Two Camps of Modernity and the emerging push of the Middle Class

In a book, Five Faces of Modernitiy: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, by Matei Calinescu, published by Duke University Press, Durham, NC in 1987, I have been doing some reading about the "modern", and "modernism", and "postmodernism". Calinescu is a Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and West European Studies at Indiana University. His books and articles include studies on modernism, postmodernism, and the relations between literature, religion, and politics.

He has written: At some point during the first half of the 19th-century, an irreversible split occurred between modernity as a stage in the history of Western civilization - a product of scientific and tehnological progress, of the industrial revolution, of the sweeping economic and social changes brought about by capitalism - and modernity as an aesthetic concept.

With regard to modernity as a stage in the history of Western civilization, the bourgeois idea of modernity, it has continued the outstanding traditions of earlier periods in the history of the modern idea:

*the doctrine of progress,

*the confidence in the beneficial possibilities of science and technology,

*the concern with time (a measurable time, a time that can be bought and sold and therefore has, like any other commodity, a calculable equivalent in money),

*the cult of reason,

*the ideal of freedom defined within the framework of an abstract humanism,

*the orientation toward pragmatism and the cult of action and success - all have been associated in various degrees with the battle for the modern and were kept alive and promoted as key values in the triumphant civilization established by the middle class.

By contrast, the other modernity, the one that was to bring into being the avant-gardes, was from its romantic beginnings inclined toward radical antibourgeois attitudes. It was disgusted with the middle-class scale of values and expressed its disgust through the most diverse means, ranging from rebellion, anarchy, and aristocratic self-exile. More than its positive aspirations, what defines cultural modernity is its outright rejection of bourgeois modernity, and its consuming negative passion.

The Oxford English Dictionary records the first occurrence of "modernity" (meaning "present times") in 1627. It also cites Horace Walpole, who in a letter of 1782 spoke of Chatterton's poems in terms of "the modernity of modulation", which "nobody can get over". Horace Walpole's use of "modernity" as an argument in the famous controversy about the Rowley Poems (1777) of Thomas Chatterton - a poet whose work and tragic myth were to become so popular with the next, fully romantic generation - implies a subtle sense of aesthetic modernity. "Modernity" appears to be close to both the idea of personal "fashion" ("the fashion of the poems was Chatterton's own") and to what Walpole terms "the recent cast of ideas and phraseology" but one should not confuse it with either. Its actual sense, in Walpole's view, was one of sound and "modulation", and we can best comprehend it musically. As for France, the corresponding term "modernité" was not used before the middle of the 19th-century.

"Chatterton's influence has been detected in Keats's Medieval poems The Eve of St. Agnes and The Eve of St. Mark. A closer parallel to Chatterton's recreation of fifteenth-century Bristol in the Rowley poems, however, may be Keats's depiction of ancient Greece in Endymion, a poem dedicated "to the Memory of Thomas Chatterton." For both poets, the attempt to revive a past world is in part a consequence of their social positions and has political implications.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both historiography and the study or interpretation of classical literature were preserves of the elite, educated classes and therefore considered off-limits to young men trained as legal copyists and surgeon apothecaries like Chatterton and Keats. In presuming to participate in antiquarian research or "[touch] the beautiful mythology of Greece" Chatterton and Keats were presumptuously aspiring beyond their traditional class prerogatives, as is made clear by the criticism to which both were subjected by conservative critics. Chatterton and Keats were part of a growing number of middle-class people claiming a right to engage in activities once the exclusive preserves of gentlemen. The harsh condemnations they and others of their class received reflect the anxieties of those in authority who feared a breakdown in traditional social hierarchies." (above paragraph taken from: Protest, "Nativism" and Impersonation in the Works of Chatterton and Keats Journal article by Beth Lau; Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 42, 2003)

The history of the alienation of the modern writer started with the romantic movement. In an early phase, the object of hatred and ridicule was 'philistinism', a typical form of middle-class hypocrisy. The best example is pre-romantic and romantic Germany, where the critique of philistine mentality (with its pretensions, and false, totally inadequate praise of intellectual values to disguise an obsessive preoccupation with material ones) played an essential role in the overall picture of cultural life. While the term "philistine", acquired a definite social meaning, first in Germany, it then spread into all Western cultures. The philistine is defined mainly by his class background, all his intellectual attitudes being nothing but disguises of practical interests and social concerns.

The idea of art's autonomy was not a novelty in the 1830s, when the battlecry of Art for Art's Sake became popular in France among circles of young Behemian poets and painters. The view of art as an autonomous activity had been defended half a century earlier by Kant, who in his Critique of Judgment (1790), had formulated his paradoxical concept of art's "purposiveness without a purpose" and thus affirmed art's fundamental disinterestedness. But l'art pour l'art as it was conceived by Théophile Gautier and his followers was not so much a full-fledged aesthetic theory as a rallying cry for artists who had become weary of empty romantic humanitarianism and felt the need to express their hatred of bourgeois mercantilism and vulgar utilitarianism. In contrast to the view defended by Kant and his disciples in Germany, the partisans of l'art pour l'art promote a primary concept of beauty, derived not so much from an ideal of disinterestedness as from an aggressive assertion of art's total gratuitousness. This concept of beauty is perfectly summed up by the famous formula - épater le bourgeois. Art for Art's Sake was the first product of aesthetic modernity's rebellion against the modernity of the philistine.