The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

16 The passage from modernity to post modernityment imagery about civilization, reason, universal rights, and moralitwas for naught. The eternal and immutable essence of humanity ifound its proper representation in the mythical figure of Dionysus : j;'to be at one and the same time "destructively creative" (i.e. to form.rthe temporal world of individualization and becoming, a process;1destructive of unity) and "creatively destructive" (i.e. to devour the;:illusory universe of individualization, a process involving the reaction'.of unity)' (loc. cit.). The only path to affirmation of self was to act, : .to manifest will, in this maelstrom of destructive creation and creative'destruction even if the outcome was bound to be tragic.The image of 'creative destruction' is very important to unerstandingmodernity precisely because it derived from the practIcaldilemmas that faced the implementation of the modernist project.How could a new world be created, after all, without destroyingmuch that had gone before? You simply cannot make an omelettewithout breaking eggs, as a whole line of modernist thinkers fromGoethe to Mao have noted. The literary archetype of such a dilemma ..is, as Berman (1982) and Lukacs (1969) point out, Goethe's Faust.An epic hero prepared to destroy religious myths, traditional values,and customary ways of life in order to build a brave new world outof the ashes of the old, Faust is, in the end, a tragic figure. Synthesizing.thought and action, Faust forces himself and everyone else (evenMephistopheles) to extremes of organization, pain, and exhaustion inorder to master nature and create a new landscape, a sublime spiritualachievement that contains the potentiality for human liberation fromwant and need. Prepared to eliminate ever thing and everyone whostands in the way of the realization of this sublime vision, Faust, tohis own ultimate horror, deploys Mephistopheles to kill a muchlovedold couple who live in a small cottage by the sea-shore for noother reason than the fact that they do not fit in with the masterplan. 'It appears,' says Berman (1982), 'that the vẹry proce s .ofdevelopment, even as it transforms the wasteland lllto a thnvlllgphysical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside of the developerhimself. This is how the tragedy of development works.'There are enough modern figures - Haussmann at work in SecondEmpire Paris and Robert Moses at work in New York after WorldWar II - to make this figure of creative destruction more than amyth (plates 1.3, 1.4). But we here se at work that oppositionbetween the ephemeral and the eternal in a rather different guise. Ifthe modernist has to destroy in order to create, then the only way torepresent eternal truths is through a process of destruction that isliable, in the end, to be itself destructive of those truths. Yet we areforced, if we strive for the eternal and immutable, to try and put ouri'?Modernity and modernismPlate 1.3 Haussmann's creative destruction of Second Empire Paris: therebuilding of the Place Saint Germainstamp upon the chaotic, the ephemeral, and the fragmentary. TheNietzschian image of creative destruction and destructive creationbridges .the two sides of .Baudelaire's formulation in a new way.Interestlllgly, the economIst Schum peter picked up this very sameimage in order to understand the processes of capitalist development.The entrepreneur, in Schum peter's view a heroic figure, was thecreative destroyer par excellence because the entrepreneur was preparedto push the consequences of technical and social innovationto vital extremes. And it was only through such creative heroismthat human progress could be assured. Creative destruction, forSchumpeter, was the progressive leitmotif of benevolent capitalistdevel pment. For others, it was simply the necessary condition oftwentIeth-century progress. Here is Gertrude Stein writing on Picassoin 1938:As everything destroys itself in the twentieth century andnothing continues, so then the twentieth century has a splendourwhich is its own and Picasso is of this century, he has thatstrange quality of an earth that one has never seen and ofthings destroyed as they have never been destroyed. So thenPicasso has his splendour.17