Introduction: The Future’s Past—Modernism, Critique, and the Political

Abstract

The story of how modernism came under fire from postmodern aesthetic practices in the 1960s and 1970s has often been told. At stake was the possibility of redefining the critical and political potential of art beyond categories that had governed aesthetic discourse for centuries. These included the aesthetic concepts of autonomy, representation, temporality, and narrativity as well as epistemological categories such as a stable self and self-transparent consciousness, linear time and teleological history, or universal morality and self-determining reason. The first wave of critics that read the rise of new artistic and philosophical discourses in Europe and North America as evidence of the end of modernity and the exhaustion of modernism soon found itself faced with intractable conceptual and methodological problems, however. Indeed, early endeavors to define postmodernism in contradistinction to modernism foundered on the conspicuous persistence of modernist concerns in postmodern art and literature. As it soon became clear, the attempt to demarcate epochal caesurae—postmodernism versus modernism, postmodernity versus modernity—remained caught in modes of temporalization and categorization that reproduced the problem rather than offering a solution. Perhaps the most glaring deficit of these early attempts was their failure to grasp the most fruitful tendency within postmodern thought, namely, its paradoxical sense of continuity and rupture with regard to the past; in particular, with regard to its modernist past.¹