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The Modernist Impulse

Modernity is a crucial concept in contemporary discourse. It is often vaguely described as a set of cultural and political preoccupations that arose during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These involved the nature of moral autonomy, tolerance, the character of progress, and the meaning of humanity. Modernity justified itself through scientific rationality and an ethical view of the good life that rested on universal values and the democratic exercise of common sense. Civil liberties and the tolerance associated with a free public sphere were logically implied by these secular liberal notions, along with ideas concerning the rule of law and citizenship. All of this was part of an assault on powerful religious institutions and aristocratic privileges in the name of a liberal watchman state coupled with a free market. The rising bourgeoisie introduced a new economic production process that rested on the division of labor, standardization, bureaucratic hierarchy, and the profit-driven values of the commodity form. The use of mathematical or instrumental rationality by this class tended to define reality in such a way that qualitative differences were transformed into merely quantitative differences. Those who worked to create commodities were treated as a cost of production, or an appendage of the machine, while the accumulation of capital served to inspire all activity. The living subject (workers) that produced and reproduced society thereby appeared as an object, whereas the dead object of its activity (capital) appeared as a subject. The result was what first G. W. F. Hegel and then Karl Marx termed the inverted worlda world of modernity shaped by alienation and reification. Modernism was the response to this world. The assault was launched by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Discourses (1750), The Social Contract (1762),

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and mile (1762) not only embraced nature as a standard for combating the illusions attendant upon progress and the alienation reflected in its arts and sciences. They also championed a new form of democratic community and a new pedagogy to educate the sensibility as well as the mind. Rousseaus Confessions (1782) demonstrated a remarkable sexual frankness and a preoccupation with authenticity. Trends like Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang) and schools like romanticism and classical idealism acknowledged their debt to Rousseau. Out of his vision other philosophers constructed their critique of materialism, utilitarianism, and the suffocating elements of industrial progress. Aesthetic ideals such as the sublime arose with thinkers like Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller.1 Art would now refashion emotions like fear, anguish, and even terror in such a way that each member of the audience might feel sympathy for the persecuted and, recognizing himself in the other, a sense of common humanity and dignity. Works like J.W. Goethes The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Benjamin Constants Adolphe (1816) captured the world of youth with its Weltschmerz, along with the tensions between authentic feeling and the hypocrisy and prudery of established conventions. The emotional intensity and dramatic verve of Schillers The Robbers (1781) created a sensationand it only made sense that his Ode to Happiness (1824) should have been employed by Ludwig van Beethoven for his Ninth Symphony (1824). The wonderful poetry of Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley echo these themes. All of them embraced a bohemian style that mixed an insistence on expanding personal experience with a hatred of injustice born of solidarity with the less fortunate. A stance emerged that would juxtapose the aesthetic (and often the premodern past) with the reality of modern life. These trends prefigured and shaped what would become known as modernism. But, ultimately, these earlier movements did not offer an overarching assault on society. Reinvigorating art was their purpose. Revolutionary politics was another matter. For the modernists, by contrast, the one was the precondition for the other. Or, better, they were one and the same. Modernism would call into question every aspect of modern life, from the architecture through which our apartments are designed, to the furniture in which we sit, to the comic books our children read, to the films we watch and the museums we visit, to the experience of time and individual possibility that mark our lives. Modernists may have believed that they were contesting modernity, but their efforts and their hopes were shaped by it. Their activities legitimated what they intended to oppose. Their cri-

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tique, in short, presupposed its object. Modernists believed that they were contesting tradition in the name of the new and the constraints of everyday life in the name of multiplied experience and individual freedom. These artists were essentially anarchists imbued with what Georg Lukcs termed romantic anti-capitalism.2 They opposed the system without understanding how it worked or what radical political transformation required and implied. Oddly, they never understood how deeply they were enmeshed in what they opposed. Modernists envisioned an apocalypse that had no place for institutions or agents generated within modernity. Theirs was less a concern with class consciousness than an opposition to the alienating and reifying constraints of modernity. Unfettered freedom of expression and a transformation in the experience of everyday life were the modernists goals. Even when seduced by totalitarian movements, whether of the left or the right, most of them despised what Czeslaw Milosz called the captive mind. Not all the problems that they uncoveredsexual repression and generational conflicts, among othersrequired utopian solutions. But their utopian inclinations were transparent from the beginning. Modernists believed that the new would not come from within modernity, but would appear as an external event or force for which, culturally, the vanguard would act as a catalyst. Modernism is not reducible to its artists, works, or intended purposes. The modernist ethos highlights experience in its immediacy and the constraints that tradition places upon it. Bohemian radicals everywhere sought to resist tradition and the ingrained habits of everyday life. Michel Foucault emphasized just this point by noting how modern painting derives from the new understanding of the picture object introduced by the spatial, perspectival, and lighting techniques of Manet.3 Modernists sought to break down the wall separating the audience from the work. Style, in short, went public, ultimately shaping the perception of the enemy and the self-professed political resistance of the artist. Liberal humanist Italy thus spawned an antihumanist and bellicose futurism, while an authoritarianmilitarist Germany generated a mostly humanist and pacifist expressionism. Modernism surely underestimated liberalism, with its reliance on the individual as the cornerstone of society and its insistence on prohibiting only what is condemned by law. The liberation of experience was far more important. Intensity became the ethical purpose of life. Ludwig Rubiner an expressionist poet and a democratput the matter bluntly in Man in the Middle (1918) when he wrote, Politics is the public manifestation of our ethical intentions.

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Modernism was not about institutions; its advocates didnt think about them. Their enemy was decadence, and in responding to it, they appropriated diverse contributions from nonwestern cultures. Painters and sculptors in particular, but also certain writers like Andr Gide and D. H. Lawrence, turned to Africa, Asia, and Latin America for inspiration. Modernists thereby transformed and broadened the understanding of art. Pluralism and tolerance lie at the core of modernism, but it never required liberal institutions to flourish.4 The Austrian, German, and Russian empires served as crucibles for modernism. Its symbolic power of resistance is, arguably, diminished in more liberal societies where the culture industry thrives on fads and artists are encouraged to challenge limits. Authoritarian regimes repress the new while liberal regimes domesticate it. For all that, however, modernism retains its salience, exhibiting what Ulrich Beck termed a subpolitical quality. It tests existing customs and mores by sparking the desire for new adventures, new experiences, and new ways of understanding the world. Modernism enlarges the world and strengthens the cosmopolitan sensibility. With its injunction to make it new, indeed, modernism serves as the inner core or existential truth of modernity. No wonder then that the modernist undertaking should have taken place in cities. The urban landscape breeds cosmopolitanism and the bohemian response to traditionalism. Journals like the expressionist Der Sturm and Die Aktion,5 the futurist Lacerba, and Rvolution Surraliste appeared and championed the new, not just in Berlin, London, and Paris but also in Barcelona, Bucharest, Budapest, Florence, Kiev, and elsewhere.6 An international avant-gardea term first introduced by Henri St. Simoncrystallized throughout Europe. Its particular movements often overlapped. All of them opposed philosophical formalism, institutional politics, and an economy built on calculable profit and materialist values. Ironically, however, they all considered their actual admirers to be their implacable enemies. Their individualism, experimentalism, and cosmopolitanism appealed to the liberal elements of the bourgeoisie. Peasants and shopkeepers had little use for their assault on traditionalism and authoritarian attitudes. The bohemian style of the modernists, moreover, made them the object of scorn by a semiliterate working class living in hideous conditions and burdened with very different concerns. Modernism was mostly immune to the influence of Marx. Most of its partisans were contemptuous of the seemingly more mundane concerns of the socialist labor movement and its cultural tastes. Few emphasized the disenfranchisement and systemic exploitation of the proletariat and even

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FIGURE 1.1

Die Aktion magazine (19111932).

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fewer participated in its political organizations. Modernists were more preoccupied with existential matters and aesthetic explorationwhat Flaubert might have termed an education of the sentiments. They understood themselves as engaged in a higher politics whose agent, whatever it was, was not the working class. The modernist avant-garde was focused on neither reform nor revolution. Its members experimented with multiplying experience, broadening the possibilities of perception, exploding the habitual, and transforming the way in which people relate to one another. Intergenerational tensions were raised in works like Patricide (1922) by Arnolt Bronnen and The Maurizius Case (1928) by Jakob Wassermann. The devastating implications of sexual repression, innocence, and hypocrisy were given sensational expression in plays like Springs Awakening (1906) by Frank Wedekind and Julie (1888) by August Strindberg. Patriarchy and gender oppression were the themes of masterpieces like A Room of Ones Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf and A Dolls House by Ibsen. Same-sex love was brought out of the closet in The Immoralist (1902) by Andr Gide and the poems of Gertrude Stein. All of this was connected with articulating a new sensibility; institutional power was an afterthought. The subpolitical became the substitute for politics. Modernists justified their cultural understanding of politics through a seemingly endless supply of manifestoes and philosophical tracts that usually combined a mishmash of half-baked claims.7 For all the bombast, there were no practical programs for social or political change. Modernists were content with imagining a new cultural community in which their radical individualism would blossom. Oscar Wilde is a case in point. His witty and satirical plays made him the toast of London, before his sensational trial left him bereft of friends and a disgraced exile in Paris.8 Wilde was a homosexual dandy with socialist sympathies who hated vulgarity as much as injustice. He exemplified that strange mixture of elitism and populism that marked the avant-garde. Author of a lovely essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), he may not have thought much about the means for bringing about a transformation in human nature, but, like so many other modernists, he did understand that the liberating quality of socialism depended on something other than more efficient production and more equitable distribution of wealth. Wilde symbolized the assault on Victorian prudery and hypocrisy. He also personified the bohemian opposition to the standardizing, mechanizing, and alienating tendencies of the commodity form and mass society. Modernism can be understood as an antiauthoritarian reaction to modernity or, more precisely, the reification process usually identified with

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modernity.9 All the major movements and artists identified with modernism contested the sexual constraints of the Victorian age, the attitudes of their own national bourgeoisie, and the consensual and common-sense understanding of the real. Some modernists tended to the left and others to the right; some were advocates of technology and a ruthless realism, while others embraced the religious and the sentimental. For all that, however, there remains what Louis Althusser would have called the problematic of modernism. Only by focusing on that problematic is it possible to illuminate the contributions, contradictions, and utopian projections of the modernist enterprise Modernists confidently considered their enterprise an apocalyptic breakthrough. They desired to reenchant and invigorate the world that modernity had disenchanted and deadened. This marked their rebellion and their rationality of resistance. It also generated a political outlook in which modernism was so often defined by what it opposed.10 That is why modernist artists could often comfortably stand on both sides of the political barricade and still treat one another as comrades. Those on the left like mile Zola, Pablo Picasso, Heinrich Mann and others are well known. But modernism also had its famous right-wing partisans, including Maurice Barrs, Paul Czanne, Edgar Degas, Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and a host of others whose stars have dimmed.11 These two political wings of the modernist movement knew one another, influenced one another, andespecially before the Russian Revolution of 1917 often associated with one another both at home and abroad. Representatives from opposing political wings of the modernist movement still shared certain cultural convictions. These, I believe, centered on the existence of a common enemy and a common (if indeterminate) utopian ideal: the cultural philistine (Bildungsphilister) and the new man who would supplant him.12 Who is the cultural philistine? There is no clear answer. He is the anxiety-ridden petty bourgeois, the provincial fearful of the new, the liberal banker puffing his cigar, the old geezer admonishing the young, the schoolteacher eulogizing the classics, the censor intent on banning James Joyces Ulysses (1922), the uneducated proletarian, the sexually repressed rationalist, the aristocratic traditionalist, orthinking back to a song from the 1960s by The Kinksthe well-respected man about town doing the best thing so conservatively. An exact definition doesnt matter; the cultural philistine was not the representative of any specific class, status group, or institution. Sometimes the modernists image of the cultural philistine perfectly fit with the stalwart of political reaction. The small-minded

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FIGURE 1.2 The Revolution of the Word Proclamation (appeared in issue 16/17 of Transition, June 1929) by Eugene Jolas.

Used with permission from Betsy Jolas

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tyrant described so beautifully by Heinrich Mann in his novel Professor Unrat (1905) is a case in point. (Its more conservative cinematic adaptation, The Blue Angel (1930), launched the career of Marlene Dietrich.) But the use of the stereotype also led modernists astray. Robert Musils devastating caricature of Walther Rathenau in The Man Without Qualities (1930) identified the cultural philistine with a supposedly superficial individual of immense power who, in his real life, was a liberal foreign minister, a cosmopolitan, and an admirer of modernism. In any event, the cultural philistine was not simply identical with an advocate of political reaction. Kurt Tucholsky, the great journalistic satirist, as well as the anarchist Erich Mhsam, skewered all those who were lukewarm in their cultural and political opinions. There was the social democratic Spiesser, the liberal who always sees both sides, the phony revolutionary (or Revoluzzer) no less than the stuffy conservative, the self-righteous nationalist, and the know-nothing Nazi. Attacking the cultural philistine was considered a political act by the modernists because he appeared as the incarnation of all authority. The cultural philistine was everywhere, and modernists believed that he was the principal obstacle to the transformation of everyday life and the introduction of the new man. The cultural philistine thrived on mass culture with its leveling tendencies. Just when literacy was beginning to climb, and the possibilities of cultural experience were reaching out to a broader public, capitalism was already beginning to standardize artistic production and privilege the lowest common denominator. The issue here is not high versus popular culture. It is rather traditionalism.13 Many modernists embraced popular themes and styles. But they rejected simplification for its own sake and the reproduction of what was already familiar. The conformity and parochialism of mass society led Baudelaire to present himself as a dandy and to speak ironically about the heroism of modern life. While progressive political activists of the radical liberal or socialist variety were still concerned with universal suffrage and economic reform, modernists insisted that the real fight involved contesting popular tastes. The contradiction is palpable. The fact is that a number of modernists were democrats, but modernism was not a democratic movement.14 The cultural philistine assumed different guises in different national situations, and different modernist groups held different images of the society that they wished to transform. Until after World War I, this was arguably a matter of secondary importance. Contesting the stereotypic laziness and humanitarian liberalism of the Italian bourgeoisie generated a preoccupation with war and technological dynamism by the Italian futurists. In

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Spain, by contrast, the religious dogmatism and archaic monarchy with its feudal habits produced the elitist liberalism of Jos Ortega y Gasset and the generation of 98. In Austria the stultifying provincialism, religiosity, and small-mindedness fostered the liberal rationalism of Sigmund Freud and Stefan Zweig as well as the more bohemian assault conducted by Arthur Schnitzler, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka on the sexual decadence and hypocritical puritanism of a society still under the sway of throne and altar. The chauvinism and authoritarianism of imperial Germany produced the radical individualism and spiritual populism of expressionist painting. It also led to the often histrionic assault on patriarchy and sexual repression that the Norwegian August Strindberg had taught to Germanys far less influential and talented playwrights. But the point of reference was always the philistine.15 William Morris understood socialism as the response less to capitalism than to the philistinism of modern society. Knut Hamsun viewed the philistine as a democrat, scorned the masses, and ultimately wound up idolizing Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. In Birth of a Nation (1915), the first international blockbuster film, D. W. Griffith saw the philistine as a liberal hypocrite incapable of admitting the need for white supremacy and an organic patriarchal society such as that envisioned by the KKK. Satirists in the Weimar Republic sketched the philistine as the bourgeois war profiteer and sexual exploiter with a cigar stuck in his mouth, unconcerned with the misery surrounding him. Others simply saw the philistine as the complacent and selfsatisfied bourgeois; indeed, such was the position of Adrian Leverkuhn, the modernist composer in Thomas Manns Dr. Faustus (1947) who sought to take back Beethovens Ninth Symphony. Society remained an enigma. If the cultural philistine was an abstraction then so was the philistine world that the modernists wished to transform. Its economic contradictions, political conflicts of interest, and institutional dynamics were rarely of interest. Nostalgia existed for the elemental and natural experiences that modern society was imperiling. The new cultural politics was intended to liberate them. F. T. Marinetti understood these qualities in terms of a supposedly liberating manliness and aggression, a rebellion against all order and authority, but others saw it differently. The images of the lowly and the downtrodden presented by poets like Else Lasker-Schler and in the early novels of Alfred Dblin are far more telling. The general sentiment is actually best expressed by the unjustly forgotten expressionist Leonhard Frank in the title of his collection of short stories, Man is Good (1918), and his later autobiography Heart on the Left

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(1952). Modernists of the left basically wished to bring that elemental goodness and communitarian feeling to light. That was the sense in which they would lead the masses, or whoever would follow them. The elitism of the modernists was usually complemented by nave populism. This mixture gave rise to a politics of the spirit. In a postmodern age suspicious of grand narratives and overriding categories, of course, suspicions will also exist concerning the legitimacy of speaking about an international cultural movement. Labels can be employed arbitrarily, and they often obscure the uniqueness of individual artists and particular works. Even those who engage the idea of a movement, therefore, often do so hesitantly, almost apologetically. The modernist movement lacked a program and a theory of action. Its members were loosely connected with one another. Modernism was composed of diverse avant-garde groups. Heated conflicts usually generated by personal slights and stylistic differences took place in and between them. Each had its critics, dealers, publishers, curators, hangers-on, and individual artists. But the whole was more than the sum of its parts. A common impulse animated them. Indeed, for the artists of the fin de sicle, the goal was not art but truth which has no end except the refusal to abide by the bad, the lopsided, the untrue. They wanted to say it as it really was, and the it is always the experience that aims at the whole and can claim no legitimacy before the forum of public knowledge.16 Modernists had their own views of agency. These were generated during a time when retrograde monarchies still dominated Europe. Kaiser Wilhelm II, in fact, remained a believer in the divine right of kings until his death. Liberalism had already surrendered its revolutionary political verve in favor of free trade and Victorian cultural attitudes following the Revolutions of 1848. As for the working class, whatever its republican aspirations and commitments to social reform, its cultural views were deeply provincial. More apocalyptic and revolutionary understandings of transformation were thus associated with an avant-gardea small circle unencumbered by tradition or popular sentiment, capable of anticipating the future. Intellectual elites took center stage. Nietzsche wrote for the young who wished to think the world anew and who understood. Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca spoke of circulating elites; Robert Michels, a radical socialist who later turned to fascism, developed the iron law of oligarchy while condemning the reformist trend in social democracy; and, most famously, V.I. Lenin called for a party of [a] new

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type composed of professional revolutionary intellectuals, an idea that would be appropriated by Mussolini. What these various standpoints had in common was contempt for the petty bourgeois habits of the masses and established political movements. Modernism transformed the meaning given to revolution by Marx and his followers in the aftermath of 1848: nationalization of industry and new economic policies to privilege the interests of the working class, a socialist republic to supplant the existing monarchies, and a new secular and enlightenment ideology to contest the ethos of the aristocracy and the church. Implied in the term revolution was now a transformation of the inner experience of reality and all social relations. Revolution became so overloaded with expectations and demands that the idea connoted something more akin to apocalypse or the Second Coming. But the problem was not merely that radical expectations were heightened to the point where any real revolution could only prove a disappointment.17 It was also that modernists had little meaningful to say about how to deal with the inner life of the masses as it was historically constituted and actually lived. They sought a break with history, and they identified the refusal by others to seek it with cowardice, material interests, or false consciousness. The avant-garde believed that the experience manifested in their work was the one that their audience, or prospective audience, actually sought but had not yet discovered. Indeed, explaining his attraction to the Nazis, Martin Heidegger wrote to Herbert Marcuse on January 20, 1948: I expected from National Socialism a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety.18 Opposition to liberal republicanism was the norm among the modernist avant-garde. Not only was parliament seen as tainted by the selfish interests of different factions but, far worse, it was boring: its politics rested on coalitions, consensus, and routine. Parliament symbolized the meaninglessness of everyday life. That was as true for many modernists of the left (Mayakovsky, Brecht, Breton) as well as of the right (Marinetti, Jnger, Cline). When it came to liberal politics, indeed, what united the modernists was ultimately more important than what divided them. That is why so many supposedly political artists with radically divergent political views could feel themselves bound within the same international cultural revolt. A journal like La Socit Nouvelle: Revue Internationale could thus list among its contributors to a volume in 1892 Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist; Barrs, the French conservative; Nietzsche, the German cultural anarchist with reactionary political tendencies;

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La Socit Nouvelle: Revue Internationale cover (Jan.Feb. 1892).

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Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian literary bohemian; and William Morris, the English socialist. Modernists saw themselves as revolutionaries of the spirit and harbingers of a new humanity. Their new community would have an anarchist flavor. Hardly any modernists indulged in the longing for a leader or a savior. If they embraced the notion of an bermensch then, legitimately following Nietzsche, it would be a superman who liberated culture from its constraints. Apocalyptic visions may have created the elective affinity between modernism and totalitarian movementsespecially when the latter were on the rise. But the modernist concern with individuality and a liberated form of everyday life threatened the demands for regimentation and conformity demanded by totalitarians once they were in power. It is no accident that Mussolini marginalized Marinetti in the twenties, that Joseph Goebbels included Nolde in the Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937,19 or that Stalin drove Mayakovsky to his death. Stalin and Hitler responded to Igor Stravinsky no differently than had Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm. The little men with little minds would have had the same philistine views about daring and expressive dancers like Mary Wigman and Martha Graham. Contemporary authoritarians still denounce modernism, and for good reason: they know what they have to fear. Nietzsche was perhaps the seminal philosophical influence on modernism. His insistence that the subject is a fiction highlighted subjectivity and the lived moment in which self-definition begins. Embracing perspectivalism while rejecting objective versions of the real, envisioning a new dawn and the sustained fulfillment implied by the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche undermined the petrified truths associated with the routines of everyday life, existing standards of perception and representation, from a utopian vantage point. His emphasis on self-realization and selfexpression no less than his rejection of all traditions of aesthetic, social, and political authority radicalized the romantic impulse and shaped the thinking of a new generation. Visions of cultural renewal through the transvaluation of values inspired the assault against reification. Wagners Ring (1876) was intent not merely on intoxicating the audience but in producing a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) directed against the division of labor and the alienation it generated. The boundaries between different forms of cultural representation collapsed: poems turned into poster-images, images became texts, texts changed into paintings, paintings evoked music, and music elicited colors.20 In Thus Spoke Zarathrustra

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(1871) Nietzsche blurred the distinction between art and philosophy. In 1911 the young Lukcs destroyed the rigid distinction between art and art criticism.21 Modernism was everywhere intent on breaking down scholastic and time-honored distinctions. Foresight and judgment were required to make sense of it all. Visionary art dealers like Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, Paul Cassirer, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler recognized as art what others initially considered rubbishand they cashed in accordingly.22 New formal techniques not only exploded existing cultural assumptions but also opened new possibilities for artistic expression and the expression of individuality. Marx had already spoken about the eye becoming a human eye and the ear a human ear: sights and sounds would be heard differently. A profound change in perception would find expression first in the great impressionist painters, whose sense of what Schiller termed the beautiful illusion indicted everyday life, and then with sculptors like Ernst Barlach who engaged in a conquest of the ugly. Salvador Dal evidenced disdain for a standardized life ruled by clock time, while striving for the infinite became a dominant theme. Various artists responded first to photography and then to film by demolishing representation and turning line or color into the object of the work.23 Cubism, indeed, put the viewer in the position of reconstructing an object that had previously been deconstructed by collapsing three dimensions into two. Tradition came under attack in every way and in every genre. James Joyce gave radical expression to stream of consciousness and the epiphany, while in the 1950s, the new novel of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute allowed events to be judged with distance and empirical objectivity and from the perspective of the reader aloneby stripping away context, narrative, and the external depiction of experience. Marcel Proust understood memory as an associative processas in the famous use of the madeleine biscuit being dipped into a cup of tea in Swanns Way (1913)and he employed a nonobjective notion of time to elicit the construction and potentially ongoing reconstruction of the lived life. Expressionist dramatists created new relations between text, music, and staging, before Bertolt Brecht finally provided a theoretical basis for the overthrow of Aristotelian categories in the theater. Modernism exploded fixed assumptions about time and space that underpinned both idealism and materialism. The assault on philosophical foundations undercut the need for mimetic representation and set the stage for Wassily Kandinsky and Arshile Gorky. The imagination triumphed. So

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it became legitimate for Franz Marc to paint a horse blue, Proust to construct a novel around memory, and Dblin to express through montage the tempo of urban life in Berlin, Alexanderplatz (1929). No longer was it possible to encompass the unique experiences of individuals within universal categories. Turning their backs on the manner in which social reality was historically produced, and equally opposed to the abstract and universal categories of idealism, the modernists followed their own patha third path predicated on philosophically privileging emotional intensity and a life-affirming vitality. Modernism hoped to invigorate the future by redeeming the past. Its painters and sculptors cast established standards by the wayside as they embraced Oceanic and African art, as well as forgotten representatives of the medieval inheritance like Matthias Grnewald and El Greco. Fearful of modernity, suspicious of science, many modernists sought to reenchant the world. This was especially true of poets like Lautreamont in The Songs of Maldoror (1868) and Arthur Rimbaud in The Drunken Boat (1871) and Illuminations (1874). They extolled decadence and injected a sensuous excess into bourgeois existence, while later, Kafka exposed the world of bureaucracy with its incoherence, vacuity, and assault on subjectivity. Painters like the brilliant J.M.W. Turner, who had fallen out of fashion, were rediscovered as impressionists learned from his blinding use of light, Fauves from his symbolic use of colors, futurists from his dynamism, and expressionists from his virtual elimination of the object in his series The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons (1835). Similarly, painters sought either to recreate the objective world in their own likeness, through reducing it to the most basic forms as in futurism or cubism, or eradicating it entirely as in the tradition which took sustenance from Claude Monets haystack paintings. Indeed, whether in art or philosophy, modernists sought to ground subjectivity and preserve it from the menace of an increasingly standardized and bureaucratized reality. Modernism sought to elicit an experience that is universal and yet intensely individual to the point of being inexpressible. That is why expressionist playwrights chose to provide their characters with the most abstract labels: the boy, the girl, the poet, and the like. The same impulse led Reinhard Sorge, the expressionist author and playwright, to demand the formation of a prophetic vision above and beyond the groping of language. For playwrights on the left like Ernst Toller, as well as Bronnen on the right, experiential states and personal visions become transformed not merely into public events but also supposedly into political challenges to the status

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quo. Humanity itself was speaking through their inexpressible experience of singularity against the misery of existence. Endgame (1957) by Samuel Beckett is more radical in its form, far less pretentious in its political claims, and transforms the process: it speaks to the subjectivity of each without speaking to anyone in general.24 One is alone, writes Sorge, and black with anguish is the world. Existence itself became the object of critique. Society lost its mediated character and the world turned into a symbolic chaos. Asserting human dignity while retrieving some repressed human essence served as fundamental impulses for modernist art. These tasks required a break with formal conventions for depicting reality and the introduction of new techniques for reconfiguring discrete and unrelated objects in order to express a higher experience. Distortion and exaggeration took on lives of their own. Subjectivity was unleashed with ever growing vehemence until, finally, the object itself vanished. Line and color became the objects of painting. Only this increasing reliance on form seemed to allow an escape from givenness of existence. Andr Breton, the driving force behind the surrealist movement, put the matter well when he wrote that the earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.25 Freedom no longer had anything in common with what Hegel and Marx termed the insight into necessity. It lost any connection with the opportunities and constraints embedded in real historical situations. Classes vanished along with the production process and the determinate context in which the individual becomes what he or she is. The utopian imagination would emanate from what Maurice Barrs termed the cult of the self. Modernists were never concerned with power in any meaningful sense. Nor were they concerned with eliminating discernible structures of oppression. They sought instead to penetrate into the realm of shadows, which cling to everything and lurk behind all reality. Only after their conquest will liberation become possible. The poet must learn again that there exist worlds quite different from the world of the five sensesworlds comprising the super world.26 Modernism redefined solidarity, making it the arbitrary designation for a supposedly common experience. Franz Rosenzweig could speak about the need for an emotional catharsis that would produce a new Jew. Else Lasker-Schler empathized with a poor little humanity. Even Heidegger talked about the experiential transition from a singular existence to the we in his What is Metaphysics? (1929). For the most part,

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however, solidarity was dependent on style, an antibourgeois attitude, andperhaps above alla willingness to evidence what Breton called the great refusal. What unified all these positions, again, is the call to transform the meaning and experience of existence. If these concerns were connected with politics, then it was mostly in an indirect way. Something else was primary. Nietzsche had intuited what amounted to an international crisis born of decadence and nihilism that was threatening to engulf Europe. This was the key to modernism. As the twentieth century began, continental political parties clashed, cultural standards seemed on the decline, and the the mass man was on the rise. Intensity and nonconformity took on a value of their own. These attitudes crossed national borders. They were articulated in England by Disraeli, Shaw, and Oscar Wilde; in France by Baudelaire, Barrs, and then Henri Bergson; in Italy by Benedetto Croce and Gabriele DAnnunzio; in Russia by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; and in the United States by Henry and William James. Some with more and some with less insight and acumen derided organized religion, settled habits, the reign of mediocrity, and the repression of the instinctual and the intuitive. Indeed, if Nietzsches fame was generated among the bohemian avant-garde of Germany, that was not the case for someone like Henri Bergson, the thinker of the 1890s with the greatest charisma, the one whose direct personal influence was most compelling.27 Bergson was the most famous philosopher in France.28 He was also the teacher of Georges Sorel, whose Reflections on Violence (1911) would translate his concern with the dynamic experience of life into the political realm. Bergsons notion of the lan vital, the foundational moment of human existence underpinning all analytic and ideational forms, parallels Nietzsches emphasis on the will to power and provides a French version of the third path in philosophy that opposes both materialism and idealism. So, too, Bergsons willingness to confront objective clock time with the subjective experience of time, le dure, profoundly influenced Proust and other major figures of the French modernist avant-garde. It undercut the primacy accorded mimetic representations of the real and, thereby, echoed the perspectivalism of Nietzsche. Most important, however, Bergson highlighted the unacknowledged experience of reality that could inject vitality into life. F.T. Marinetti is a minor thinker in comparison to Nietzsche and Bergson. But his influence on modernism was, arguably, as profound. Neither a misunderstood hermit nor an academic philosopher, Marinetti was a flamboyant publicity seeker as well as the founder and mainstay of Italian futurism. His personal tours of Germany were overwhelming successes, and his

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manifestos appeared in Herwarth Waldens great expressionist journal, Der Sturm. Working in an economically underdeveloped nation, complacently recalling its grand tradition of Renaissance humanism, Marinetti opposed the cultural philistine by demanding a new commitment to unfettered technological development and a rejection of anything connected with classical humanism. He envisioned a new foundation for human existence in the experience of speed that ruthlessly cuts away the past, intensifies the present, and multiplies the interactions between individuals and their world. His futurists, indeed, served as the organizational prototype for a modernist vanguard imbued with the belief that the future is theirs. Modernism no longer treated tradition as prefabricated. Its artists were unconcerned with what Edmund Burke would have termed the hidden bond between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. Tradition now implicated the interests and will to power of the individual in its constitution and definition. Nietzsche articulated this position best in The Uses and Abuses of History (1874). The past would now be treated in terms of what was useful for the creativity and vitality of the artist. Modernity was thus often juxtaposed in its artificiality, hypocrisy, and brutality with the simplicity, authenticity, and elemental beauty of nature and those in touch with it. Or it all could be understood the other way around. Always, however, the instinctual communion with organic forces would provide the moment of revelatory ecstasy. The past would be refashioned in light of the artists desires for the future that explodes the present. Nietzsche envisioned an unleashing of the intensified experience hidden in us all, and he identified the prospect of each of us finally realizing this possibility with the vision of a new man. What marked this new man would be the way in which he touches, thinks, feels, and speaks. The new man would explode the ordinary ways of experiencing the worldand the modernist anticipates this possibility. Thus, the poet Verhaeren sought to destroy syntax and common word usage in the name of a new language that could express thoughts previously incapable of formulation. Not material conditions, or new institutions, but rather the experiential capacity of individuals to receive these new messages would bring about the new man. The sublime character of art would generate new possibilities for human sympathy. Determining the context in which this new man would thrive was not the concern of the new politicians of the spirit. The new man would always remain indeterminate, a fleeting image, a symbol of utopia embraced by artists on both ends of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, however, the new man that arrived never

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quite met the modernists expectations. Interpreting modernism today begins with this recognition and and the task of drawing out its implications. Modernism makes clear the mistake in attempting any mechanical identification of radical cultural tastes with radical political commitments. These are two very different dimensions of the struggle for liberation, and if they often overlap, each still retains its own logic. That is something those seeking to appropriate the modernist inheritance should try to remember.