The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

28 The passage from modernity to postmodernitySaint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Matthew Arnold, Jeremy Bentham,and John Stuart Mill all had in common.But after 1848 the idea that there was only one possible mode ofreprese t ailo-;- -- began to break dowṅ The categorical fiity ofEnlightenment thought was increasingly challenged, and ultImaelyreplaced by an emphasis upon divergent systems o .f reprẹsentatIOn.In Paris writers like Baudelaire and Flaubert and pamters lIke Manetbegan t explore the possibility of different represe . ntational moesin ways that resembled the discovery of the non-EuclIdean geoetneswhich shattered the supposed unity of mathematical language m thenineteenth century. Tentative at first, the idea exploded rom 1 90onwards into an incredible diversity of thought and expenmentatIonin centres as different as Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Munich, London,New York, Chicago, Copenhagen, and Moscow, to reach its apogeeshortly before the First World War. Most commentators agree t?atthis furore of experimentation resulted in a qualitative transformationin what modernism was about somewhere between 1910 a!?-sLl'l15L_(Virginia Woolf preferred the earlier date and D. H. Lawrence thelateṙ ) In retrospect, as Bradbury and McFarlane document convincingly,it is not hard to see that some kind of radical transformationdid indeed occur in these years. Proust's Swann's way (1913),Joyce's Dubliners (1914), Lawrence's Sons and lovers (1913), Man'sDeath in Venice (1914), Pound's 'Vorticist manifesto' of 1914 (mwhich he likened pure language to efficient machine technology) aresome of the marker texts published at a time that also witnessedan extraordinary efflorescence in art (Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi,Duchamp, Braque, Klee, de Chirico, Kandinsky, many of whoseworks turned up in the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913,to be seen by more than 10,000 visitors a day), music (Stravinsky'sThe rite of spring opened to a riot in 1913 and was paralleled by thearrival of the atonal music of Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok, and others),to say nothing of the dramatic shift in linguistics (Saussure's structuralisttheory of language, in which the meaning of words is givenby their relation to other words rather than by their reference toobjects, was conceived in 1911) and in physics, consequent uponEinstein's generalization of the theory of relativity with its appeal to,and material justification of, non-Euclidean geometries. Equally significant,as we shall later see, was the publication of F. W. Taylor'sThe principles of scientific management in 1911, two years beforeHenry Ford set in motion the first example of assembly-line productionin Dearborn, Michigan.It is hard not to conclude that the whole world of representationand of knowledge underwent a fundamental transformation during iModernity and modernism 29this s?ort space of time. How and why it did so is the quintessentialqu stlon. In Part II we shall e . xplore the thesis that the simultaneitydenved fron: a . radical change m the experience of space and time inWestern capitalIsm. But there are some other elements in the situationwhich deserve note.The cnges were certainly affected by the loss of faith in theinelụctabII ty of proress, and by the growing unease with the categorICalfixity of EnlIghtenment thought. The unease in part derivedfrom. the turbulent path of class struggle, particularly after the revolutionsof 188 anḍthe publication of The communist manifesto.Before then, thmkers m the Enlightenment tradition such as AdamSmith or Saint-Simon, could reasonably argue that oce the shacklesof feual clas relations had been thrown off, a benevolent capitalism(orgamzed either trugh the hidden hand of the market or throughthe power of assoIaton made I;nuch of by Saint-Simon) could bringtḥe benefits of capItalIst modermty to all. This was a thesis vigorouslyrejected by Marx and Engels, and it became less tenable as thecentury wore on and the c .lass disparities prduced witin capitalismbecame more and ore eVId I1-t . . Thec.>.cialist movement increasinglychallenged the umty of EnlIghtenment reason and inserted a classdimension into modernism. Was it the bourgeoisie or the w C;a{ rs' -moveffient·wliiCli"was'-to"ihform and direct the modernist project?And whose side were the cultural producers on?There culḍ be no imple answer to that question. To begin with,propgandIstlc d dIrectly political art that integrated with a revolutIOnarypolItical movement was hard to make consistent withthe modernist canon for individualistic and intensely 'auratic' arṫ Tobẹ sure, the idea of an artistic avant-garde could, under certainC1rcumtances, e integrated ,:ith tht of a political avant-garde party.From time to tlme commumst partIes have striven to mobilize 'theforces of culture' as part of their revolutionary programme, whilesome of the avant-garde artistic movements and artists (Leger PicassoAragon, etc.) actively supported the communist cause. Evn in thabsece of any explicit political agenda, however, cultural productlọnhad to have political effectṡ Artists, after all, relate to eventsand . Issues . around theṃ, and .construct ways of seeing and repre­entmg ẉhich have SOCIal meamngs. In the halcyon days of modernistlIlnOVatlon before World War I, for example, the kind of art producedcelebrated ụniversalṣ eve in the midst of multiple perspectiveṡ Itwas txpressive o . f alIenatlon ? antagonistic to all sense of hierarchy(even of . the subject, as cubIsm showed), and frequently critical of'bourgeOIs' consumerism .and life-styles. Modernism was during thatphase very much on the SIde of a democratizing spirit and progressive