Modernism Mummified Author(s): Daniel Bell Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 1, Special Issue: Modernist Culture in America (Spring, 1987), pp. 122-132 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2712633 . Accessed: 27/03/2014 09:37

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DANIEL BELL HarvardUniversity

IN HIS INTRODUCTION TO THE IDEA OF THE MODERN,IRVING HOWE QUOTES THE famousremark of VirginiaWoolf, as everyonedoes sincehyperbole is arresting, that"on or aboutDecember 1910 humannature changed." Actually, Mrs. Woolf had writtenthat "human character changed." She was referring(in herfamous essay,"Mr. Bennettand Mrs. Brown,"written in 1924) to the changesin the positionof one's cook or of thepartners in marriage."All humanrelations have shifted-thosebetween masters and servants,husbands and wives,parents and children.And when human relations change there is at thesame time a changein religion,conduct, politics and literature."' Thissearch for a transfigurationinsensibility as thetouchstone of modernity has animatedother writers. , in temperament ever cautious and complex, whilepersuaded in his reading of the Iliad or Sophocles that human nature does not changeand thatmoral life is unitary,nevertheless came to believe,as he statedin theopening pages of Sincerity and Authenticity,that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenthcenturies "something like a mutationin human nature took place," and thata newconcern with the self, and being at one with one's self, "became a salient, perhapsa definitive,characteristic of Westernculture for some fourhundred years."2 The answerto whenand howwhat we call "themodern" emerged has a large historicalcanvas. One can date it withthe rise of the museum,where cultural artifactsare wrenched from their traditional places and displayed in a newcontext of syncretism:history mixed up and consciousnessjumbled by will,as when Napoleonransacked Egypt and Europe to stuff the Louvre with his trophies; and yet vicariousemperors have alwaysdisplayed their power by placingtheir heels on culture.For JacobBurckhardt, the modern begins, of course,in theRenaissance, withthe emphasis on individuality, originality, and putting one's name in stone. One can say,and I wouldplace greatweight behind the argument, that the modern beginswith Adam Smith and the proposition that the economy is no longersubject to the householdor moralrules but is an autonomousactivity, just as in this extensionof liberalism one has theautonomy of law frommorality (to be regarded

Thisessay is a repriseand a reflectionon themesI advancedin TheCultural Contradictions ofCapitalism (1976) and theessay, "Beyond Modernism, Beyond Self," a memorialessay for Lionel Trilling, in the volumeArt, Politics and WilAedited by Quentin Anderson, Stephen Donadio and Steven Marcus (1975) andreprinted in mycollection of essays, The Winding Passage (1980).

This content downloaded from 192.80.65.116 on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 09:37:42 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ModernismMummified 123 principallyas a setof formal procedures), and the autonomy of the aesthetic from all constraintsso thatart exists for art's sake alone.And if one believesthat the fundamentalsource of all knowledgeand sensibility is epistemological, one would haveto datethe creation from Kant, with the proposition of an activitytheory of knowledge(as againstthe classical contemplative theory deriving knowledge from preexistingForms), so that,as Kantsays in theProlegomena, "The understanding doesnot derive its laws (a priori)from, but prescribes them to, nature," a theorem thatis carriedout in modemart and in politics.3 Whatis clear,out of all thesevariegated elements, is thatwhat defines the modernis a senseof openness to change,of detachmentfrom place and time,of socialand geographical mobility, and a readiness,if not eagerness, to welcomethe new,even at the expense of tradition and the past. It is theproposition that there are no ends or purposesgiven "in nature,"that the individual, and his or herself- realization,is thenew ideal and imago of life, and that one can remake one's self and remakesociety in theeffort to achievethose individual goals. Revolution, which hadonce been a ricorsoin an endlesscycle, now becomes a rupturewith the endless wheel,and is theimpulse to destroyold worlds,and fornew worlds to create. In all thisit is clearthat capitalism and modernism have common roots. Both were dynamicin theirrestless kneading of the dough;for both there was "nothing sacred";for both there were no limitson theefforts of rugged individualism or the unrestrainedself to tearup thepast and to makeit new. Yetwhat is also clear,and this is thehistory still to be unraveled,is thatbrothers thoughthey may have been in thewomb, there was a deepfratricide whereby the risingbourgeoisie, sublimating its energies into work, feared the excesses and the floutingof conventions and cultural forms by the new boheme, while the avatars of modernismdespised and held in contemptthe money-mindedbourgeoisie, for whom culturewas only a commodityand a source of display,status, and consumption. Capitalismand cultural modernism also had different trajectories. At its extreme, capitalismbecame concerned with efficiency, optimization, and maximization as it subordinatedthe individual to theorganization. Cultural modernism opened an attack,often an unyieldingrage, against the social order; became concerned with theself, often to a narcissisticextent; denied art the function of representation; and becameunusually absorbed with the materials alone-textures and sounds-which itused for expressiveness. I have tried,in my work,to relatecultural modernism to changesin social structure.I have arguedthat in modernism-inpainting, literature, music, and poetry-therewas a commonsyntax which I havecalled the "eclipse of distance," and thatin thesevaried genres there was a commonattack on the "rational cosmology"that had definedWestern culture since the Renaissance;that of foregroundand backgroundin space throughmathematical perspective; of beginning,middle, and end, as the orderedchronology of time; and of a "correspondencetheory of truth" in the idea ofmimesis or the semantic relation of

This content downloaded from 192.80.65.116 on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 09:37:42 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 124 AmericanQuarterly wordto object.4I hadtried to showthat where the aesthetic was joined to politics, particularlyin thetwentieth century, the "world-view" of modernismhad been principallyreactionary or revolutionary(whether Stefan George and Gottfried Benn,or the German expressionists intheatre and art; whether Pound, Eliot, Yeats and WyndhamLewis and the ambiguouspolitics of a Lawrence,or the early revolutionarystance of Auden,etc., etc.). And I had arguedthat contemporary bourgeoissociety, seeing its inflated,decorative culture collapse underthe onslaughtof culturalmodernism, had in an astonishingtour de force taken over culturalmodernism and flauntedit as its own culture-thisbeing the cultural contradictionof capitalism. Today,according to thewinds of theZeitgeist, modernism has ended.We have "postmodernism"wrenching modernism from its historical context, and jumbling it withdifferent cultural styles (old hat, nouveau,and deco) in a new,bizarre syncretism(such as PhilipJohnson's pediment to theAT & T toweron Madison Avenue),and academicsransacking the texts to deconstructthe past and createa newpresence. So thehoot owl ofMinerva screeches in thefalse dawn.

II Whatof America? Lacking a pastand having made itself in a revolutionaryact, Americahas beenthe only pure capitalist society we have known.But has there beenan AmericanModernism? And if so, whatwas it? Modernismin the United States existed inform, not in content. Not only is thisan arbitrarydistinction, but I am necessarilyusing these words in an arbitraryway. Andit is byexposition, rather than definition, that this distinction can be madeclear and,perhaps, useful. Incontent, American culture (leaving aside nineteenth-century NewEngland and the twentieth-centurySouth-yet thisremains a large country)was primarily small-town,Protestant, moralizing and anti-intellectualin the sense that Richard Hofstadterhas usedthis term. If, as Santayanaonce remarked,Americans were innocentof poison, they were even more so ofsexuality (not sex). Can oneimagine a Huysmans,a Swinburneor an AubreyBeardsley (though The YellowBook was initiatedby an Americanexpatriate) or any other "dandy aesthete" (to useMartin Green'sphrase) on theAmerican scene? Americanmodernists, as is obviousfrom the history, could flourish principally onlyin Europe: James leaving New York and Boston, Pound from Idaho, Eliot from St.Louis, Gertrude Stein from Baltimore, Hemingway from the Illinois suburbs, and the"lost generation" of the twenties going earlier to Londonor later to Paris. The littlemagazines took theircue fromEurope. The painters,beginning with the Armoryshow, again hailed fromEurope. The composers,again, spentthe obligatoryperiod abroad. The twoinnovative American writers, Dos Passos and Faulkner,were experi- mentaland modernist,but they were not part of a nativemodernist culture in the

This content downloaded from 192.80.65.116 on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 09:37:42 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ModernismMummified 125 sensethat such writers as Mallarm&,Rimbaud and Proust were able to place their imprintsdeeply on a Frenchculture. Dos Passosintroduced a style of montage close to cinemaand, to someextent, the political expressionist theater of Germany,but hisinfluence was largelyin the radical milieu of his time. And though Dos Passos continuedhis montagetechniques when he abandonedhis radicalism,he was writtenoff by the critics as passe.Faulkner wrote powerful experimental novels, derivedfrom the French influences (The Sound and theFury can rankwith any of thegreat modernist romansfleuves) yet he received little critical attention. Faulkner was revivedonly in 1945 whenhe sketchedfor Malcolm Cowley the map of YoknapatawphaCounty, and Cowleythen redefined Faulkner in thesociological contextof thestruggle between the Sartorises and Snopesesfor the soul of the South-notas a modernistwriter. The two distinctivemodernist innovations-as cultures-werejazz and photography,but jazz was outsidethe mainstream, regarded as sinfuleven in the jazz age ofthe twenties, and only became a majorinfluence in American culture in the fortieswith the largercommercial jazz bands,while photography, despite Stieglitz,was aestheticallymarginal to American concerns. The one great technical innovation,film, was regardedas "themovies" in the United States, a formof mass entertainment,and as "thecinema" in France, where it became an aestheticand so providedthe route back to criticalcommentary in theUnited States. In thesesenses, while there were modernists in theUnited States, there was no modernistculture in content. The one place wherethere was a modernistculture in theUnited States was inform-andthis was themachine aesthetic. And, as theold sayinggoes, this was no accident.The machineaesthetic excluded the self and the person,it was abstract and functional, and fused with industrial design. Photography cameinto its own not with the periodical Camera Work, but with the business scene; theFortune pages providedits showcase.The greatfunctional factories and the hugefunctional skyscrapers, as well as thecurving ribbons of thenew concrete motorways,became the emblematic symbols of the new culture. The keyterm that definedits form was functional. Modernist artists such as CharlesSheeler, in his "precisionist"paintings and photographs,reflected these abstract geometrical designs.Abstract artists, such as StuartDavis, fused the rhythms of jazz withthe linearforms of the machine age. A modernistculture began to appear in the United States after World War II with thecollapse of thesmall-town Protestant hold on Americanlife, the distinctive imprintof urbanismas thefocus of economic activities, and theflood of French- Europeansurrealists (Breton, Masson, Ernst) who influenced the new art of a Gorky or Pollock;the Russian emigres such as Stravinskyor Balanchine,who shaped developmentsin music and dance; the large number from Central Europe such as ErwinPanofsky and Roman Jakobson, who influenced art history and linguistics, and the many Germanrefugees who broughtin continentalsociology and philosophy(as wellas physicsand other sciences). The completestory of all those myriadinfluences remains to be told.

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III

Whatof modernismtoday? It has become whatculture usually becomes in periodsof luxury and decadence, a decorativecommodity or the last duchess on the wall. On theone handthere are theculturati who make up thenew industryof galleriesand museums and magazines, as wellas entertainment,thepurveyors and transmittersand cicerones of culture. And on theother, the corporations and banks thatline their corridors with the requisite Newman, Motherwell, Noland, Morris Louis or Kline,where the thick impasto and therivers of colorsag and go limp againstthe neutral beige carpets and thewhitewashed walls.5 Modernismtoday is the"official" high culture-because it is dead and stuffed. Andits high taxidermist is Hilton Kramer and his magazine, The New Criterion, who identifymodernism with capitalism and bourgeois society. In a recenttour defarce, "Modernismand Its Enemies," Kramer sets the glow of high culture in theSixties "whichwitnessed an extraordinaryexpansion in cultural life.... the era that saw the buildingof a greatmany new museums and the expansion of a greatmany existing museums,"the spread of "a publicthat was largeand growing." As thecapstone, TheNew YorkTimes appointed him as its culturalcritic because, "As thethen executiveeditor of The Times, Turner Catledge, explained to me (with something of a sigh),'Our readers are now a lotsmarter about all thisthan we are.'To keepthese readersand win still others the managers of the paper felt it necessary to redress the balance,and this meant-in some fields at least-joiningthe modernist tide instead ofopposing it."6 Thereare two striking points in this exposition: one, modernism is to be explained byits audience, and by the existence of museums. Historically, ithas alwaysbeen theartist who establishes and writes the culture. The artist may have been adversary orentwined with court or church, but culture was defined by the artist. The museum was the place the artistavoided. If one turnsto the bombasticoutriders of modernism,the repeated cry in theFuturist manifestos of Marinettiis thatthe museumsare "cemeteriesof emptyexertion, calvaries of crucifieddreams, registriesof abortedbeginnings," and Marinettiurges the "gay incendiaries with charredfingers [to] set fire to thelibrary shelves," and floodthe museums.7 Second,other than the genuflections tothe Abstract Expressionists ofthe postwar period(now thirtyyears in thepast), there are fewreferences to contemporary artistsor writers who exemplify the creativity and vitality of high culture today. In fact,this modernist culture, the only true "high culture," must guard the portals againstthe new radicals-e.g., a Beuys-whobeat at thegates, while defending a hucksterlike Julian Schnabel. Culture is highculture only when it is calcifiedin the museumsof Modern Art.8 Who are theenemies of modernism?According to Mr.Kramer, there are the radicalswho feel betrayed because modernism, instead of remaining revolutionary, has"turned out to be a coefficientofbourgeois capitalist culture." And there are the philistines(Mr. Kramer's,not Arnold's,designation), such as thiswriter, who

This content downloaded from 192.80.65.116 on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 09:37:42 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ModernismMummified 127 identifymodernism as thebegetter of the counterculture ofthe sixties. Mr. Kramer, as a veteranpolemicist, skews his targets and misstates positions. The Marxists who haveattacked modernism have not thought of it as revolutionarybut as a derivative ofbourgeois life. In mywritings, I call the counterculture a "conceit" in its claims to be modernist,but say that the liberal culture was unableto draw the line between a modernism(and fantasies of murder and bestiality) lived out in the imagination, and theclaim to justify the erasure of any distinction between art and life and to act out (albeitin streettheater) the lifestyles of outrage. Thereare also twostriking omissions about the critics of modernism: Mr. Kramer completelyignores the large groupof conservativeintellectuals, followers of RussellKirk, who have described Modernism as theinvention of the Devil, and the sourceof all politicalheresy in the contemporary world. Yet, as "oldbelievers," they areas ferventas Mr.Kramer in their defense of capitalism and have even attacked the"neo-conservatives" for still clinging to the modernist heresy, something which is nottrue of that group-except for Mr. Kramer. The secondomission is Mr.Kramer's amnesia about his own past. Writingin 1959,on the threshold of the hallowed sixties, Mr. Kramer remarked in the socialist magazineDissent

Everythingin oureconomy and in thesocial organization of the arts conspires against the privacyand independence which would be indispensableifthe spirit of the avant-garde were tosurvive. Once we findourselves in a situation,as wedo today,in which society has assigned vastbureaucracies to thetask of seeking out and exploiting the last word in all thearts, and when the artiststhemselves have joined as eager accomplicesin this orgyof self- exploitation-inthis situation I think it is merepiety to deny that the avant-garde is dead.The factof thematter is thatsince 1945 bourgeoissociety has tightenedits grip on all thearts by allowingthem a freerrein.9

Old polemicalapparatchiks never die, they only change their targets. Muchof this would be merelysectarian if not for the fact that Mr. Kramer, almost alone,remains a defenderof Modernism-atleast in its petrifiedstate. Irving Kristoland Peter Berger have conceded the point that capitalism is oftena grossand unlovelysystem, to be defendedprimarily on theground that it is an enginefor increasingmaterial standards of lifeand thatit is "a necessarybut not sufficient conditionof democracy under modern conditions." But neither Kristol nor Berger has defendedmodernism in theterms of Mr. Kramer. Mr.Kramer defends Modernism not only as an aspectof capitalism, but also of democracy,and writesthat "what is reallyat stake,then, in this attackon modernism[is] something central to the vital cultural life of our democratic society. . . ." But thisis intellectuallyconfusing and historicallyinvalid. The avatarsof modernismthemselves have been overwhelminglyantidemocratic (and oftenas not,anti-Semitic); and Mr.Kramer, like an invertedMarxist, conflates his realms. Democracyis notdependent on capitalism,but on a set of traditionsand legal concepts,such as thecommon law, that antedate capitalism, while capitalism itself has beencompatible with fascism and authoritarianism,as in Italyor Chile.

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Mr.Kramer writes: "The truth is, the culture of modernism has served all alongas theaesthetic and spiritual conscience, and sometimes even the moral conscience, of middle-classlife, and it is thiswhich has made it pre-eminentlythe culture of democraticsociety." Butthis is a slipperyglissade. Modernism has been a savageand often destructive forceagainst middle-class life (need one repeatthe litany of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud,Pound et al.), and if modernismserves as an "aestheticand spiritual conscience,"Mr. Kramer clearly wears a hairshirt to bed at night.To say that modernismis preeminentlythe cultureof democraticcapitalism is to have embalmingfluid rather than blood in one's veins. And if so, Mr. Kramer remains the walkingmummy of modernism.

IV

The "senseof an ending,"as FrankKermode has remarked, is a recurrenttheme in culturesthat move toward an eschatologicalclimax or are miredin cultural despair.If we have no fixedtime as to whenmodernism began-one's starting point,as I have noted,can be based on sensibility,or self,or on theautonomy of institutions,economic or aesthetic-it is clearthat "cultural modernism" has come toa close. As OctavioPaz, himselfa childof the modern, stated in his Charles Eliot NortonLectures at Harvard:

Modernart is modernbecause it is critical.... Today we witness another mutation: modern art is beginningto lose its powers of negation. For some years now its rejections have been ritual repetitions:rebellion has turnedinto procedure, criticism into rhetoric, transgression into ceremony.Negation is no longercreative. I am not saying that we areliving at theend of art: we are livingthe end of the idea of modernan.'0

Wasmodernism "co-opted" by capitalism, as HerbertMarcuse has suggested, or was ita contradictionofcapitalism, as I haveargued? Marcuse stated the problem fromthe standpoint of culture, yet one can arguethat the psychological force that became dissipatedin thislast centurywas not culturebut capitalism. Marcuse claimed(in his One-DimensionalMan, publishedin 1964) thatall aspectsof life-art,technology, working-class rebellion, black resentment, youth Sturm und Drang-had beenflattened out by the technological rationality of society, only to findhimself hailed, a fewyears later, as thePied Piper of Revolution by the raucous studentsof Berlin and Paris." l Capitalism, said Marcuse, was based psychologically on "surplusrepression," imposed by the severity of the superego through the agency ofthe family. (In theUnited States today, almost one outof every two children will spendsome period of their youth in a one-parentor a fatherlessfamily!) Yet, if one looksat capitalism today, one can put Marx on his head. It is culturewith its varying demandsthat has becomethe substructure of Westerncapitalist society and the productionsystem reorganized to meetits voracious appetites-material; erotic

This content downloaded from 192.80.65.116 on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 09:37:42 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ModernismMummified 129 and aesthetic;high, middle and low; punkand rock;Hollywood Squares and TV bang-bang. A societydemonstrates its vitality through wealth, power, and culture, high and low.Power alone breeds sterility, as we see todayin the Soviet Union, North Korea, or Albania.Wealth alone breeds decadence. And culture? A culturederived from religionand sustained by its commanding faith can give us the great Buddhas of the Orientor the Christianart of the Middle Ages. A periodof greatexpansion, nineteenth-centuryParis, an eraopen to change and discovery, to geographicaland social mobility,can break frommythology for the vivacityof plein air, the excitementof the spectacle, the presentation of theself. Bourgeoissociety (not early adventure capitalism, the capitalism described by Sombart)forced a cleavage betweenhigh and low culture,deploring the adventurousnessofthe one and thevulgarity of the other. Modernist culture was extraordinarilycreative because it lived,sociologically, in tensionwith bourgeois societyand, because, as Paul Tillichonce observed, it reached down to the taproots ofthe demonic and transmutedthose surging impulses into art. Today, bourgeois societyhas collapsed and the demonic cavorts everywhere, for there are few taboos. AlfredJarry could open his UbuRoi with the clownish king saying "Merdre," but how muchof a shockis thattoday against the desecrationsof a Genetor a Burroughs?'2 Todaywe have a culturethat is eclecticand syncretisticbecause therational cosmologyand the mirror of nature have been shattered. The disjunctionof forms, growingout of the tension with mimesis, has vanished,and formalism has become largelyself-referential. The disjoinedand alienatedexperiences (articulated now largelyby women writers) too oftenare expressedin sociologicalcliches, or lack "shape"(to use the term of Jean Rhys), and fail to engage society other than through narcissisticreflection. The new vogue termis "postmodernism."Its meaningis as amorphousas modernismitself, but the term also containsa setof paradoxes as startlingas the engagementof modernismand capitalismin the past two hundredyears. Postmodernism-ifwe dateit from the subterranean writings of Michel Foucault and,in the UnitedStates, of Norman0. Brown(with a small nod to Norman Mailer)-proclaimednot only the "de-construction of man" and theend of the EnlightenmentCredo of Reason, but also the "epistemologicalbreak" with genitality,and the dissolution of sexuality into the polymorph perversity oforal and anal pleasures.I3For them,this was theliberation of the body, as modernismhad beenthe liberation of the imagination. The sexualrevolution that followed broke intothe gay and lesbian movements as onecurrent, and the somewhat overlapping rock-drugculture as another.Imagination had come out of the closet and lived out itsimpulses openly. Foucaultand Brown--had gone "beyond," a transgressionof the taboos,a posthumousrendering, so tospeak, of modernism. But by a strangetwist of fate, the

This content downloaded from 192.80.65.116 on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 09:37:42 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 130 AmericanQuarterly term"postmodernism" itself was appropriatedthrough the media by a successive generationof artistswho, oftenconventionally, reacted against modernist formalismand expressionism,and wereimmediately hailed by the chic culturati readyto follow the new winds of fashion. The practitioners of"postmodernism," by and large,have substitutedpastiche for form and clevernessfor creativity. In architecture,Michael Graves mixes Moorish fantasy with heavy Byzantine arches, as inhis Portland, Oregon building, and his proposed superstructure tothe Whitney Museum.In literature,there is theaffectless flat prose of Ann Beattie. In painting, we see thereintroduction ofshadowy figuration, like X-ray images, in the canvases ofthe neo-expressionists. And on thestage, there are the hypnotic dream imagery and dissociatedslow-motion tableaus by RobertWilson, underscored by the monotonicminimalism of Philip Glass. Muchof this was foreshadowedby ,an artwhich largely recycles images throughcollage orjuxtaposition, on silkscreenor phosphorescentacrylic. Some originalartists like Jasper Johns or Jim Dine can subduethe image by expressing it throughthe tensionof techniqueand texture,as in theirprints. But witha Rauschenberg,the technique becomes too obvious;with a Warhol,the image too blatant.In bothcases theoutcomes finally become tiresome. Whatpasses for high culture today lacks both content and form, so thatthe visual artsare primarilydecorative and literatureself-indulgent babble or contrived experiment.Decoration by its nature, no matterhow bright and gay, becomes, in its finiteand repetitive patterns, mere wallpaper, a recedingbackground incapable of engagingthe viewer in the renewablere-visions of perception.Self-referential literature,when both the self and the referencerepeat the same old refrains, becomesa tediousbore, like Uno showingthat he can standon one fingerin a circus.A cultureof recycled images and twice-told tales is a culturethat has lost its bearings. "Whetherritualized or not,art contains the rationality of negation,"Herbert Marcusewrote in One-DimensionalMan. Paradoxically, the only cultural currents ofnegation, as an irrationalform, have been segments of popular culture that have brokenall boundaries,set themselves up againstthe traditional social valuesof Americansociety, and are marketedwildly and successfully,as sex and rebellion, bythe purveyors of capitalism and massculture. Today,television soap operasare the Streets of Libido, the softcore pornography deliberatelytitillating the viewers with a fantasylife they can act outin their own homes.Heavy Metal and hardcorerock appeal to youthswho feel angryand discouragedabout the dead-end prospects of earninga living.Sex-obsession as exhibitedby a Madonnaor Princetakes an evermore explicit form. One can imaginethe grafitti on thewalls: Genet lives! Is thisso differentfrom the rock-and-roll initiated by Elvis Presleyin thelate 195Os, or the sweet inducements of LSD sungby the Beatles, or the hard stomp of MickJagger's Rolling Stones? In one sense,as withany enlargement of a cultural phenomenon,there has beena "wideninggyre" in whichmore and moreof what

This content downloaded from 192.80.65.116 on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 09:37:42 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ModernismMummified 131 has been assaultedcontinues to crumble,and moreand moreof whathad been forbiddennow goes on publicly.But what also seemsto be trueis thatthe youth culture,and especiallylower-class culture, now is exploitedmore crassly by the commercialinterests. With regard to sex and violence,the appetites of the young turnedout to be voracious,and as MarthaBayles, a criticon , has written:"After all, raw sexualityand anti-socialanger are thetwo preferred weaponsof the adolescent against his elders. And when the entertainment industry discoveredhow endlesslymarketable these distillations of black culturewere, it ceasedto see reasonsfor restraint."'4 For the entertainmentindustry-movies, TV, rock musicrecords, and pub- lishing-allof this is freeenterprise and free speech, and the government must not be allowedto interferewith the libertarianism/libertinismof the marketplace. Againa culturalcontradiction of capitalism?A centuryand a quarterago it was Baudelaireand the bourgeoisie condemning Les Fleurs du Mal as an outrageagainst public decency.Today is it Foucault and Hustlermagazine as brothersin "negation"? Culturalfashions, especially in popular culture, come and go inspasms. With the risingthreat of AIDS, the compaignsagainst drugs and tobacco,the sheer exhaustionof the ugliness of sexualviolence, as demonstratedin thefilm Sid and Nancy,we maybe on theverge of a "newsobriety." That remains to be seen;and thatis also anotherstory. "Never call retreat"is a maximof the ideologue, not of culture. Ifthis is thecase, when all is saidand done, we cannow be gratefulfor modernism as a culturethat itself was once committed to shock. It is safelyin the museums, and on thecorporate walls, ready for the closets of History.Such old contradictions neverdie; they just fade away.

NOTES

'VirginiaWoolf, Collected Essays (New York,1967), 1:320-21.(Italics added.) When I firstread this phraseand quoted it in my book, I wonderedwhat may have happened to Mrs. Woolf herself in 1910to giverise to this startling assertion. In 1910,if one follows the detailed events in Quentin Bell's biography, Mrs.Woolf began to speakup forthe feminist cause, signalled the importance of RogerFry's "First Post-ImpressionistExhibition," and bathed naked with Rupert Brooke by moonlight in the Granta. While Bloomsburyhad become"licentious in itsspeech by 1910,"as Mr.Bell notes,as a sociologistI was relievedto findthat it was primarilyin socialsituations that this momentous change had occurred. 2LionelTrilling, Sincerity and Authenticity(Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 19. 3Kant'sProlegomena,ed.Paul Carus(La Salle,Ill., 1945), 82. Ifthe reference to politics seems strange, I havein mind simply the view one finds in classical Greek thought that the natural order, the moral order andthe social order are all akinin having an entelechydefined by the telos, and that the proper ends of nature,morality and the social are given in the unity of purposes that exist in the constitutive structures of physisand nomos.Modernity, beginning with Hobbes, dirempts that unity, and insiststhat ends are individualand varied. 4Thistheme was firststated in my essay "The Eclipse of Distance," in Encounter(London) May 1963. Needlessto say,I havenot tried to writea general"theory" of modernism, but to lookat theseaspects whichrelate to "external"forces, rather than its own immanent trajectories.

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5I haveno objections,per se, to corporationsor museumsor collectorsbuying the canvases of these worthwhileartists for display on theirwalls. How couldone? What becomes objectionable is thatthe buyingof "modem art" is bynow obligatory as a meansof demonstrating "support for the arts," or as a wayof showing that one is "withit." It is inthat sense that the Museum of Modem Art becomes the seal of "Good Housekeeping"for the corporations, and thearbiter of tastefor the society. A DuncanPhillips, exercisinghis own independentjudgment, was able to builda marvelousgallery (including the first purchasesof MorrisLouis) in Washington.But a JosephHirschorn, buying art by the carload, gets his nameemblazoned on themalls of Washington as a benefactorof culture. Fortunately, the sifting of taste willmake such collections leaner and, in theyears to come,few people will know of thevulgarity of Hirschorn,as fewtoday recognize Frick as theruthless head of the Carnegie Steel works who ordered the shootingof the workers in the Homestead strike of 1892. 6HiltonKramer, "Modernism and its enemies," The New Criterion March 1986: 5. 7"TheFounding and Manifesto of Futurism," inMarinetti Selected Writings, ed. R. W.Flint (New York, 1973),43. 8Andnot only the museums. New York's "newest antiques and decorative-arts fair," reports The New YorkTimes in a culturalfront page article of November 21, 1986,is "Modernism:A Centuryof Style and Design,1860-1960." "It's the most exciting 'antique' show I haveever seen," burbled Christopher Wilk, assistantcurator of decorative arts at the Brooklyn Museum. Those artists shown include Hector Guimard, FrankLloyd Wright, Russel Wright, and Charles Eames. "Although there are some selections at $100 or less-perfumebottles, early plastic jewelry, ceramic plates-" writesRita Reif, "the majority of offerings arefrom $500 to$10,000, and master works command as muchas $235,000."High, high culture, indeed. 9HiltonKramer, "To Hellwith Culture," Dissent Spring 1959: 166.(Emphasis added.) I OctavioPaz, Childrenof the Mire: Modem Poetry from Romanticism tothe Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.,1974), 148-49. 1 In 1970,Marcuse appeared on the stage of the Free University ofBerlin and was hailed rapturously by thestudents who chanted rhythmically, "Her-bert," "Her-bert," "Her-bert." And when they broke into the singingof the Internationale, Marcuse whipped off his coat, raised his elbow with a clenchedfist, and joinedin the singing of the last chorus. When the noise finally died down, he steppedforward and cried: "Studenten!....At which an angryvolley shouted back: "Studenten?Esheisst Genossen!"Old professors neverdie. The storyis toldin MelvinJ. Lasky's collection, On theBarricades and Off. 12UbiRoi withsets elaborated by Bonnard, Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec, was thefirst of the public utterancesof obscenity. The word,merdre, set off a pandemoniumthat lasted throughout the evening. Presentedin 1896,it could not be stagedagain until 1908. Yet even Jarry had givena spinto theword merdeby adding one letter,so thatthe word has been translated, variously, as shiteor pshit. Though used privatelyas themot de Cambronne,a remarkof one of Napoleon'sgenerals at Waterloo,the public utteranceof the word in 1896,as RogerShattuck has observed, was "unthinkable." Compare this scandale withGenet's graphic depiction of homosexual rape in NotreDame desFleurs (and thefilm made of his fantasies)or Burroughs'description of the sexual ejaculation of a manwhile being hanged, in Naked Lunch.Merde, of course,is now thecommonplace word for good luckfor a studentgoing off to an academicexamination or a talismanfor a friendgoing on a journey.Does everything,intime, become tamed? Fora discussionof Jarry and Ubu Roi, see Roger Shattuck, TheBanquet Years (London, 1959) ch. 7, esp. 161.The playhas beenfully translated under the strange title of KingTurd by Beverley King and G. Legman(New York,1953). 13Fora previousand moreextensive discussion of Foucault and Norman0. Brownas goingbeyond modernism,see myCultural Contradictions ofCapitalism, 51-52. 141 takethis comment from the prospectus for a bookon popularculture which Ms. Bayleswill be writingfor The FreePress. I am gratefulfor her permission.

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