Abstract
This chapter addresses “modernism” (as opposed to the modern in general) and positions it as the proximate stimulus for the rise of postmodern theory, especially in France. Nietzsche is the pivotal figure. His concept of history as genealogy undermined the evolutionist “master narratives” of the Hegels and the Spencers. In the name of a Darwinian nature—in which the agent of selection is chance—Nietzsche replaced all teleological schemes with a picture of nature-in-history as a field of forces in perpetual contention. The founding posture of modernity, the reliance on reason to discern nature’s plan and to guide humanity’s enterprises accordingly, was eroding: with World War I, it was shattered. “Modernism” names the way the modern subject adapted to this condition of abandonment and shows that in the arts and in the academic disciplines, the great creators responded as if in concert. They turned away from the senseless mess of history and the meaningless routines of mass society in the machine age and focused instead on their “works”—their art works and their disciplines, conceived and carried out by the only authors of meaning left: themselves.
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Notes
- 1.
“Worldhood”is the term Heidegger used to evoke the ultimate “there” of Da-sein, the environing horizon of all actualities and possibilities that constituteDasein as being-in-the-world.
- 2.
This passage focuses on everyday experience but, for the modernist elite, the impact of relativity theory and quantum mechanics reinforced the basic message. The intuitively accessible Newtonian cosmos, a monument to modern rationality, was no more.
- 3.
William Cronin, speaking of Frank Lloyd Wright, said that “job of the artist (is) to create a vision of nature more natural than nature itself” (Frank Lloyd Wright, Ken Burns [1997] 2014).
- 4.
Contemporary usage “it was so surreal” seems not to carry that connotation. High Culture brought low under the postmodern regime.
- 5.
Said Ezra Pound, writing from Stone Cottage, where he was at work with Yeats: “to explain a symbol is to destroy its ability to embody the divine or permanent world; knowledge that could be understood by the uninitiated masses would not be knowledge at all” (in Longenbach 1988, 91).
- 6.
Says Nietzsche’sbiographer: “All of the significant currents in the early 20th century, from symbolism to art nouveau and expressionism, were inspired by Nietzsche. Every self-respecting member of these circles had a ‘Nietzsche experience’” (Safranski 2002, 323).
- 7.
From “Time Passes” in To The Lighthouse ([1927] 1989).
- 8.
The pervasive influence of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896) and his nonsense-science of pataphysics is most apparent in this aspect of Marinetti’s work.
- 9.
Evil, beautiful, and ugly are the other non-natural predicates Moore identifies. They are also non-physical, invisible, intangible—but intuitively discernible in ways that depend ultimately on “taste.”
- 10.
Moore skewers Spencer immediately, in his typical way, as he introduces the fallacy: “It is absolutely useless, so far as Ethics is concerned, to prove, as Mr. Spencer tries to do, that increase of pleasure coincides with increase of life, unless good means something different from either life or pleasure. He might as well try to prove that an orange is yellow by shewing that it is always wrapped up in paper.”
- 11.
The fact that this “book” was actually assembled by students from their notes on Saussure’s lectures may account for this divergence.
- 12.
See Mark Micale The Mind of Modernism (2004) for a revealing overview.
- 13.
It is interesting to notice that, from the point of view of a French poststructuralist like Julia Kristeva, this modernist compulsion to compartmentalize looks like “totalizing fragmentation.” That paradoxical characterization nicely highlights why the Cartesian subject, in its positivist form, can only totalize (its prime directive) by way of compartmentalizing. That subject itself is unexamined and so (unlike Kantian, Hegelian, Husserlian versions) is “outside” of all phenomena presented to it—there is as yet no phenomenological immanence.
- 14.
Margaret Mead was my advisor at Columbia in the 1970s. She was a student of Franz Boas, a disciplinary founder of American Anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only a few decades from modernist founding to postmodern crisis, then—but in the heat of battle it felt to all concerned as if ancient testaments were at issue.
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de Zengotita, T. (2019). New Authorities, Works, and Disciplines. In: Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_3
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