To say that modernism is a constellation of artistic expressions or even a certain totalizing aesthetic, un fait accomplit, is primarily to misjudge the intentions of those who may fall under its aegis. Certainly there was a fundamental shift from the pre-modern to modernité proper, yet the recognition of a single defining point for the commencement of the latter in fact betrays a certain conceptual impulse which we must deem inherently anti-modern. The consequences of periodization are obvious, and perhaps a touch stereotypical; even the overlapping ‘geological’ nature of periods and movements which informs Foucault’s reading of socio-structural changes in Les Mots et les Choses is perhaps too much of a generalization when localized on modernism. It is therefore my intention to look at modernism as a recognition of the multiplicities, contradictions, and absurdities inherent in existence, which then become reified in given artistic expressions. Central to this position is the awareness that a multiplicity of existences has both spatial and temporal concerns; we see, for example, that the modernist gestures of Stein or Kafka do not correlate in either respect with those of Borges or Tarkovsky, and yet each can claim citizenship within a modernist aesthetic. Fundamentally, they make the same interpolative gesture in relation to the viewing subject, in part the abstraction of subjective experience from the capacity to represent and interpret that experience, as well as the same ontological claim upon themselves, namely a negation to which I shall return shortly. The list of unique artistic expressions that can be contained within modernism as narrative trope are as numerous as the points (of rupture, origin, etc) from which modernism as narrative category emerges from the pre-modern: historical occurrences such as the social and religious revolutions in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries; philosophical creations such as Cartesian rationality or the nihilistic individuality of Nietzsche; or perhaps with the introduction of the (self)creation of the human subject by its own (un)conscience, forwarded by Freudian psychoanalysis.
The last example best exemplifies the principle conception about modernism, namely that it knows itself, that it is self-aware and by extension self-referential. In many respects, Freud’s work anticipates the anxieties of representation which were not to enter into modernism proper until serialism in music, abstract expressionism in visual art, and the “lost generation” in literature (and language poetry in the later context of a post-modern crisis). Repetitive gestures of representation, which by the turn of the century had begun to include mechanical techniques of image and language reproduction, created in a sense a high tide of represented figures and exhausted tropes. Reality has by the pre-war period incorporated previously symbolic modes of understanding and expression as tangible and in a very real manner marketable products, and thus the authentic artist, siding with Nietzsche in the belief that the ‘real’ – a construction of reality predicated on the reiterated past – is intolerable, seeks a new language in order to express his own subjective experience of their surroundings. It is at this point that the artistic gesture encounters an impasse in relation to the artist, namely that the latter has seen itself before itself in this very guise. The subject is made painfully aware that it is using a language increasingly distanced from experiential reality, and thus a rupture is formed within the subject’s historical sense of time.
It is here that the subject creates the present by reifying the past as the past, namely as a narrative category or trope by which the present is defined. The modernist sees the eternal present within the recurrent past and the rupture that this creates within subjective relations to time, much as the chronological flow of Proust’s text is famously suspended with reveries of childhood as certain smells and tastes elicit profound reminiscences (and in a physically real sense time is objectively telescoped for the reader, as one compares the simple lifting of a madelaine to one’s lips in relation to the time it takes to read Proust’s narration of the event and realizes that the very physicality of this text – over 3500 pages in many editions – is itself a modernist gesture). The impasse which hinders the artistic gesture mentioned above is the moment when the artist realizes that nothing new has emerged to define the past by a repetition of the present; in other words, the continual repetition of the past annihilates both the past as the present. Consequently, the initial crisis of representation felt by the ‘High” modernists of the visual arts, namely that the introduction of certain technological advances such as still and film cameras made traditional representation in painting and graphic art completely irrelevant, can be correlated to a similar crisis encountered by painters of the late modern period who found that they had exhausted the various schools of interpretation/production within abstract expression. And thus the anti-consumerist gestures of the avant-guard (which in Benjaminian terms is de facto anti-bourgeois) became the pro-consumption repetitive tropes of pop art; the avant-guard gesture of Magritte’s La Chambre d’Ecoute was reiterated by Warhol’s Goethe. In a similar manner the avant-guard of Schoenberg’s serialism and Berg’s atonality in modern composition became the widely popular neo-classicism of Stravinsky. Indeed, one can locate a unique intra-mediary correlation between the artistic gesture in music and the visual arts in the 1950s, when abstract expressionism emerged as the logical extension of the initial crisis of representing the subject realized by the Impressionists at the very same time that freely improvised music emerged from direct compositional influence; one gets the same sense of spatial and temporal play within the art of both Pollock and de Kooning, for example, as one can interpret within the music of Morton Feldman or Ornette Coleman. Each seeks to relocalize the past in order to more accurately situate the present, and thus legitimate the artistic gesture itself. Importantly, film, itself a new medium born with modernité, suffers no such crisis of representation. To summarize in brief, modernity must remain continually at play with its own conceptualization in order to remain truly modern. The modern artist must indeed follow Rimbaud’s dictum, “Il faut être absolument moderne!”, and remain like Baudelaire an eternal flaneur of the present, for living and creating otherwise is precisely the annihilation of history.
And yet the construction of the artist of modernism remains in a very real sense a mythology, and as such requires situation within its own narrative voice. It is here that I wish to posit the closest thing I can to a thesis concerning modernity. Modernism is a description rather than a totalizing category pour-soi. Within rhetorical terms, modernity is a trope for textual production, yet it is one which, in a performative manner, creates and signifies itself. As Fredric Jameson writes in A Singular Modernity – admittedly the guiding critical text for my present formulation of the modern – “this is to say that the trope of ‘modernity’ is always in one way or another a rewriting, a powerful displacement of previous narrative paradigms” (35). And thus an artist who is self-aware is merely one representation of what the modernist artist can be. There are indeed others, suggested by the notoriously unconscious modernist expressions of Jackson Pollock, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet, who remain distanced somewhat from the authentically self-referential texts by ‘High’ modernists such as Duchamp, Joyce, and Faulkner. There is not one narrative which universalizes and conceptualizes all that is located within its jurisdiction. Despite a multiplicity of subjects of and subjective experiences depicted in warfare, Picasso’s Guernica does not attempt to contain all the voices of the participants of the Spanish civil war nor does it attempt to re-present as legitimate their subjectivity to that experience. That space of silence – not an ontological muting but rather a semantic one – is both the negative space of the darkness, which defines the forms and serves to function as a sort of negative dialectic imparting meaning to the ‘positive’ images, as well the geometric and temporal fracturing of the images themselves into their constituent parts. The latter differs the initial experience of Guernica as conceived objet d’art, initially distancing the viewer of the mural from itself as an image, but it also geographically unifies them as a multiplicity of overlapping images which create subelements of visual representation. One can notice, for example, that the white rectangular area to the right of the mural’s centre when viewed in the same plane as the lightbulb-eye conflation just above the horse’s mouth in the centre suggests a darkened room in which the artist repeats the violence done to bodies in warfare by interrogating them as subject to his artistic gaze (simultaneous to this, we see ourselves situated within this room, ourselves interpolated as agent-victim of the recuperated violence).
In this capacity, Picasso’s work doubles in upon itself, replicating the silence of its subjects within a language that can speak only by negation, by precisely what it is not. It has in effect sealed the historical rupture between the gesture of painting (or representation, and by extension of the historical process in general) and the event itself, which upon reflection is an element of and for its own history, and thus solved its own representational crisis by the very act of negating itself within this rupture. That this conscious gesture of rupture is one and the same with the same implicit and unavoidable one in the photographic process is no simple accident of historical synergy. I am here thinking of Barthes’s argument in Camera Lucida, in which the temporality of the photographic subject is utterly destroyed by the infinitude of the moment of time captured in its representation. In other words, the viewer experiences a fundamentally different set of subjectivities in relation to the image, and thus a new mode of production is required for the artist who wishes to express the authentic. Film and still cameras had captured the horrors of warfare (and indeed all of its subjects) more provocatively than was possible with the language of art the moderns inherited. Thus a new language was required to re-create the visual arts as authentically and legitimately expressive. Bodies in Picasso’s mural are made infinitely more sensual than they would given a traditional depictive gesture – I invoke the ontologic interchangeability of orgasm/pleasure and termination/death as the extension of de Sade and the French formulation of jouissance as le petit mort – and thus the violence done to them is even more intolerable. In a very real sense then, the viewing subject is made to experience the dislocation of their own body along with the numerous arms, heads, and legs which populate the scene simultaneous with the realization that this process is one of self-mutilation. This process of internalization is further evidenced by a somewhat more literal interpretation of the figures within the scene, who seem to merge the private and the public spheres of subjectivity and emphasize the violence inherent in this act. They are both the intruders and the intruded upon, and represent places and moments of hiding, discovery, and subterfuge, and one is reminded that the Blitzkrieg – an act of warfare targeting an entire population both civilian and military – was perfected in the Spanish conflict. The sense of dread and guilt, both of the future and the avoidance of the inevitable within that future, permeates Picasso’s mural and the viewing subject is forced to confront the limits of its own rationality. Guernica speaks to the desire for a totalizing experiential representation of its subject and the ontological crises which this process by consequence suggests.
As a logical extension of the principle of narrative multiplicities, we must not, by a process of institutional exclusion and thus textual censorship, avoid the voices of the repressed in modernity, those among the subaltern who may not have the agency to represent themselves as authentic subjects within the conception of modernity. I am here thinking of the recovery strategies proposed by feminist and post-colonial critics, who wish to re-introduce texts that have been excised from the archive of modernity and authenticate them within the canon of academic study; this is a theme to which I will later return. That the modern subject requires certain aesthetic realities for acceptance as ‘modern’ reflects the institutional nature of criticism in its most general sense, namely that of inscribing the past with the voice of the present. Indeed, Jameson identifies such a conception as belonging to the ‘High Moderns’, a term which must be positioned as belonging to the canonization of art and not a category for its production: “most often they allowed representation to follow its own semi-autonomous course ... they allowed it to separate itself from its content and its object” (198). It is my own belief that such an arbitrary stance toward the signifier reflected the sense of play, in the sense proposed by the later Wittgenstein, towards conceptualization in general. In other words, during the moment of artistic gesture the individual artist whether consciously or not creates a text (perhaps body is both more accurate and more suggestive than text) which adheres solely to an internal logic, and in a sense prefigures itself to itself. In this respect, Duchamp’s 1946 piece Paysage Fautif, composed entirely of the artist’s own semen, best exemplifies the gesture of modernism, although in an admittedly abstract manner. The rational mind of the viewing subject seeks order within this particular amorphous geometry produced by Duchamp, and thus the image begins as an overhead picture of an island perhaps, or the conceptualized resistence of an organic, non-angular entity against the angular and obviously mechanized confinement of the frame and the negative (and negated) space it suggests. Rather the gesture Duchamp makes is quite literal: art is simply a jouissance reified and solidified, and consequently made into a gesture, by its own materiality. In the vein of Escher’s representation of mathematical space or the ‘self-sufficient’ compositional feedback of musical phrases in the magnetic-tape era Varèse or Cage, the gesture enters into itself in order to emerge as a concrete entity.
This has been true of artistic expression in a very broad sense throughout post-classical history – the emergence of perspective in Renaissance European art, and western-style tonality in post-monastic musical composition are as self-referential or ‘internalized’ in the sense given above as any artistic gesture of the twentieth century. Yet there is one fundamental difference, namely that which the self represents to itself as an ontological reality; this has indeed changed from the pre-modern to the modernists. The difference within modernism itself is that this process of representation-to-oneself is a process of increasing abstraction and duplication. For the pre-modern artist the representation of a given subject was simply: “I am painting x, and thus need to follow the rules for painting such subjects in order to realize x as x within my audience’s perception of x”. That painting until the middle of the 19th century has been traditionally conceived within the discourse of art history as a process of increasingly ‘realistic’ representations of given subjects, followed by the rupture of an Impressionism which celebrated painting for its own sake, is more reflective of the narrativization of history than historical actuality itself, for the contrapuntal (and to a degree contradictory) subtext to such histories will forever remain the sublimated surrealism of fantasy artists beginning with Bosch and running through the engravings of Blake straight to post-Impressionism. Rather the pre-modern artist remains such precisely because of a belief in a totality and universality of representation, or in other words that x will forever be viewed as x so long as it is painted correctly. Alternately, the modern artist is cognizant that there is no true x except the representation of x, and therefore the act of play occurs in a secondary manner in relation to the subject of the art gesture. For the modern artist, x becomes a mere abstraction for the true process of art, namely “within my audience’s perception of x through medium y, I wish to realize x as y in order to properly situate x as x”. This process can exhaust our alphabet quite readily – Duchamp would locate the museum itself as z, for example – as the subject position of both the artist and the audience are continually negotiated and re-conceptualized.
And yet the ontology of the art gesture is exactly the same, despite the multiplicities it suggests. The subject is annihilated in order to be recreated as as representation. Thus the modern artist, regardless of medium, plays with representation itself knowing full well that the representation of a given subject will then be re-presented to the viewer of the artwork. This is not the same as the process Arthur Danto describes in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, in which the awareness of criticism ontologically changes artistic expression, and indeed changes the modes of its production (Danto himself does not use such an obviously Marxist teleology, but my purposes are served) – Andy Warhol knowing, for example, that the process of art criticism and reception requires a priori certain criteria which are then negated or emphasized in a particular piece of work. More to the point I wish to suggest that within the modernist aesthetic the critical function was itself an element for play within a broader gesture towards culture, which would include not only the critical function but also those of the market, ethics, technology, ethnography, sociology, etc. Indeed, the mark of the modern is the same that marked Cain: having destroyed the traditional subject of art, modern art must now be protected from those who wish it vengeance, and thus it retreats into itself in order to legitimate itself. The rupture from the pre-modern to the modern is an act of violence, and in this capacity I cannot think otherwise than Derrida in Archive Fever. The pleasure of the archive – the institutionalization of the modern as modernism – is precisely the pleasure of inscribing certain texts into the archive and excluding others in a process of negation. Thus the Tintin comic strip is not modern in the institutional sense for the reasons that it is not like that which has been included; likewise Mina Loy has been recovered from the purgatory of the non-modern as a legitimate and authentically modern artist. Indeed, how can one think otherwise, with an example such as ‘There is no Life or Death’ from The Last Lunar Baedeker, which sees only an eternal present created out of a narrativization of its own past: “There is no Life or Death / Only activity / And in the absolute / Is no declivity”. She tells us that nothing exists save a certain subjectivity towards ourselves, and this by extension precludes totalizing gestures (life and death being two of the most obvious examples). This is fundamentally the same gesture as Faulkner’s temporal fracturing of narrative subjectivities in The Sound and the Fury, just as Picasso’s Guernica echoes her line, “There is no Space or Time / Only intensity”, in the refusal to objectively situate a site the ‘real’. The annihilation of the subject of the present inaugurated by the past is the subject of her unpublished ‘Continuity’, in which the eternity of subjectivity encounters the ironic termination of the eternal present by mechanical reproduction. Loy twice invokes the passage, “Continuity / renews / precedence”, which serves as a concept prefiguring its own continuation and reification as poem despite its grammatical fracture. The unpublished ‘Echo’ perhaps best concretizes the expressive gesture towards an ontologic negativity which I have been promoting throughout this discussion. Existence is figured as an inquiry which fundamentally looks through itself to create itself; “our anxious ‘Why’”, the philosophical imperative which constitutes the self, returns as an ambiguity, an echo, which then reifies whatever is external and transcendent to itself as mere subjectivity: “echo is no answer”. The sole answer to the question of existence that Loy is here forwarding is the process of self-creation through negation.
It is with modernism that we enter into the space where institutionalization encounters authenticity, and within this space a certain respect must be given to all those who consciously or not were able to counter the violence done to them by exclusion from the umbrella of (High) Modernism. It must be recognized that there are experiences of modernity which will never be recovered – one must think of the anonymous poets of the first world war who are canonically deferred in favour of an Owen or a Brooke, just as one must think of the anonymous housewives whose expression of domestic subjectivities in textile or food production were as powerful a realization of the modern as Stein’s Tender Buttons. And yet we can accept the relatively nonsensical text of a Stein or a Burroughs as important objects of study precisely because we have the institutional means to accept their existence, namely the study and reproduction of language in both the educational and critical mediums. Other modernist gestures which cannot be so easily contained are excluded from study; they are censored by the archive of modernism itself. It is thus that we arrive at what I initially posited as an institutional function of modernism which is itself anti-modern. Modernism must attempt to contain all that is a gesture of the modern, and yet it cannot for it has created a temporality for itself which cannot inscribe the totality of the modernist oeuvre within its archive. The sense of history is created out of specific modes of production which embraced the expressions of certain artists while rejecting others as ‘not-of-itself’. And indeed, it is to be remembered that Modernism is a narrative creation and as such it a priori excludes that which contradicts a given experiential reality. Thus, while Marinetti’s followers could indeed rejoice in his dictum that there is no painting, sculpture, or poetry, but rather there is only creation (!), all elements of said creation cannot be contained within Modernité proper, as Jameson elaborates in A Singular Modernity: “each mode of production has its own system of temporalities” (79), further emphasizing the inscribing process of history from specific vantage points. In this sense it is easy to see why the readymades of Duchamp were so readily accepted, and indeed consumed, within the art community; had Duchamp’s gesture been less akin to sculpture, had he for example made a film of himself baking a cake and submitted the reels for museum installation and looped presentation, his subversive expression would have been greeted with a sense of boredom rather than anger – the film would be a non-art and thus a non-entity for criticism, whereas the readymades were so obviously anti-art, and thus inherently artistic in their negational qualities. Forgetting the absurdity of the preceding example for a moment, it does serve its purpose, namely to further underline the notion of modernism as a narrative trope, as a history created by the present for the present. A contemporary critic would have no problem whatsoever in discerning the gesture and artistic consequences of a filmed occurrence, regardless of subject; in this sense, it is possible to argue that only within a post-modern society can the modern be truly situated.
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