Modernism, or Chuck on Derrida, Doug on definitions

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Sep 7 20:56:32 PDT 1999


Doug and Eric raise the problem of what label we give to all who live in our world:

========= Eric Beck wrote:


>Doug wondered:
>
> >All you folks saying "postmodernist!" and "no I'm not!" at each
> >other: what's a postmodernist? Aren't we all in part "postmodernists"
> >just by drawing breath in 1999?
>
>But by this logic aren't we all "capitalists" too?

We live in capitalist society, yes. But unless we make more than trivial amounts of money from the labor of others, we ain't capitalists.

Doug

===========

And Chuck Grimes:


> [SNIP]
> "The most remarkable similarity between Romanticism and the
> avant-garde, the crucial point of similarity, is the attempt to unite
> life and art. . . ." (103p)
>
> It is in juxtaposition to this moment, that I would like to look at
> our own period and Yoshie's last two posts titled, "Logics of Failed
> Revolt.." and "Re: Derrida". In other words I agree that Hegel is
> somehow central to understanding this sweep from romanticism to the
> avant-garde, and more particularly the latter, in its turn into a
> postmodernity.

[SNIP]


> I am fascinated by this amazing historical scene. I don't think we
> have ever escaped this confrontation. And, it is for this reason that
> I think the modernist and postmodernist avant-gardes in the arts and
> humanities can be associated with and partly understood as a series of
> embraces and rejections of Hegel's program to secularize and rescue

As Doug notes, "capitalist" can only (usefully) name those who possess capital and is not a useful name for all of us who live under capitalism. That society is of course also labelled "bourgeois," and it is better but still confusing and clunky to refer to us all as bourgeois. Doug carries it forward by suggesting that by breathing in 1999 we qualify for the label "postmodernist," and I would agree we ought all, by so existing, share some historical label.

Chuck's post suggests, almost explicitly, that that label should be modernist. I would agree to that also. Surely there are far more and far more fundamental resemblances than differences between whatever we call modern and whatever we call postmodern. (Catherine wants us to make more use of "post-structuralist" -- but surely structuralism was too passing and too insignificant a blip in world intellectual history to elevate to a period term.)

I think "modernist" will do for all of us if we equate it with "individualist," and extend its reach back one or two centuries before Hegel, thus including neoclassicism and well as romanticism in the term. What we have is 400 years or more of intellectual and artistic struggle to make sense of a world conceived (quite irrationally) as a collection of autonomous individuals, existing prior to and independently of the social relations which (in material reality) constitute them as human.

(I am trapped within a eurocentric perspective here, but this whole debate has been similarly trapped.)

It (neoclassicism, Rousseau, romanticism, Kant, modernism, post- modernism) is all there in *Paradise Lost* -- even in that episode in Book VIII in which Adam tells Raphael his memories of his own creation. He opens his eyes, leaps to his feet, and (one person speaking, one hand clapping) begins to reason as an 18th c. French *philosophe*. Whitehead remarked that the history of western philosophy was a series of footnotes to Plato. Modern (i.e. capitalist) culture can be seen as a series of footnotes to *Paradise Lost*.

Commodity production, even in its fragmented pre-capitalist existence, tends to split apart act and motive. That is, in a social order such as feudalism the peasant's motive is (or seems to be) visible in the very act of planting and harvesting the rye. In that sense, the present (actually, the past, but that is another story) dominates the future. If the present (the act of planting/harvesting) is carried out successfully, the future (eating the bread) is certain. Commodity production dissolves this unity of act and motive (and with it all the other unities the loss of which romanticism bewails) For the commodity producer (and for all who live in a world dominated as is capitalism by commodity production) the link between act/motive, present/future is broken, the latter relationship depending not on a material potential of the present but on the investor's guess/calculation as to the meaning that act will have in the future. *Oikos* (economy of the more or less self-complete household) becomes political economy. (I am not, of course, saying anything here that cannot be found in Marx's *Grundrisse*, but that is not available for those who, like Carl Remick, think intellectual life must be reduced to the expectations of the schoolgirl/boy.)

While even limited commodity production splits appearance and reality (hence the epochal difference between the *Odyssey* and the *Republic*), the real (as in different ways for both Plato and Aristotle) remains hidden/manifested in the visible -- the real is still tied to the visible. The real is, as for Dante and St. Thomas, analogically present in the visible. To know oneself, for Socrates and Plato, even for St. Thomas and Dante, even for Boccaccio, was to know one's *place* in a visible order. This is the Grand Narrative that modernism/nominalism found was a lie. The neoclassicists (Milton/Pope) attempted to cling to it. The Romantics bewailed its loss and tried to find it repeated in the human imagination. (Keats's Odes; the irony of Stendahl's Charterhouse) The High Modernists (Pound, Stevens, Williams) wrote nominalist poems celebrating Platonic forms. The poststructuralists (whatever) revel in the wreckage. Individualism like Shakespeare's Cleopatra (Eliot's history) is a creature of infinite variety and doubtless can go on producing one new manifestation after another until one or the other of Rosa's alternatives is realized. The only thing that apparently never changes is the bourgeois intellectual's frantic clinging to his/her right to remain free of social relations -- that clinging being now exhibited in a private resistance to capitalist separation of work and life, now in resistance to workers' solidarity and the subsequent subordination of intellectual to party (which is disguised as opposition to the reverse, the subordination of workers to intellectuals).

Carrol



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