then you market it. it’s a process that’s somehow added on to the creative process, after it’s done. and so people focus on booksellers, receipts, subscription-lists. and yet the fear is truly that somehow the modernist work might be corrupted by it…and yet why aren’t we asking the closer to home question: how was the production of the art work itself a type of marketing? how did the “rhetoric” of the modernist work try to “claim” for itself properties that it didn’t actually have or that society didn’t yet have? I want to say that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is perhaps the paradigm, not the exception, b/c modernist are always in a sense projecting a future world and trying to sell it or critique it. that is, rhetoric and marketing don’t start after the work is done, but rather actually do come into play during the writing of the piece. but not like you think, not in a what will sell fashion, but instead as creating a new world that isn’t there?

Bloomsbury

• Argues that Fry didn’t start Omega as a “missionary” practice to the public but rather to support the artists working on the objects.
  • But then in proof of it makes a contrast between Omega and the Victorians, Carlyle and Ruskin, whose audience apparently “forgot…in their everyday activities” what the two men had to say…he’s not admitting that Ruskin and Carlyle did have huge effects and that the two men weren’t wholly socially progressive but rather complex. He does so to say that Morris was primarily about morality and politics.
    • And then he says that Morris unequivocally thought production “in a word, evil” and “canted towards a Luddite loathing of industrial machinery” when again in reality the matter was much more fuzzy
• And then he tries to revise the critical consensus that while Morris had lots of success, Omega’s influences was very tiny…he wants to say that Morris’ infl. was nil and Omega’s was huge. Which isn’t true.
  • he’s trying to create a huge gap between Victorian and modernist alternative production movements. Why? To be a part of his larger timeline of capitalism where it’s “increasingly freed from past investments in dying conventions,” to make sure that the modernists still sound uber modern, to make sure that Omega still sounds “posttraditional”
• Omega for him: not about production mode but about personal involvement with the object; not about object “imprisoned” in tradish uses but instead about “the object abstracted from the necessity of its place and function”
• Demonstrates “Bloomsbury modernism” “towards the unburdened appreciation of the object, of the thing itself, not existing independently of human cognition, but cognition as a process of release, not of appropriation as a process, in practical terms, of making room for the consumer’s affective response”
  • Free from “two nineteenth-century prisons: Ruskinian moralism on the one hand and the chatty subjectivism of the French Impressionists on the other” where he says the “object” disappears
  • “emancipation of the object free of obstructive associations became a modernist crusade; a work of art is a work of art and not another thing”
    • comes from Fry’s stuff on “pure vision” in Vision and Design
      • Actually, what he’s forgetting is that they’re privileging a mode of experience, as Fry says “the artistic attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity”
• And then of course he concludes saying “Ironically” this kind of thought “positioned the object for its more rapid absorption in the space of the commodity” in that they created a marketing scheme for avant-garde art still being used today (for example the “abstracted from necessity” sounds like free trade)
  • “rather than an escape from necessity we find that the favored enclave is the best and surest expression of a new necessity, a new kind of social and cultural logic…in complete harmony with posttraditional market society”
  • Gee you hid the idea in the bush