Late Modernism. Robert Genter

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СКАЧАТЬ acts effectively but still provides means of expression, standards of expectations and tools of ordering, while the new, the ‘post-modern,’ still lacks definition, expression and tools but effectively controls our actions and their impact.”³¹ Similarly, in his 1957 introduction to Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, a collection of essays by a number of prominent postwar intellectuals, Bernard Rosenberg, too, invoked a sense of historical transformation: “In short, the postmodern world offers man everything or nothing. Any rational consideration of the probabilities leads to a fear that he will be overtaken by the social furies that already beset him.”³² For many, the promise of modernity appeared shattered.

      The only solution for high modernists was to accept the splintering of art from its entanglement with political, economic, and scientific fields. If the separate movements of high modernism in the 1940s and 1950s amounted to anything, it was the defense of the humanities as a corrective to modern science. Dwight Macdonald’s project, for instance, in The Root Is Man was to “define a sphere which is outside the reach of scientific investigation, and whose value judgments cannot be proved (though they can be demonstrated in appropriate and complete unscientific terms).”³³ For Macdonald, such a realm was “the traditional sphere of art and morality.” He was echoed by Theodor Adorno who noted that “with the objectification of the world in the course of progressive demythologization, art and science have separated.”³⁴ As such, aesthetics became for high modernists the only imaginable field through which the particular, the sensuous, and the contingent might be saved from the desiccated and desiccating methods of science and the only remaining habitat for intellectual engagement in which intuitions were not brutalized by concepts. The project of high modernism, then, was to protect the autonomy of art from outside impositions and to offer a form of experience—the aesthetic—that might mitigate the overbearing tendencies of modern life.

      The Autonomy of the Aesthetic

      To begin, high modernists charted the historical progression of art from its ritualistic uses to its isolation within a separate sphere of development at the end of modernity. Following in the footsteps of his friend Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, for instance, noted the historical disintegration of the cultic function of art, which had once linked artistic production to the needs of religious and cultural institutions.³⁵ But after the subsequent revolutions in nineteenth-century Europe had severed the connection between artists and their courtly patrons and with “the authority of everything traditional irretrievably lost,” artistic production became implicated with the rising bourgeois market society.³⁶ Freed from the bondage of church and state patrons but lacking monetary support, artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were forced to align with the bourgeoisie and produce artworks for commodity circulation. Whereas premodern art had participated in religious and political life, modern art, in contrast, was a product of capitalist relations, which, having reduced all production to utility and exchange, had allowed aesthetics to develop autonomously. As Adorno explained, even though it railed against capitalist expansion, modern art “[owed] the historical unfolding of its productive forces” to “the advances of a civilizing rationality” (147). For the first time, artists were free to experiment with the formal properties of their respective mediums, a move evident in the litany of artistic styles in literature and painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the problem for modern artists was to defend their newly won autonomy from their bourgeois consumers who often appropriated modern art for their own ideological commitments. Having experienced the power of the New York art market to determine not only the success of particular artists but also the development of specific artistic movements, Clement Greenberg, for instance, was very cognizant of the “umbilical cord of gold” that attached the avant-garde to the financial support of the “elite.”³⁷ This defense of art as a singular discipline was a daunting proposition under such conditions.

      Paradoxically, then, aesthetics became an autonomous discipline only when artworks became commodities, that is, only when market forces freed cultural production from serving any other purpose except exchange value. Socially, an artwork became autonomous by remaining “derivative, a mere agent of the law of value,” forever tied in bad faith with “economic considerations.”³⁸ Equally problematic was the recognition that the materials, designs, and schemas used by modern artists were contaminated by the historical context from which they were appropriated. Clement Greenberg, for example, connected the origins of Cubism not merely to the unresolved problems in Cezanne’s picture planes but also to the “scientific outlook” of “the highest stage of industrial capitalism.”³⁹ Consequently, “art’s shame,” as Adorno stated, was its closeness to “the existing pattern of material production” from which it tried to distinguish itself.⁴⁰ But since artworks now received their importance in relation to their exchange value because they had been freed from any overarching political, moral, or epistemic purpose, aesthetics was now ironically provided with a ready-made defense against any utilitarian subsumption. Modern artists did not have to provide any justification for the character of their works except through reference to the formal properties of their respective mediums. As pure, self-referential objects deprived of any standardized purpose, artworks retained an intrinsic autonomy through the unique organization of their materials and elements. “The more heavily the situation weighs upon it,” Adorno explained, “the more firmly the work resists it by refusing to submit to anything heteronomous and constituting itself solely in accordance with its own laws.”⁴¹ This notion of form as the key marker of high modernist aesthetics was most fully developed in the literary practices of the New Critics. Reacting to the trends prevalent in American criticism throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, New Critics such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Cleanth Brooks went to great lengths to defend the aesthetic work as a unique source of meaning that was irreducible to historical, biographical, moral, or psychological explanations.⁴² Calling for close readings and textual analysis to protect art from both propagandists and complacent readers, the New Critics argued that the modernist poem had no meaning or purpose extrinsic to its formal structure or to the poetic techniques with which it was constructed. In this way, aesthetics was safeguarded within its own space of development.

      Officially announcing this new school of analysis in his 1941 book The New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom defined the poetic object as a unified structure of various elements, often contradictory and conflicting, held together by certain literary devices. Weaving together words, images, symbols, feelings, and rhythms into the “complex of meaning” that constituted the poem as a whole, the modernist poet attended to the “heterogeneity” of his elements while maintaining an overall “principle of assembly.”⁴³ The New Critic who most thoroughly outlined the formal properties of modernist poetry was Cleanth Brooks, whose Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn (1947) marked the theoretical culmination of the project begun by Tate and Ransom. Envisioning the modern poem as an unforced balancing of discordant attitudes and feelings such as pity and laughter, tenderness and frustration, and love and intellect, Brooks examined the use of four essential elements—paradox, wit, irony, and metaphor—that constituted the modernist poem. Paradox, for Brooks, was the juxtaposition of incongruous views in a given situation, such as the modernist refusal to suppress poetic references to the Christian in the celebration of the pagan. Similarly, wit was the ability to attend to the nuances of language, in particular, the refusal to privilege the denotative or dictionary meaning of words over the countless connotative meanings that might arise within the context of the poem itself. Irony was used, like wit, to temper or qualify a particular statement by offering a “reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities.”⁴⁴ The form most appropriate for these expressions of wit, paradox, and irony was of course metaphor, arguably the most important term for the New Critics. Given the poet’s unwillingness to sacrifice the complexity of experience in the name of direct expression, metaphorical comparisons allowed for subtle shifts in tone, paradoxical attitudes, and pointed suggestions. As a structural component, metaphor also provided the context within which divergent images, words, and ideas gained meaning. Consequently, as Brooks argued, “comparison is the poem in a structural sense” (15). In this way, the form of the poem was not something that merely СКАЧАТЬ