Andrew's Wiki
Politics Modernism

Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, 1989

Editor’s intro (Tony Pinckney)

• Williams was thinking about modernism the last few years of his life
  • wanted people to distinguish among modernisms (Following Kermode) to separate the “reductive and contemptuous forms” from the truly experimental
• He had planned his book by the time of his death, but the editor put it together
• advertising: “the final home of modernism” 2
• culture: “whole way of life”
• “self-contratulatory dramatic radicalisms so often captured by the very structures of feeling of their apparent opponents”
  • this is what he says of Ibsen
  • Williams was never able to write the essay he planned called Against the New Conformists, but this is what the editor thinks it would have looked like: to make it apply to cultural theory too
• “Modernism as a historical and cultural phenomenon cannot possibly be grasped by brands of literary theory, which, in a self-serving circularity, are actually born out of its own procedures and strategies”
  • so that we critics are caught up in modernism; we aren’t distanced from it
• the editor says: ”’modernism’ is one of the most frustratingly unspecific, the most racalcitrantly unperiodizing, of all the major art-historical ‘isms’ or concepts.”
  • he’s grappling w/the meaning of the word as empty “now:” “the empty flow of time itself” so begins “when the static, mythic, or circular (non-)temporality of the ‘organic community’ ends”
    • so he’s tuning into the fact that you can’t have modernism until the word modern was taken out of the empty meaning and meant to refer to a specific moment in time, which helpfully postulates why time is so important: b/c modernism begins AS a consciousness of temporality in the first place, and I have to grapple with this honestly (ie in my discussion of space)
  • “that tragic, dissociating moment…is subject to infinite regress” (so said Williams in Country and the City, referring to it as “escalator”)
• Williams: “conscious modernism”
  • this is phase one, which he exemplifies w/ Baudelaire; “enactive” (second phase “reactive)
  • “when such unavoidable novelty, mere formal by-product of a stylistic innovation whose substance derives from other (religious, social) sources, is at last abstracted as a content in its own right” 3
  • it “carries a theory of its own modernity” (either as liberation and experimentation or as loss)
    • in the Country and the City: “islation and loss of connection were the conditions of a new and lively perception…a ‘spree of vitality,’ an instantaneous and transitory world of ‘feverish joys’” (referring to Baudelaire’s poetry)
• Editor sees Woolf and Joyce stream of consciousness in this way: “simultaneously fragmented and multiplied perceptual identitities of contemporary urban living”
  • whereas I say Dalloway’s FORM is all about connection, full of transitions, not disjunctions; while its content enacts the dance of social relations being isolated and connected: where the problem is not that you can’t connect, but that you can’t keep it permanent
• Editor: 1850-1920 “chronological focus…cannot be sustained”
  • “celebration of dynamism, the delirious multiplication of the possibilities of self, substantially precedes and succeeds this particular phrase.”
  • he’s wrong b/c he does’t specify modernism enough: you must place this in the context of a perceived social lack of possibility and tons of possibility at same time
  • his example: Romantic imagination of Wordsworth, the sense of the possibility of the self, “Prelude”
  • He says Romanticism looks like modernism when you think of modernism as “acceleration”
  • Notes that D and G sound like modernists when they talk aobut the “schizophrenic out for a walk” which sounds like Dalloway, and their flows and deterritorializations are like Marinetti
  • Hence, it can look like the earlier (Romanticism) and the later (postmodernism)
• Second Conscious Modernism
  • overlaps with the first, but here you have to go against the grain (industrialization, democratization, massification) rather than feel “liberated by it” 5
  • Shows that modernism is “reactive”
  • It’s when people are worried about standardization, all grey: “modernism and modernity are by now mortal antagonists”
  • such as Waste Land
  • This is where you have the talk about language: the problems with current language needing to be solved (cliched, abstract language)
    • Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des Idees Recues; James’ late style; Eliot saying poet must “force” meaning on to language
    • poetic v ordinary language (Russian Formalism)
  • this too can be seen in other historical periods (Shelley and Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller)
• Williams’ Conclusion: “modernism cannot be periodized by drawing upon its own internal ideologies” 6
  • The Marxist history finding meaning of modernism in the social being a la hist mat
    • Lukacs and Sartre: 1848 barricades of Paris “took out the…literary tradition before or as it took on the National Guard” 6
      • while the bourgeoisie change from the revolutionary (anti-feudal) element in society to a new hierarchy that protects itself agains the encroachment of the new, its literature (realism) becomes decadent
      • modernism is a part of this degeneration, so we need a class-based realism: “dialectical interaction of individuality and politics within hte active historical self-making of the bourgeoisie’s ‘heroic’ period”
      • (I object to linking Sartre to this b/c Sartre admitted that you couldn’t just blast a whole literature as decadent b/c its social formation was)
    • Editor says that post 1848 lit went into two opposite directions: subjective (Munch) and objective (Zola)
      • this is what Williams’ The Long Revolution essay “Realism and the Contemporary Novel” says happens in modernism: The Waves on one end the Brave New World on another; just like Zola v Mallarme for Lukacs
    • Roland Barthes also does this post 1848 narrative in Writing Degree Zero: that the 1848 moment when the bourgeoisie wails on the masses, Enlightenment meets its limits: “henceforth, this very ideology appears as one among many possible others; the universal escapes it”
      • universality in lit translates into classical ecriture: “Nature, Reason, ‘things as they are’” 7 so literature complicit w/bourgeoisie, in the bourgeoisie’s “bloody hands”
      • Unlike Lukacs, Barthes says that “Modernist formal experimentation, thickening, twisting and dislocating the medium, both acknowledges and resists this ‘guilt’ of literature”
• Barthes
  • 1) “artisanal consciousness of literary fabrication” (Flaubert)
  • 2) literature itself is is own theory (Mallarme) ... but this is tautology, so:
  • 3) postpone literature (Proust)
  • 4) multiply meanings instead of trying to use language to pin one meaning (Surrealism)
  • 5) a Dasein, a Being, of language (Robbe-Grillet)
  • Doesn’t work for England, post 1848 regenerated bourgeois art (Arnold, G. Eliot); and too dependent on modernism’s own theories 7
• Editor finally says the 1848 explanation doesn’t work: “tacking a political bloodbath onto the front of what otherwise remains an autonomous literary series”
  • And the social events are too complex for it to be magically erected in 1848
    • of course the editor doesn’t understand how you can use 1848 correctly as a SYMBOL or crystallizing moment
• Williams “avoids” this “impasse” of the two autonomous realms, lit and politics 8
• Williams bio
  • late 1930s Cambridge student
  • member of Socialist Club, which was modernist in affiliation: liked Joyce, Fritz Lang, Surrealism, jazz, Ibsen
  • Ibsen for him: a Naturalist (Williams calls Naturalism “Modernist Naturalism”) first, who must then appeal to symbolism to get any meaning across, and in frustration ends up Expressionist
  • his interest in culture actually spurred by Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
• Capitalism’s form since 1950s was modernism: “glossy futurism” of the “stylish consumer society which would be the new form of capitalism”
  • Cool for me: this meshes with the invention during modernism of the industrial procedures post WWII
  • Editor calls Le Corbusier “technopastoralism”
• Williams relash to Lukacs
  • similarly defends realism and critiques modernism, but he says he doesn’t agree w/Lukacs all the way
  • Williams’ love of modernist film means he’s not against all modernism (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vigo, Flaherty)
    • and likes German expressionist film
    • film is where the good stuff of Naturalist drama goes
    • and he ends up comparing many modernists to this film he now likes
• Country and the City
  • labor movements: “the city’s human reply to the long inhumanity of city and country alike”
  • focuses on England
    • except for section on imperialism as the “last form” of the country/city distinction
  • periodizes modernism as rise and fall
  • like Berman, modernists are the non-modern and reflect both sides of modernity: isolation and proximity, liberation and dissociation 13
  • Blake, Wordsworth, and Dickens are the heroes here: understand “social dissolution in the very process of aggregation”
    • whereas later authors had “more totalizing visions of the period after 1870” which is lame b/c you have a “simpler structure” in which “indignant or repelled observation of men in general; exceptional or self-conscious recognition of a few individuals” 13
      • god that’s unfair cf the lower class women in KM and Woolf who are sympa
  • the division of the gross mass and the wonderful few “taken into the very form of Modernist artefacts” like Ulysses and Waste Land
    • “between texture and structure, between heightened or even pathological subjectivity and the static, absolutist myths which govern these texts” 13
      • another silly misunderstanding of what the myths are doing…perhaps
  • like Berman, then, after your heroes (for Berman, Goethe, Marx, Baudelaire), “have lurched far more towards rigid polarities and flat totalizations” qtd 13
    • the real stuff then is in Futurism, Corbusier, Expressionism
  • editor notes that whereas for the earlier authors he used reference to the social, but for his high modernists he didn’t bother to create a social totality or talk about culture but merely did textual analysis of the works
• Benjamin, Pasagenarbeit method
  • 1) find and elaborate urban geography and its cultural meanings
  • 2) find social formations and types accdg to economic analysis, w/observation
  • 3) “identifying problems of perception and writing which are referred to social phenomena” 14
  • neat cuz it looks like Modernism/Modernity’s structure
• from The Politics of Modernism
  • Discern between two types of anti-bourgeois rhetoric, aristocratic and working class ones, which is “key determinant of the later political destinations of the avant-gardes” (I suppose the easy way to interpret this is some a g goes commie, some go fascist)
    • absolutely very very cool (the “semi” of both the aristocracy and the ruling class give you to models of reacting against bourgeois, and they to a HUGE degree DETERMINE the rhetoric of modernist movements
  • Raymond William’s synchrony version of modernism
    • related to “the imperialist and capitalist metropolis as a specific historical form” 16
      • but it’s not about nation state: “avant-garde formation, developing specific and distanced styles within the metropolis, at once reflect and compose kinds of consciousness and practice which became increasingly relevant to a social order itself developing in the directions of metropolitan and international significance beyond the nation-state and its borders” (Williams, Culture)
    • like Burger says that a g challenges institution of art
      • Burger: artworks not “received as single entities, but within institutional frameworks and conditions that largely determine the function of the work” qtd 17
  • sad timeline of modernism that replaces “fully oppositional” groups with “self-defensive” ones
  • “It was capitalism, not Futurism or Surrealism, that successfully integrated life and art…commodity no longer feared culture because it had already incorporated it.” commodity is aesthetic, not just use value
  • Futurism and the Irrational
    • didn’t appeal to “tradition of reason” but “new celebration of creativity which finds many of its sources in the irrational”
    • this argument, admits the author, rises from the “tropes” Williams uses, not his offical line of argument which assumes a g is merely “dissident-bourgeois”
      • ex: he puts together Bolshevik Revolution as tragedy next to Ibsen and other modernist drama
    • “Leninism and the avante-garde are now the dissociated halves of an integral lived politics, a New Left ‘third space’ between reform and revolution that remains to be invented in full” 26
  • editor: “two almost incompatible views of Modernism” in this book
    • bourgeois dissidence
    • a kind of scientific socialism that has heart and soul in it (Bloch’s “warm current”)
    • Williams did before said that bourgeois dissidence does have two paths for it

Random

• Le Corbusier: editor asks if was actually progressive “in the name of Communist efficacy” or instead “a bleached capitalist functionalism that had no place for Nature, subjectivity, or dream”
  • neat question b/c it shows how obedience to capital can sound fascist, so that maybe fascism as a modernist issue for me can be whether you accept imperatives of capital or even valorize them
  • capitalism if you take political economy’s view of if that it MUST be followed and it’s a rule that you can’t get around….hmm
  • the editor also is cool in comparing to Morris: “reintegration of art and praxis envisaged by William Morris was to take place in the labour process, in the expressive creative freedom of the artisan; there could be no more radical challenge to capitalist work-relations” 19
    • consumer too is not alienated b/c the use values are beautiful
    • for Morris, there’s no “Work of art” as such b/c all beauty is in all work and therefore is the culmination of what Surrealists wanted (in the Burgerian sense), that is, to reintegrate life and ar
• Perry Anderson’s critique of Berman’s All that is Solid, New Left Review
  • Anderson gives a triumverate model of the cultural field of modernism, where they have a bunch of “semi” presences: semi-aristocratic, semi-industrialized, semi-revolutionary labor movement
    • that’s cool b/c modernist scholars often assume that everything has ALREADY been changed and swept away, whereas this “semi” stuff really reflects what’s going on if you look at stats and the works closely!
    • until 1914, “aristocratic and agrarian ruling classes” exist. Avant gardes use THEIR critique of the bourgeois, but they reject their academicist concepts of art
      • Williams, Country and City: aristocracy lost some power sure but “its social imagery continued to predominate” 15 esp as a source for “nationalist ideology” 16
    • industrial revolution spreading to “backward” economies
      • second industrial revolution (need to look up this to see what it means historically, perhaps it can mean I R spreading from say North of England to getting into London, for example)
    • social revolution present everywhere (key, Russian 1905 Revolution)
  • cities are the nodes where these three movements cross
  • these developments have “a certain ad hoc air”
  • the second two coordinates are v. descriptive for urban environ, says editor
    • for example 1870s Great Depression makes urban slums that are key imagery for labor movements
      • (historical aside: 1890s are a boom, a revival economically: transport, using electricity for industry, urban planning, utopian planning (Ebenezer Howard), “mass-produced clothes, china, paper, food, bicycles…cars, aeroplanes, telephones, radio” and Eiffel Tower 16
      • (continued historical aside: so in 1890s you have some interesting couplings: “mass production is ‘democratic,’ technology sweeps away vestigial feudal survivals, and socialism will liberate a dynamism that capitalism fetters” 16: the era referring to which John Berger calls Cubism “the last optimistic art” and Perry Anderson talks about “gaiety of the first cars and movies”
    • so that editor says you have a disciplined crowd way diff from Baudelaire’s
• Benjamin compares Dada and film, same effects that film gives
• For me, the reason why modernity, Victorian, and modernism don’t look like the same is b/c the Victorian era tried to clothe the secular conclusions raised by Enlightenment – but avoided by them, cf Locke debate – whereas modernism faces them squarely. Victorians keep trying to find God again, while the modernists have despaired of doing so.
• Rimbaud: “Il faut etre absolument moderne”
• Pound: “Make it new.”
• Marinetti: “Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action.”
• New Left: Hobsbawm, E P Thompson, Williams; the term emerged in late fifties

When Was Modernism”

• Fred Inglis edited this from the lecture notes of a March 87 lecture
• modernism: “a dominant and misleading ideology”
• Modern
  • late sixteenth century: begins to be used; refers to “now”
  • by Romanticism: updating, improvement (modernization)
  • mid 19th c: “largely favorable and progressive ring”
    • cf Modern Painters, Ruskin 1846
  • then modern gets stuck in specific moment, and we have to use word “contemporary” for “now”
    • at least from 1950s refers to “absolute modern” of 1890-1940
    • “by its point of view, all that is left to us is to become post-moderns”
• How is it ideological?
  • Arbitrary, seen by its exclusions, such as Symbolism, Ibsen, Strindberg
    • Won’t recognize that Romantics were the ones to start “definition of the arts as outriders, heralds” 32
    • Won’t see that Gogol, Flaubert, Dickens “devised and organized a whole vocabulary and its structure of figures of speech with which to grasp the unprecedented social forms of the industrial city”
    • And they even take out Impressionists from their list
  • It gives to this arbitrary list the application of Freud, the questioning of representationalism and “clear” language, self-reflexivity (to show constructedness of art)
  • It’s “highly selected version o the modern which then offers to appropriate the whole of modernity” 33
    • “open ideologizing…permits the selection” 33
• Although he admits that there were breaks during late 19th c (no more triple decker; the dandy)
  • thus, any study of the so called high modernists should begin w/changes in “media of cultural production”
  • “Photography, cinema, radio, television, reproduction and recording:” in reaction to these you have the groups forming: “defensive” and “competitively self-promoting”
    • manifesto form; Futurism, Imagism, Surrealism, Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Russia: Formalists and Constructivists
    • “they arose in the new metropolitan city” 35 “transnational capitals of an art without frontiers” as artists border-cross to get to cities
• How is the city significant?
  • He says all the border-crossing is what made them realize “non-natural status of language”
    • oh KM I’m thinking of you
  • b/c of the journey (“a broken narrative”), the switch of language and culture, “transient encounters” that ensue (unfamiliar), and homelessness and solitude and independence arise from this traveling and this arriving in Cities of Strangers
    • so, here is an alternative genealogy of the signficance of the city, AND of the reason WHY people start thinking about language as artifice, construction
• Modernism Not Unified
  • “Modernism thus defined divides politically and simly – and not just between specific movements but even within them.”
  • esp divided b/c you still have the differing legacies of the diff sources of anti-bourgeois formations: aristocratic (sacred art) or as popular consciousness (Fascism, Communism: I like how he is thus able to see them through the same lens)
• So, back to ideology
  • post WWII canonizing in academia says “Modernism is here in this specific phease or period, there is nothing else beyond it” 34
  • “marginal or rejected” now become canon
    • partly b/c they were in the city, which is now dominant in our world; so we forget the “majority of artists” who were “at home” 35 (says that the modernist emigre experience was NOT the typical experience of the artist at that time…which is good for me b/c of how I see that economic truths of these times were way diff from the cliches I hear)
      • (This shows me one of my projects needs to be about this ideology: this uneven development where we take as a literal reality a vision of modernity that is more of a prophecy about post WWII world than anything else)
      • and b/c of the city modernism is seen to be something where “artist is necessarily estranged” and “ratify as canonical the works of radical estrangement” 35
      • this ideology makes it look normal to want to leave, abandon your local/origins
  • irony: “it stops history dead” b/c says that development ended w/end of Modernism. 35
  • What is does is turn anti-bourgeois Modernism into something comfy and snuggly w/capitalism
    • (although I’d say this is the result of them describing our present world: they weren’t snuggly with the capitalism THEY actually lived in; from our perspective they look snuggly w/capitalism; but their own version of capitalism was an imaginative construction)
• Ideology of modernism is complicit w/capitalism
  • “Its attempt at a universal market, trans-frontier and classless, turned out to be spurious.” while its rapid changes of forms echo “commercial interplay of obsolscence” so that “the isolated, estranged images of alienation and loss, the narrative discontinuities of alienation and loss, and the lonely, bitter, sardonic and sceptical hero takes his ready-made places as a star of the thriller” 35
    • what he doesn’t really say is if those images in themselves are or are not complicit w/capitalism (he says it was critics looking at it that made it look complicit, but doesn’t address the idea about the connex between the forms of modernism and the forms capitalism likes)
• “the innovations of what is called Modernism have become the new but fixed forms of our present moment.”
  • He says this, unfortunately for me b/c it’s what I want to talk about as my own idea, but I’ll at least say that I can unpack his statement
• His ending point: find other words outside the modernist tradition in order to find a new future (this is a common theme even of modernism: trying to find a way out of repetition to find newness, see Nicholls on modernism)

Me

• Talk about the areas of linkage between modernism and postmodernism
  • In relation to what kind of social order they engage with, it must be diff (if the two historical periods are indeed diff)
  • So, in relation to modernity: modernism is prescient, looking at what is clearly a “minority economy” just as Williams argues that modernists are a “minority group” of artists
    • The economic reality that modernists faced was a lot less “new” than we like to think; actually it looks more Victorian than we’d want to admit, in terms of what’s dominant
    • For example, Taylorism and Fordism not actually established in biz practice until after WWII
    • For example, the proportion of factory workers to all laborers in the culture wasn’t majorly skewed in favor of factory workers until around beginning of WWI - so couldn’t have been a reality that they’d lived with for awhile
  • In relation to postmodernity: modernism DESCRIBES what’s dominant in postmodernity
    • The realized world of global finance capital: that’s the approach of which modernists were dreaming
    • This is why now modernism is in our commercials, our advertising, etc: b/c now the econonmy has caught up
• We are fascinated with modernism still b/c it actually describes the world we live in
  • The modernists didn’t show what they experienced….truly they were prophets.
• Modernists only “Complicit” if you come from the stance of postmodernity
  • Their energetic imaginations of capitalism are based on the NEWness of the tech, where they haven’t necessarily been sullied by commercialist boredom and repetition, and is all about openness and opportunity
    • they wanted to see the utopian possibilities, and only from our later position can we see them as somehow damaging to their reputations
    • not all commercialism is the same: even if the modernists did want to avoid some kind of commodification of their art or a type of soiling from mass culture, it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t cherry-pick, and it doesn’t mean they damn ALL capitalism, eh?
    • That’s why the aestheticization of politics is so damaging to them: now politics starts to catch up with their prescient art; and it shows how the new stuff is sulled
• Of course I have to admit that the artists DID experience the city this way, that it was true for them, but what I mean is that from the standpoint of GENERAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE they aren’t illustrating something that was usual
  • but that they were only dealing with a minority situation, and it was their luck (ie responsible for their popularity today) that they describe what we see
• Perhaps I will find how the descriptions of shopping are actually more reflective of finance capital than just one person buying something

Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism

• “practices and ideas” of a g = “conditions and relationships” of 20th c metropolis
• way diff from present metropolis b/c used the small venues: small galleries, small presses, small exhibitions, rather than film tv radio
  • “minority arts”
• Says that the ways we think about art today are actually archaic: “main roots…of that older, early-twentieth-century period”
  • just as we still let the city dominate
  • hence the way we think about art today is “residual”
  • he says thus we’re in “cultural stasis” (but of course I think that that’s silly b/c it’s not like these assumptions were actually there in 1910s but that we’re interpreting it to be like that)
• “certain themes in art and thought developed as specific resopnses to the new and expanding kinds of nineteenth-century city”
  • he says that these themes are older than we think: gives Wordsworth example
    • but he’s not admitting that you can have the same themes and a DIFFERENT ATTITUDE given to them, and that’s where Wordsworth is diff from Eliot: Wordsworth is so positive, optimistic b/c the anonymity and mystery of the city is for him an occasion to exert his wonderful creativity
  • strangers, isolation in crowd (he gives mid-Victorian examples like Thomson and Gissing), social or personal alienation, impenetrable/concealing city (Sherlock), mobile and diverse city
• Modernism: “internal diversity of methods and emphases: a restless and often directly competitive sequence of innovations and experiments, always more immediately recognized by what they are breaking from than….towards” 43
  • can either embrace modernity (tech, innovations, social movements) or go against it
  • this diversity of views towards city aren’t distinctly modern, but what is modern is the position of the artists in that city
    • they’re the strangers, the exiles, the movers
• How has metropolis historically changed?
  • Instead of just “the very large city” or nation’s capital, “where new social and economic and cultural relations, beyond both city and nation in their older senses, were beginning to be formed”
  • Early phases: largely b/c of imperialism, “concentration of wealth and power” and access to diff cultures that resulted from imperialism
  • But it’s more than that: “complexity and sophistication of social relations” and “freedom of expression” 44
    • “complex and open milieu” 45 very diff from tradish social forms
    • in this place, small groups can get a “foothold” impossible in tradish society
    • and new audiences are formed
    • two phases: an early struggling competitive one and a later one that’s somewhat consolidated and accepted, establishment
• Thus the metropolis has “direct effects on form”
  • immigration (hence alienation) means that the only thing all of these various immigrant-artists have in common is…art itself: “their own practices” 45
  • B/c of the mixing of cultures, “language was perceived quite differently…no longer, in the old sense, customary and natural, but in many ways arbitrary and conventional” 45-6
    • B/c you translate, you see language as “medium” not “social custom”
    • even w/in the city’s native language
    • You see you can change language
  • the city is a melting pot of languages
  • B/c the city is so complicated and huge, “no formed and settled society to which the new kinds of work could be related. The relationships were to the open and complex and dynamic social process itself, and the only accessible form of this practice was an emphasis on the medium…art”
    • So the artists begin to emphasize the medium: art
    • With so much mobility and diversity, it’s the only thing that stays the same, so to speak
• Method: no “universals” of modernism, no practice or process that is universal
  • Also themes like “modernization” are also universals
  • “any major cultural phase…takes its local and traceable positions as universal” 47
  • and, for example, so we don’t need to think that all art is always about its form