Modernism and the idea of Time
During the last 150 years, the terms "modern", "modernity" and "modernism" have been used in artistic or literary contexts to put forth an increasingly sharp sense of historical relativism, which is a form of criticism of tradition. From the point of view of modernity, an artist is cut off from the past with fixed ideas, and tradition has no legitimate examples to offer him to imitate. His own awareness of the present appears as the main source of inspiration and creativity. This was a major cultural shift from a time-honoured aesthetic of permanence, based on a belief in an unchanging and transcendent ideal of beauty, to an aesthetic of the transitory and immanence, whose central values are change and novelty.
Modernity in the broadest sense, is reflected in the irreconcilable opposition between the set of values corresponding to a) the objectified socially measurable time of capitalist civilization (time as a commodity, bought and sold on the market) and b) the person, subjective, imaginative private time created by the unfolding of the "self". This identity of time and self constitutes the foundation of modernist culture. For all its objectivity and rationality, modernity has lacked (after the demise of religion), any compelling moral or metaphysical justification. The time consciousness reflected in modernist culture that is produced by the isolated self, is a reaction against the dehumanized time of social activity.
Even during the late 17th and 18th-centuries, most of the 'moderns' continued to consider beauty as transcendental and eternal. They were still connected to the ancients, even if they believed they had gained a better, more rational understanding of its laws. Romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries first defined its historical legitimacy as a reaction against the basic assumptions of classicism, however, and the concept of a universally intelligible and timeless beauty began to undergo a process of steady erosion. This process first became self-conscious in France. A French writer named Stendhal (1783-1842) had a notion of romanticism that carried not only a sense of commitment to an aesthetic programme, but also a sense of presentness and immediacy. Most of his predecessors, however, saw in romanticism nothing less than an artistic expression of the whole of Christianity as opposed to the world-view of pagan antiquity. [Stendhal wrote The Red and the Black - the red signifying the army and liberation, and the black signifying the reactionary clergy.]
With the breakup of tradition, aesthetic authority, time, change, and the self-consciousness of the present have tended increasingly to become sources of value in the "adversary culture" (Lionel Trilling) of modernism. Historically, Baudelaire, one of the first artists to oppose aesthetic modernity not only to tradition but also to the practical modernity of bourgeois civilization, illustrates the intriguing moment when the old notion of the universal beauty had shrunk enough to reach a delicate equilibrium with its modern counterconcept, the beauty of transitoriness. In Les Fleurs du Mal, he wrote: "Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable…" After Baudelaire, the ever-changing consciousness of modernity as a source of beauty succeeded in prevailing and finally in eliminating, the "other half" of art. Tradition was rejected with increasing violence and the artistic imagination started priding itself on exploring and mapping the realm of the "not yet." Modernity opened the path to the avant-gardes. At the same time, modernity turned against itself, and by regarding itself as 'decadence', dramatized its own deep sense of crisis.
The end result of both modernities seems to be 'relativism'. The clash between the two modernities, renewed with increasing intensity over the last 150 years or so, appears to have led to a near-exhaustion of both as intellectual myths. After the Second World War, and especially since the 1950s, the concept of a post-modern age has been advanced by a variety of thinkers and scholars.
(Information for this blog was taken from Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, by Matei Calinescu, Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and West European Studies at Indiana University.)
Modernity in the broadest sense, is reflected in the irreconcilable opposition between the set of values corresponding to a) the objectified socially measurable time of capitalist civilization (time as a commodity, bought and sold on the market) and b) the person, subjective, imaginative private time created by the unfolding of the "self". This identity of time and self constitutes the foundation of modernist culture. For all its objectivity and rationality, modernity has lacked (after the demise of religion), any compelling moral or metaphysical justification. The time consciousness reflected in modernist culture that is produced by the isolated self, is a reaction against the dehumanized time of social activity.
Even during the late 17th and 18th-centuries, most of the 'moderns' continued to consider beauty as transcendental and eternal. They were still connected to the ancients, even if they believed they had gained a better, more rational understanding of its laws. Romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries first defined its historical legitimacy as a reaction against the basic assumptions of classicism, however, and the concept of a universally intelligible and timeless beauty began to undergo a process of steady erosion. This process first became self-conscious in France. A French writer named Stendhal (1783-1842) had a notion of romanticism that carried not only a sense of commitment to an aesthetic programme, but also a sense of presentness and immediacy. Most of his predecessors, however, saw in romanticism nothing less than an artistic expression of the whole of Christianity as opposed to the world-view of pagan antiquity. [Stendhal wrote The Red and the Black - the red signifying the army and liberation, and the black signifying the reactionary clergy.]
With the breakup of tradition, aesthetic authority, time, change, and the self-consciousness of the present have tended increasingly to become sources of value in the "adversary culture" (Lionel Trilling) of modernism. Historically, Baudelaire, one of the first artists to oppose aesthetic modernity not only to tradition but also to the practical modernity of bourgeois civilization, illustrates the intriguing moment when the old notion of the universal beauty had shrunk enough to reach a delicate equilibrium with its modern counterconcept, the beauty of transitoriness. In Les Fleurs du Mal, he wrote: "Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable…" After Baudelaire, the ever-changing consciousness of modernity as a source of beauty succeeded in prevailing and finally in eliminating, the "other half" of art. Tradition was rejected with increasing violence and the artistic imagination started priding itself on exploring and mapping the realm of the "not yet." Modernity opened the path to the avant-gardes. At the same time, modernity turned against itself, and by regarding itself as 'decadence', dramatized its own deep sense of crisis.
The end result of both modernities seems to be 'relativism'. The clash between the two modernities, renewed with increasing intensity over the last 150 years or so, appears to have led to a near-exhaustion of both as intellectual myths. After the Second World War, and especially since the 1950s, the concept of a post-modern age has been advanced by a variety of thinkers and scholars.
(Information for this blog was taken from Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, by Matei Calinescu, Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and West European Studies at Indiana University.)
posted by maggiesong at 5:21 PM
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