Late Modernism. Robert Genter

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СКАЧАТЬ individual identity in a world that had apparently reduced subjectivity to mere appearance. Such speculations on the metaphysical ranged from appropriations of Buddhist transcendentalism to discourses on a foundational élan vital or energy underlying artistic production. Through references to either mythology or metaphysics, the immediate was translated into the eternal, all in a desperate attempt to respiritualize the world by making the ordinary extraordinary.

      However, not all modernists exhibited the paranoia found in disparate works such as William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch or Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality. Although equally concerned with the problem of mass politics, late modernists were more willing to accept the disorder of the modern world without lapsing into the nostalgic visions of a prelapsarian moment that emerged from high modernist writings or without accepting the more mystical visions of romantic modernists. While most modernist practitioners such as Trilling, Adorno, and Burroughs fretted that the autonomous self was under siege from the contaminating influences of mass society and tried, albeit in different ways, to shore up individual subjectivity from noxious influences, late modernists such as C. Wright Mills and Kenneth Burke outlined the social, historical, and linguistic constitution of the self. In so doing, they promoted those more open and intersubjective forms of identity later associated with postmodernism.²⁵ These modernists were willing to view the self in a much more linear or horizontal fashion than their modernist counterparts who delved into the deeper depths of the self. This, if anything, was the common theme running through diverse texts such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Late modernist practitioners offered a complex account of subject formation, one that dispensed with the overt essentialism of their counterparts and one that was willing to explore the liberating possibilities remaining in a world seemingly full of artifice, imitative practices, and social conformity.

      From Kenneth Burke to James Baldwin to Jasper Johns, late modernists saw a complexity to human identity—a subject that was formed in and through its relations to others, to institutional forms, and to the political landscape. Such late modernists argued that the self was neither fully whole nor autonomous but instead constituted through an endless parade of generalized and significant others—sometimes with overlapping agendas and sometimes with conflicting interests—that provided the context for self-identity. “What is our ‘reality,’” argued Kenneth Burke, “but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present?”²⁶ Like the postmodernist writers who came soon after them, late modernists saw the self as formed through a series of identificatory and linguistic practices. But unlike those postmodernists, Burke and others refused to believe that the self was reducible to the context in which it was situated. One can note the difficulty of this project by examining the odd terminology used by many late modernists—sociologist David Riesman referenced the autonomous other-directed personality, sociologist Erving Goffman spoke of the presentation of self in society, and Kenneth Burke described man as homo rhetorician. For all such writers, the self was not something given but something achieved through a delicate social, linguistic, and economic performance, a self that emerged from the landscape of everyday life and that tried to provide an account of its needs, desires, and possibilities. These late modernists provided a description of the self that included, however hesitant, language of the self as subject.

      In this sense, my book is both a work of tradition building, in which I carve out an overlooked moment in American intellectual history, and a work of cultural history, in which I map these debates over modernism onto the cultural terrain of the early Cold War. In so doing, I chart the contentious debate between these three forms of modernism—high, romantic, and late—over the nature of art and the nature of the subject. In Part I, I analyze the rise and fall of high modernism, examining how a range of critics such as Lionel Trilling, Theodor Adorno, and Clement Greenberg tried to promote high art as a rejoinder to an American landscape dominated by science and technology and threatened by the specter of totalitarianism from abroad. As the Cold War progressed, these high modernists eventually forfeited their prior aesthetic commitments and turned to more conservative assumptions about social transformation. Throughout, I detail the response by several late modernists who critiqued the failed project of high modernism, exposing its biases and limitations. In Part II, I trace the development of romantic modernism, exemplified by the action painting of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the spontaneous poetics of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, an avant-garde that similarly critiqued the conservative politics of high modernism. Offering endless metaphysical speculations on the true grounding of being, these romantic modernists tried to salvage the self from a supposedly decrepit, authoritarian culture. Such wild speculations were at times quite cartoonish, and throughout Part II, I examine the rejoinder offered by late modernists to these compatriots as well, exposing the reactionary, if not retrograde, assumptions about identity lurking behind their aesthetic project. Finally, in Part III I summarize the theoretical and aesthetic project of late modernism, demonstrating not only the contribution of writers such as Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison to the postmodern turn of the 1960s and 1970s but their own independent reworking of modernism overall. Readers of course will object to certain characterizations of particular works or the pigeonholing of certain thinkers. This is endemic to any attempt at classification. But the refusal to make categorical distinctions leads, borrowing from a famous phrase, to the night in which all cows are black. As we begin to answer difficult questions such as “who comes after the subject,” we might need to look backward to move forward.²⁷ Any post-postmodernist conceptualization of the self needs to recognize the social, political, and historical roots of this dilemma.

      PART I

      High Modernism in America

      Self and Society in the Early Cold War

      CHAPTER ONE

      Science, Postmodernity, and the Rise of High Modernism

      IN JULY 1945 Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, submitted a presidential report titled Science: The Endless Frontier in which he detailed a plan for federal support of scientific research in peacetime. With a certain utopian flourish, Bush argued that “advances in science, when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages past.”¹ Given the climate of a society transitioning to an uncertain peacetime order, Bush’s arguments for a permanent collaboration between universities, corporations, and the military to conduct basic and applied research found a receptive audience. The technological achievements made by civilian scientists working under the auspices of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the Manhattan Project had made federal officials very aware of the contributions to national strategic policy offered by scientific experts and generated considerable enthusiasm for extending large-scale, government-sponsored research into the postwar era, giving rise to what Alvin Weinberg, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, termed “big science.”² Indeed, by the end of hostilities with Japan, the “great science debate,” as Fortune magazine described, had begun.³ In obvious ways, the rise of Cold War tensions gave considerable urgency to the development of a working accommodation between scientists, military planners, and government officials, an accommodation that was formed through a series of protracted debates over the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950, over the shortage of scientific manpower that reached a crisis point during the Korean War, and over the challenges that Soviet advancements presented after the famous launching of a Russian satellite in 1957. James Conant, in his 1947 retirement speech as president СКАЧАТЬ