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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org 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 MODERNISM MUMMIFIED 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. Lionel Trilling, 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,