Modernism Ep02 ⟩ “The Powers That Be”

What is Modernism?

The Faces of Power: Art, Authority, and the Engineering of Desire

First, a bit of good news: we have been making improvements to both SADHO and THORR. One is polished and orthographically accurate subtitles. The rest we’ll see at the beginning of the meeting.

Friends, this is A Very Special Episode of The Shock of the New.

Robert Hughes begins at the Somme, where The Machine—who was a savior-type hero last time—transformed from liberator to instrument o’ industrialized death. Millions were fed into the Metropolis Moloch under impressive sounding terms like honor, sacrifice, our people. After that, Hughes says, “the back of language broke.” Suddenly, the inherited language of European civilization could no longer carry its old meanings, because those meanings had been used to advertise the trenches.

Dada emerged from this moment as the only sane thing to do. Its chance procedures, nonsense poems, childish masks, mutilated images, and attacks on respectable culture refused rationality, or the official rational-like objective spirit that had made mechanized slaughter … rational. In Berlin, Dada became openly political. Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Raoul Hausmann cut apart the photographs, slogans, military bodies, advertisements, politicians, machines, and consumer fantasies of Weimar Germany and recombined them into a public autopsy.

Then comes the part I have been waiting for: the Russian avant-garde and the attempt to construct an entirely new visual nervous system for society. Tatlin, Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Malevich, Mayakovsky, and the Constructivists treated typography, photography, posters, architecture, exhibitions, and even street decoration as instruments for reorganizing consciousness. Art leaves the private homes of the rich and enters ordinary life as zhiznestroenie—life-building—reprogramming crappy people into the novyi chelovek: the New Human Being!

The Russian artists were asking questions that now occupy advertising agencies, political consultants, market researchers, social-media platforms, and propaganda departments: Which angle arrests the eye? Which font carries authority? Which arrangement of image and text converts attention into desire? Which bodily gesture makes an idea feel trustworthy? They were developing an experimental art of persuasion, but they still believed that its purpose might be collective emancipation.

That particular branch of modernism survived magnificently. Unfortunately, it survived because capitalism hitched it to an immense machine of money, research, testing, repetition, surveillance, and competitive selection. The Constructivists dreamed of using visual communication to produce socialist consciousness. Our apparatus uses its vastly improved descendants to make people desire commodities, enemies, fantasies, and political identities on command. The techniques flourished and today are beyond beyond. But the utopia which was the point did not.

Hughes then performs an especially useful ideological demolition. Modernist form carries no automatic political virtue. Montage, abstraction, dynamic typography, monumental architecture, and the rhetoric of the New could midwife actual bona fide dignitarian utopias—communism at its most emancipatory—but they could also serve fascist corporatism, bourgeois liberal democracy, social-democratic state capitalism, colonial and imperial capitalism, Fordist industrial capitalism, monopoly capitalism, consumer capitalism, corporate-managerial capitalism, neoliberal financialized capitalism, platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, racial capitalism, petro-capitalism, and the whole publicity apparatus of late-capitalist desire-production.

Mussolini could appropriate many of the very same visual tropes as as the Bolsheviks . Albert Speer could translate not care and health but political domination into breathtaking Roman-cyclopean symmetrical stone theaters. This allows people to become hyper-sheeple somebody else’s idea of unity (rather than into Unity’s idea of unity).

Hughes reaches even the Kennedy-TRUMP Center, whose “brutish blandness” places it within the same international genealogy as Speer’s Nuremberg, Mussolini’s EUR, Stalinist monumental classicism, Rockefeller’s Albany Mall, Lincoln Center, and the LBJ Library. Here we have architecture in the service of glorious FASCISM—opacity, scale, symmetry, administrative grandeur, and the reduction of the citizen to a speck of iron filing inside a massive field of Separate Power.

The episode culminates exactly where most of you guess it would—in Picasso’s Guernica. Hughes is great here! He calls it the last great history painting, and one of the last paintings that could enter public political speech with the expectation of changing what masses of people felt about power. (Mass photography and television would soon seize that function. Art remained political, but its ability to intervene in politics was steadily neutralized by publicity, celebrity, institutional absorption, and market value.)

Here’s a good question worth suppressing: What might become possible if the thought-shaping weapons were controlled by non-sociopaths?

So join us for a light and rosy frolic through industrial slaughter, Dadaist gibberish, war cripples, the Universal Monster movies, revolutionary posters, fascist spectacle, coercive architecture, failed utopias, capitalist desire-production, and the disappearance of politically effective art.

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.