MODERNISM
Modernism is the aesthetic practice of modernity, a period which is almost impossible to
define. For some modernity began with Descartes, and can therefore be identified with
the Enlightenment. For others it owes its origins to Charles Baudelaire and Gustave
Flaubert, and the bloody suppression of the revolutions of 1848. For others still
modernity is an essentially twentieth-century condition. Likewise, modernism itself
resists easy definition. Indeed the provisionality of modernism, its fragmentary nature
and constant search for progress and new forms, would seem to preclude any totalizing
definition. Whatever its precise definition, ‘modernism’ has been adopted here as a term
of convenience to group together the work of certain thinkers who have a broadly
modernist outlook, and who focus on the social problems and the aesthetic practices of
modernity. Many of the extracts are underpinned by a Marxist understanding of
aesthetics as the embodiment of underlying social and political forces. Yet they go
beyond a traditional Marxist view to see aesthetics as having an important cultural role.
The extracts were written in the early part of the twentieth century, a period of great
social change, exposed to the sudden onslaught of modernization. A central theme that
emerges is the shock of the new. The writings mark a moment of reflection in the very
face of this shock. They capture with an astonishing lucidity the very essence of
modernity. Georg Simmel’s essay, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, offers a penetrating
insight into the modernist metropolis. The ‘intensification of emotional life’ resulting
from the overstimulation of the senses produces the blasé individual who, like the flâneur
of Benjamin’s arcades, can be seen as both the product of and a resistance against the
modernist condition. Kracauer’s ‘Hotel Lobby’, like Edward Hopper’s hauntingly vacant
interiors, evokes the transcendental homelessness of contemporary existence. Modernity
can be seen to be two-edged, and these writings serve as a necessary check to the
utopianism of much of modernist culture, not least in architectural discourse.
It is towards the potential impoverishment of the Modern Movement in architecture
that Adorno turns his attention. Indeed his essay, a powerful critique of Adolf Loos’s
architectural writings, exposes the paradoxes at the very heart of the modernist project.
Architecture in its commitment to functionalism—a functionalism that is ultimately little
more than a style—must not overlook its social ‘function’. In a similar manner, Ernst
Bloch notes the impoverishment of the ‘railway-station character’ of a culture whose
architecture has lost the caresses of the muse. He calls instead for an architecture with
wings, an architecture that might offer a glimpse of some utopian world of the future.
At first sight Georges Bataille’s writings sit uncomfortably in this category. Often he
has been categorized ahead of his time as a poststructuralist. Yet in his critique of
modernity, Bataille has much in common with other theorists included here. From this
point of view the essays can be seen as a form of postmodernism avant la lettre. Indeed
we might even go so far as to suggest that postmodernism already existed within
modernism as a critical strain of resistance. Modernism’s demise could be attributed
perhaps to its failure to heed these very cogent internal critiques.