Modernism EP01 ⟩ “The Mechanical Paradise”

What is Modernism?

We are doing Robert Hughes’ eight-part BBC series The Shock of the New.

The series is another epoch-making BBC2 masterpiece. (BBC2 masterpieces is why our Meetup group was originally started.)

Each thesis will excite a thousand revelations in you. You’ll be pausing it so often to take notes that the sun will rise and set before you can finish a single episode.

The reason for doing art history in a philosophy group is that art history is the original home of causal complexity. A painting is never a painting. It is pigments, money, boredom, religion, sex, machines, museums, cities, imperial plunder, class anxiety, war, advertising, trained hands, trained eyes, and whatever the unconscious is doing that century.

That is also why art is such a good diagnostic surface for the Zeitgeist. A period usually pictures itself before it understands itself. So if we want to do phenomenology of an age — not just list its official beliefs, but see the pictures, machines, spatial habits, body-images, fantasies, and fears that hold its fake reality together — art history is the way. It gets us closest to the metaphorical infrastructure that philosophy later needs in order to say anything at all.

Hughes is the peerless shockographer of Modernism. See him show us the moment around 1880–1914, when the old world began losing its obviousness. The Eiffel Tower, electric light, cars, planes, radio, cinema, mass newspapers, and the modern city did not merely add use values. They changed how space, time, movement, publicity, and distance were perceived, and so were.

People suddenly could travel farther, know faster, compare more, see more, want more, and imagine more possible lives. As Karl Marx said, capitalism was the best thing that ever happened. For us today, who are already schizoid and dissociated beyond repair, it’s old hat. But to be alive then and experience this transformation of cognition-perception-experience-reality was massively disorienting—hence “shocking.”

The older situation — stable place, inherited manners, religious or civic continuity, recognizable craft, realist depiction, perspectival space — no longer held the same authority. Inherited locality and realism weakened. People became less securely situated in any single world. All that was solid melted into air. The old reality husks (the old certainties of perspective and narration) still existed, but they had been exposed as BS—i.e., they had become historical. And once an intersubjective hallucination becomes historical, it can be broken, parodied, rebuilt, accelerated, abstracted, or sold back to you as spectacle.

Fredric Jameson gives us a useful way to read that transformation. Modernist art belongs to the moment when artists can no longer treat form as a neutral container for content. The old trusty idioms became less relevant to the reality people were now living in. So the modernists start messing with the idiom itself. The canvas, the sentence, the camera, the building, the machine, the stage, the grid, the commodity image, temporal atom, the act of construction itself, the medium itself.

The goal was no longer accurate perception and duplication of something real. The artist becomes mason, engineer, saboteur, medium, machine-lover, machine-hater, and sometimes priest of pure form. Something weird had started.

Cubism and abstraction will be especially important for us, because they change the level of the problem. Cubism still cares about the object, but the object has to be built, not merely copied. Abstract art asks where value can live when there is no recognizable object left at all. That is already philosophy, whether anyone wants to call it that or not.

For Heidegger and Gadamer, art is the event in which truth appears. Plato wanted to exile the artists, but then had to use myth anyway. That old embarrassment—the reliance of science on myth—has never gone away.

My private reason for doing this is old and embarrassing. When I was twenty, I arrived at Duke as a cultural illiterate. The list of books I had voluntarily read was the following:

1. The Hobbit.
2. Dick Smith’s Do-It-Yourself Monster Make-Up Handbook

But Duke had Jameson — the smartest, most important, and most scandalous professor in the country. The Duke Review and the Young Republicans could not understand why he was there, except as a civilizational emergency. “Why so serious?” I wondered. So I forced myself to take a class with him to see what the fuss was all about. It was LIT 283: Modernism.

It was a self-esteem destroyer. I was surrounded by a sea of cocky black turtlenecks who rightly snickered at all my stupid questions and answers. Many of these people were reading Mallarmé when they were infants. Meanwhile, there I was struggling to understand how anyone in their right mind could take literature seriously, especially America’s smartest human.

The answer, of course, is that we humans are mere fruiting bodies. Underneath us run the real stuff—the mycelia: the buried automating logics of culture. Art is one of the places where those logics expose themselves. A culture begins to find out what its world has become by making images, forms, rhythms, buildings, stories, and monsters long before it knows how to explain them.

Modernism matters because it is not over. We are still living inside the chaotic world it tried to understand. The screens got smaller, the malls became phones, and the Bonaventure Hotel became the Internet, but we’re still lost.

Hughes will help us! Our only job is to out-Hughes Hughes by asking what kind of material-felt-perceived world of earnestness and substantial life needed Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and the architecture of power.

In summary: while we are officially doing art history, we are really doing meta-philosophy: looking at the images, metaphors, machines, and fantasies that feed theory.

So hop aboard the Hughes train and learn a thing or two about where your desires, tastes, values, and reality tunnel were manufactured.

METHOD

• Watch this week’s episode, located HERE.
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.