Late Modernism. Robert Genter

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СКАЧАТЬ any kind, not a piece of rationality” but rather in “a way of being and of acting” (251). This “negative capability,” according to Trilling, was dependent upon a certain personal strength, found in a self that was “certain of its existence” and that could do “without the armor of systematic certainties” (249).

      Other high modernists found similar intellectual heroes. In his portrait of Thomas Mann, with whom he had collaborated when the two were in exile in southern California during the early 1940s, Theodor Adorno described a man living “in a world of high-handed and self-centered people” who knew that “the only better alternative” was to “loosen the bonds of identity and not become rigid,” an artist with “two extremely different handwritings,” one of “heaviness” and one of “involuntary starts,” and a man whose rhythm of life was “not continuity but rather an oscillation” between the extremes of “rigidity and illumination.”⁴⁰ The modernist hero of Dwight Macdonald’s The Root Is Man was a slightly more distant figure—the American modernist Henry James, who possessed the maturity to recognize the “imperfections” of “present knowledge.”⁴¹ Willing to accept the “tragic limitations of human existence,” James, according to Macdonald, taught the importance of moderation, exhibiting a life lived “with contradictions” and “skepticism” (145). Similarly, Clement Greenberg, years after Jackson Pollock’s death, claimed that the artist had possessed “what Keats called Negative Capability: he could be doubtful and uncertain without becoming bewildered—that is, in what concerned his art.”⁴² Of course, since Pollock was not able to maintain such a temperament in his personal life and since he was, much to the chagrin of Greenberg, an acknowledged Stalinist for most of his life, high modernists like Greenberg had difficulty in translating this negative capability to the general public as an antidote to antidemocratic sentiments.

      Modernist Aesthetics and the Tempering of the Self

      Some Cold War intellectuals, most notably Sidney Hook, placed considerable faith in progressive education to reinforce liberal tolerance. Even Max Horkheimer, in one of his more optimistic moments, argued that irrational politics stemmed from a “lack of enlightenment.”⁴³ In his contribution to a United Nations–supported investigation into the “tensions that cause war,” Horkheimer observed that “the task of those engaged in education on all levels, from the high school history class to the mass media of communication, was to see to it that the experiences of the last war of aggression, which came very close to success, become deeply engraved in the minds of all people” (241). This was also the conclusion of Life magazine’s 1948 “Round Table on the Pursuit of Happiness,” featuring “eighteen prominent Americans” including Edmund Walsh, Sidney Hook, and Erich Fromm, all of whom concluded that “editors, educators, the clergy and various individuals and institutions immediately concerned with the enlightenment of the people” needed to help stem the tide of dread threatening democratic society.⁴⁴ Of course pedagogical indoctrination was not very appealing to many high modernists who were quite skeptical of the nation’s educational system. The other solutions offered by social scientists—mandatory therapy sessions for suspected political deviants and compulsory physical activity to sublimate aggression—were similarly untenable to those who worried about the pressures of conformity. Instead, the danger of identity thinking, argued many high modernists, might also be tempered by the aesthetic experience provided by modern art. As an order of knowledge and a cognitive experience separate from the instrumental world of science, the realm of art, even more than progressive education, supposedly softened the hostile tendencies of the ego. For instance, Lionel Trilling argued that the “negative capability” taught through the experience of art emancipated the individual from the compulsive need to grasp reality in a strictly cognitive manner. The “practical usefulness” of the novel, according to Trilling, arose from its “unremitting work” in forcing the individual “to put his own motives under examination, suggesting that reality is not as his conventional education has led him to see it.”⁴⁵ Modernist art, according to Trilling, presented a direct challenge to utopian illusions and moral crusading in the name of maturity, sobriety, and skepticism.

      Of course high modernists described the tempering nature of art in different ways. In his essay “The Sense of the Past,” Trilling defended the modernist canon for the “historical sense” it provided readers, serving as a quelling agent for the will’s innate aggression.⁴⁶ Trilling argued that the literary work functioned as a form of estrangement because it opened a window to a moment of reality no longer recoverable and no longer understandable. In contrast to liberals and Communists who sought redemption in forthcoming utopias, Trilling turned to the past. This sense of history provided a moment beyond ideology—“without the sense of the past we might be more certain, less weighted down and apprehensive” (185). Naturally, Trilling was not promoting some antiquarian impulse. To acknowledge the “pastness” of a work of art, he argued, was to acknowledge it as a “thing we can never wholly understand.” Aggressive contemplation was retarded by “the mystery, the unreachable part” of the artwork that was irreducible to “ideological or subjective distortion” (180). Any particular meaning derived from a historically distinct piece of literature was therefore incomplete. For Trilling, “we ought to have it fully in mind that our abstraction is not perfectly equivalent to the infinite complication of events from which we have abstracted” (189). This “historical sense” provided by art counted as “one of the aesthetic and critical faculties” that aided the individual in escaping his own subjective “abstractions” (188).

      Like Trilling, Theodor Adorno argued that if totalitarian ideologies strove to awaken the primal aggression of man, modern art might serve to temper that impulse. But in contrast to Trilling, Adorno described the reception of the aesthetic object as a form of mimesis. He reformulated the concept to refer not to the imitative reproduction of nature but to the spectator’s role in the consumption of the aesthetic object.⁴⁷ In order to avoid the reductive translation of the artwork by preformed categories of thought, the spectator needed, according to Adorno, to imitate or mimic the movements within the object itself. The spectator was to trace mentally the internal dynamics of the work, following the contours of the painterly strokes, the trajectories of the musical refrain, and the rhythmic articulations of the poetic verse. In other words, the spectator did “not understand a work of art” when it was translated “into concepts” but rather when the spectator was “immersed in its immanent movement,” that is, when the work was “recomposed by the ear in accordance with its own logic, repainted by the eye, when the linguistic sensorium speaks along with it.”⁴⁸ The aesthetic experience was receptive and sensuous, offering a form of knowing separate from conceptual domination. Since the spectator did “not actually think” but instead made himself “into an arena for intellectual experience, without unraveling it,” the aesthetic experience produced a momentary hesitation in the individual and a sense of wonderment, effects that served to loosen the rigidity of the individual ego.⁴⁹

      The spectator of course was not entirely passive. The aesthetic experience required active effort—an attentiveness to artistic detail and a knowledge of previous artistic traditions. High modernism was nothing if not deeply intellectual. But the experience of high art was not reducible to an understanding of technique; indeed, the works themselves produced their own standard of judgment to which the spectator submitted. As Adorno argued, “the ability to see works of art from the inside … is probably the only form in which aesthetics is still possible.”⁵⁰ This aesthetic experience avoided both the complete loss of self associated with total immersion in the object and the domination of it associated with cognitive manipulation. Mimesis taught the spectator to respect the otherness of the other by momentarily relaxing the need to grasp and repress and by momentarily suspending the cognitive for a form of perception much closer to the erotic. As such, the aesthetic experience “may contain the potential to counteract the deterioration of human capacities—what would be called ‘ego weakness’ in current psychological terminology” (102). Adorno was not alone in his speculations; his reconsideration of mimesis as the elemental principle of aesthetics was in fact prefigured by the New Critics. For example, in his 1938 essay, “The Mimetic Principle,” John Crowe СКАЧАТЬ