A SINGULAR MODERNITY

objective or particular language. The very movement towards

language itself, in modernist practice as well as in contemporary
philosophy, betrays this obligatory detour through the object PART II
world, that is, through matter and space. For inner models of
subjectivity, external trajectories are substituted, which cun-
ningly espouse the syntax of the sentence as their own tempo-
rality. The resurgence of rhetoric and of the system of the tropes
Modernism as Ideology
is to be understood in this way, as a repudiation of psychology
that attempts to transfer its operations to some non-subjective
realm, while its own inner spatiality (for the very theorization
of the tropes finds its condition of possibility in a sublimation
of space itself, and its positions and relations) is thereby enabled
to model the external forms and figures through which modern-
ist representation is driven. It would be tempting, indeed, to go
on to show how even the forms of modern literary criticism are
unable to evade the dynamic of depersonalization. But with our
three methodological correctives secured (periodization, narra-
tive, depersonalization), we are now in a position to construct
a model of modernism as a whole, and to tell the story of its
fate.

138
 1

bi principle, it ought to be possible to construct the model

4,£totality (and a totality that is itself a process) by beginning
.lrith any feature and eventually working our way through
and around to all the others in a trajectory different from all
:theother possible ones and yet somehow still the same, or at
!east projecting and marking the contours of the same com-
plex unrepresentable phenomenon. But since the premise of
(the preceding discussion has been that of the preliminary
a;equirement to reconstruct the situation of modernism, it
;~ms
1
appropriate to start with that, and to propose the
.ypothesis that what we call artistic or aesthetic 'modernism'
llssentially corresponds to a situation of incomplete
'1odernization.
l\'1
/ ..
It is a situation that has now begun to have its historians,
!~premely, for many of us, in Arno Mayer's The Persistence
W the Old Regime, 1 which documents the astonishingly
I/elated survival of modernity's feudal context in some Euro-
,Can countries up to the very end of World War II: and by
/tile same token, modernity's first emergence in limited
i,!lclaves of social as well as technological modernization and
·.commodification. The new bourgeoisies of the properly cap-
italist era (which in this period will be described as mon-
Gpoly capitalism or Lenin's imperialism) are still relatively
small segments of the overall and still predominantly peasant
Population. This traditional peasantry (which will only much

141
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

later be reduced in number and transformed into what today dition, or by Joyce's irritation in the confrontation with
we would call the farmworkers or the agricultural proletariat various forms of Irish and Gaelic nationalism: it is a
of a properly industrial agriculture) is still a feudal caste • cessary, indeed obligatory confrontation, which Finnegans
(along with the more fragmentarily surviving older agricul- ' ake may be taken as an attempt to outflank by a bold
tural nobility, now called great landowners, themselves not ·versalization.
yet displaced by agribusiness) and has not yet been assimi- Yet characteristically any attempt to characterize the 'per-
lated to one of those two properly capitalist groups that can ence of the old regime' in social class terms tends fatally
alone be identified as social classes in the technical sense. slip, across the geographical and regional phenomena,
This makes for a world that is still organized around two pro some ~ore openly tech~ological_phenomenon: it is a
distinct temporalities: that of the new industrial big city and ,...I picious s!ippage, about which we will shortly need to take
that of the peasant countryside. And I will remark in passing ~ precautions.
that one of the great themes which has conventionally been 1~i 'But initially technology - the 'industrial' dimension of so-
identified as a dominant in literary modernism - namely ~lled industrial capitalism - seems to have an autonomy
temporality itself, and that 'deep time' that Bergson thought ►d an inner log~c~f its own whi~h is abunda°:tly regis_tered
he could conceptualize and into which so many modern pi the art and thmkmg of the per_iod,not least m Luddite ?r
writers have attempted to peer as into a fundamental mystery ~skinian hostility to the machine as the source of social
- is very precisely a mode in which this transitional economic ' ry and aesthetic ignominy (and it is of course crucial to
structure of incomplete capitalism can be registered and ' •lude the spread of mass media and their forms in this
identified as such. In this transitional era, people - but it '· ••tegory of technology as such): thus the later separation of
would be better to say, intellectuals, and the writers and the art and mass culture is no less an anti-technological
ideologists who are part of that category - still live in two ture than the more obvious early ones. (Anti-modernity is
distinct worlds simultaneously. This simultaneity can no . a possible feature of modernism.)
doubt for the moment be cast in terms of some distinction ii, _.:The phenomenological experience to be ~egistered here is
between the metropolis and the provinces; but it might better isely that of the industrial or technological enclave. The
be imagined in terms of a situation in which individuals technological machinery brings with it its own aesthetic
originate in a 'pays', a local village or region to which they ock, in the way in which it erupts without warning into
periodically return, while pursuing their life work in the very •..••• older pastoral and feudal landscape: it has all the awe-
different world of the big city. That those writers who are 1.~e strangeness and fearsomeness of the appearance of the
unabashedly urban - one thinks of Proust or Joyce, for :'lrst tanks on the Western front in 1916; and yet poetic
example - feel beyond their urban experience the presence tlttempts to mythologize it - in Zola's novels, for example,
of something radically other that completes it if it does not 'Where the mine is a great animal, with its own mythic
indeed in part determine it, can be judged by Proust's rather Powers, or in the bedazzlement of Apollinaire's celebration
artificial 'learned' celebration of some deep-French medieval of the lethal and toxic shellbursts of World War I - are not

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

for long paths that artists can productively follow (although nd in which machinery had already become familiar and
these paths remain open well into the 1930s in the Soviet esticated.
and US celebrations of factories). ,Two features of this historical emergence now demand
I believe that the most revealing account of this process is ment: the first is that such technological developments
still to be found in Heidegger's belated theory of technology, e place under the long shadow of what we have called
less a philosophical or conceptual solution than an ideologi- e trope of modernity, and in particular of its irrepressible
cal and poetic one. For Heidegger takes pains to describe rch for the break, for the 'first time', for the beginning.
technological emergence in a way that formally echoes and we have already seen, there can be no question of
negates that very different emergence of the work of art, iding on any 'true' beginning of modernity as such: nor
namely, the temple, as the point around which a landscape "itonly that there are too many contenders for that honour.
and a world is organized, rather than, as with technology, ' alleged break is itself merely a narrative effect, suscep-
that at which it is interrupted. 2 Heidegger theorizes emergent ble of a displacement which lies within the province of the
1
technology not merely as an enclave but as a new form of )1storian's inaugural decisions. But what is clear is that
the storage of energy (Bestand or 'standing reserve'), thereby lc;:hnological development lends itself irresistibly to sub-
marking the 'mystery' of the new power sources in some- Jilbnptionunder the empty narrative form of the break: it
thing other than a mythic fashion. His theory has some Wiers itself as content for the formal beginning as do few
distant kinship with those recent conceptions of the origins Mber types of historical material. Form and content - the
of state power in the surplus and the granary, as well as with ,-rrative concept of modernity, the implantation of the first
Marx's dialectical idea of a primitive accumulation on the ,ardustrialmachines - come together with a well-nigh gravi-
level of capital itself: but better than either of those, Heideg- rational impact, and thereafter seem indissoluble, even in our
ger's theory offers the useful perspective of an emergence of ~ historiographically far more self-conscious era, when
technological modernity within a decidedly unmodern land- .. eryone decries a 'technological determinism' that they
scape. It reverses the usual view of uneven development in licretly harbour in their heart of hearts.
which 'tradition' is marked as what will inevitably give way •~ We must therefore also evoke the autonomy, or at least
to the new that is destined to overcome and replace it. Here, ~ semi-autonomy, of technology itself, which sustains this
as in the Italy of the Futurists, precisely the familiarity of hrticular illusion. The ground of this autonomy will vary
what can only anachronistically be called the pre-modern, or inrerhistory, as 'science' (now in its usual disciplinary sense)
underdevelopment, confers on the violence of the new its begins life in an applied form, the handmaiden of the new
capacity for arousing fear or excitement; and it will have technologies; then wins its own provisional autonomy as
been understood from the previous discussion that what 'pure' or research science; and now in our own period, as
matters is not so much the positive or negative valence of private businesses and corporations begin ever-increasingly
this reaction, but rather the aesthetic epistemology of the to use the university and its research laboratories as mere
shock itself, which could not be registered against a back- testing grounds for all kinds of new products, seems on its

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

way to some new form of ancillary status under the predom- nary type when writing is not present to secure and to
inant investment in R & D. The point is, however, that the ument the stages of the process? The emergence of writ-
explanatory value of 'technological determinism' is itself thus comes as some first differentiation within language,
determined by just such autonomization and its vicissitudes. e first autonomization of two distinct zones of what
This is, then, the moment to speak of autonomization as ely already knew a variety of social differentiations (gen-
such, a working concept whose adaptation from Luhman- ►, age, even the rudiments of class, which are often marked
nian differentiation I have already underscored. For what l\it'
different pronouns, different verb forms, and even differ-
seems to me genuinely productive for the cultural and histo- ~t syntactic structures). . . . .
riographic areas (or the culture-historiographic area, if you ~1,The point of such speculat10ns 1s simply to authonze a
prefer) is precisely this other face of the process Luhmann ~her, 'modern' one, according to which the multiple dif-
chose to theorize as an unremitting dynamic of interminable J.,~ntiations of nineteenth-century language, across the
scissiparity whose eventual consequences can never be fore- ftoeven development of the European nation-states, project
seen. Luhmann's is thus an extraordinary negative and diag- ,Ot merely the radically different and semi-autonomous
nostic conceptual instrument, which has the drawback of halms of aristocratic and bourgeois languages, learned and
simultaneously constituting a rather complacent ideology. As jiopular languages, the languages of high literature and
'differentiation' descends into the smallest pores of the social 9ratory, the languages of the incipient mass press and of
1

substance, it may well no longer be accompanied by the ~mmercial exchange, but also, beyond all of those, a kind
production of ever more numerous autonomous or semi- 1£empty Utopian domain of language as non-existent and
1

autonomous levels or domains, such as those we can observe 1fet as demonstrable and conjectural as non-Euclidean
in the earlier periods of modernization (and virtually up to ibometry. This is then the space in which the new language
our own time), and for which I have invented my comple- ~cialists work, and in which, by modifying the original
mentary concept. For it is certain that in this first period, not :&uclidean postulates and axioms of the various forms of
only do we observe the separation of the machine from the .• eryday speech (reference, communicability, etcetera), they
tool - in such a way as to constitute a kind of autonomy of ,educe and develop the invisible outlines of whole new
the technological - we can also observe the same process at ►guage structures never before seen on earth and heaven. 3
work in language itself and in representation: and this is :C>nce again, it does not matter what the ideological valences
surely an even more relevant development for any theory of •f such a production are (and the poets themselves supply
artistic modernism. 'their own accompanying ideological excuses and justifica-
The linguistic historians tell us that unwritten languages tions). For Friedrich, as we have seen, all this bewildering
are somehow embedded in their ecologies and their social linguistic autonomization has something to do with 'aliena-
contexts in an indiscriminacy which makes the very idea of tion'. For another tradition - authorized by Mallarme's
a grammar inconceivable and reveals all its anachronism: is immortal definition 'Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la
it even possible to evoke language change of a lawful evolu- tribu' - the realm of non-Euclidean language thereby pro-

146 147
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

duced has a powerful Utopian vocation, in an environment alities must now be perceived, not in terms of Identity,
of degraded commercial speech everywhere: it offers to their approximation to the florid periods of the ancients,
reclaim, redeem, transform and transfigure the koine of a rather in terms of differences that gradually come to be
capitalist daily life into an Ur-speech in which our authentic sped as those of the various subjective individualities and
relationship to the world and to Being can be reinvented. ll,Pderstoodas so many styles. The later historical eclipse of
Yet that is not the historical meaning of modernism but only !ltYle,and indeed of the personal individuality of the centred
its aesthetic and, as I will argue shortly, its ideology. Or at f-~ject itse,lf,.is the_nto be understood not so much as ~he
least one of its ideologies: for as the autonomization of Ftval of ecrtture, m any of the then current senses, which
language proceeds, bleaker 'motivations' of its non-commun- •uickly multiplied far beyond Barthes's own early proposal,
icativity, its non-signification, emerge, as in Foucault's late t,.rather the supersession of modernism by postmodernism
modern aesthetic of the other, non-human, side of language. ffPd postmodernity, a story we will not recapitulate here.
One can, to be sure, write a history of these varied ideologi- Nowever, the emergence of the category of style is not to be
cal appropriations of the process of linguistic differentiation ,onfused with some new historical evolution of subjectivity,
and autonomization, but such a history would be distinct ... t is, rather, part of the history of the autonornization of
from that of the process itself, as the alternating celebration ►nguage as such.
of 'poetic' or non-Euclidean language as either pure ideality -: That such autonomization then has momentous conse-
or pure materiality testifies. "1ences for representation and other kinds of artistic 'mean-
We may here as well register certain 'beginnings', which ~s' is obvious enough; and the differentiation of the figure
then become so much fodder and nourishment and new
attempts at telling the story of emergence (whether it is that
of modernity or modernism proper). 4 I believe that the
richest and most suggestive proposal in this area is to be
found in Roland Barthes's still-extraordinary Degre zero de
.t
la,om the medium of painting is certainly one of the most
Uramaticways in which this story can be told, as we shall
But related instances could be explored within the
,· nceptual language of philosophy as, with Nietzsche, it too
..• omes 'modern'; as well as in the 'invention' of the Uncon-
l'ecriture, about which one may say that only its final ous, or in the use of the non- or post-mimetic building
prognosis or prophecy (about so-called white or bleached
writing) has been outmoded and outrun by time itself.5 The
narrative I will here retain from Barthes is his account of the
replacement of rhetoric by style: an older, indeed immem-
orial oratorical and essentially decorative deployment of
language (very often as a symbolic rehearsal of political
! terials of iron, reinforced concrete, glass and the like. 6
r the layman, the analogous developments in musical
terial are likely to be apprehended more crudely as the
ikJ.ipseof the melody and the obsolescence of tonal harmony:
\1.nlessindeed it is the very invention of tonality that is
~asped as musical modernity. 7 But for all these breaks and
power or social class) gives way, in the period of the French beginnings, rigid designators are available: Baudelaire,
Revolution, to a very different kind of speech (Wordsworth's Manet, Wagner, Paxton and the Crystal Palace, and so on.
plain or democratic language is only one marker), whose What is less obvious is the way in which, at that point,

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 A SlNGULAR MODERNlTY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

for the theory of modernism as well, there sets in that same ves, what is often called postmodernism or postmodernity
dialectic of breaks and periods we identified in discussions ' I simply document yet a further internal break and the
of modernity. The matter of an absolute beginning is never ,, ' uction of yet another, even later, still essentially mod-
a problem here: for the trope exists precisely to provoke ist moment.
astonishment and the scandal of the new theory, the break lThe subsequent proliferation of such breaks is then con-
further back than we imagined, the uncanonized name sud- tionally ascribed (as we have already seen) to the so-
denly arising to overshadow the only too familiar one. What led telos of modernism, that is to say, to some inner
is more disturbing, however, is the tendency of such breaks amic of perpetual innovation, which - like the restless
to multiply; and we here only isolate one example of a 'd irrepressible expansion of capitalism itself - necessarily
1
' shes ever further beyond its boundaries, into new 'tech-
'second' break, which is nonetheless still a lively source of
historiographic controversy and also plays itself out across , ues' as well as new kinds of content. The micronarratives
all the arts (including philosophy). This is the problem of :such a telos are familiar (and themselves multiply when-
symbolisme, whose organic forms and vegetal decorations - , er a given 'modernist' artistic phenomenon is magnified on
although certainly modernist in some sense - are evidently , ser inspection). The emergence out of Baudelaire of the
different in spirit from the machine-age violences and cel- .,·tative and parallel traditions of Mallarme and Rimbaud,
ebrations of futurism and everything that follows it. It is a . pure poetry and surrealism, can be matched in the novel
historical differentiation one finds replicated in architecture ''. the emergence out of Flaubert of Joyce on the one hand,
d of Proust or Kafka on the other; and in painting in the

f
(Jugendstil versus the Bauhaus), in music (the early neurotic
Schoenberg, whose melodies Brecht famously thought were es fanning out from Manet into Impressionism or Cubism;
'too sweet', versus the later theoretician of the twelve-tone music in the multiple lineages of Wagner. Any one of
system); in painting (Impressionism versus Cubism); and so lltese moments of 'influence' and transfer can be parleyed
on down the line (in philosophy the equivalent would no ~to a break by the energetic intervention of a manifesto,
doubt be the opposition between the content of late-nine- 1/hichthen, as with Pound or the surrealists, or Schoenberg,
teenth-century vitalism and the purer formalisms of every- ► Kandinsky, rewrites the past in the form of a new
thing from pragmatism and phenomenology all the way to lenealogy. Here, the force of the imperative to innovate or
structuralism and communication theory). lo'make it new', the powerful and central presiding value of
It thus seems to me that it is perfectly proper to speak of ~ New as such, has always seemed to constitute the
two moments of modernism in this sense, provided one :fundamental logic of modernism, which replicates Schelling's
remains complacent about the inevitable dynamics of the ilynamic of modernity in its powerful expulsion of the past
process, which is bound to generate more breaks virtually ad in the name of a search for innovation as such and for its
infinitum. We will thus here shortly adduce a moment of late own sake, which can often seem to be an empty and formal-
modernism, in contrast to modernism proper (even in the ist fetish. The historical mystery of this impulse can be
latter's 'two forms'); while for the late modernists them- measured by its persistence well beyond the life span of

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

modernism itself, which in the 1950s and 1960s seemed to objecthood, which has already been identified as a funda-
touch a kind of limit and to have exhausted all available and ntal feature of modernity and modernism alike. Perhaps,
conceivable novelties (in this also offering something of a ' wever, the narrative would be even further enhanced from
caricature of capitalism itself, as the ultimate limit of a ••• perspective of Luhmann's differentiation, which might
saturated world market becomes thinkable); the point being it a scission within the commodity form itself, something
that postmodernism, despite its systematic and thoroughgo- 1 its objectal form separated out and installed as an inde-
ing rejection of all the features it could identify with high ndent force within the newly autonomous or semi-auton-
modernism and modernism proper, seems utterly unable to ous realm of art as (accompanied by its shadow image in
divest itself of this final requirement of originality. vertising and mass culture) it hives off from commercial
Those who find this persistence self-evident and even and everyday language alike.
perfectly natural and inevitable can be shown to think within ••..But it seems to me that the power of the teleological
the framework of a market that outlasted modernism proper rrative is not fully secured by notions of the market and
and accompanied capital, in however differentiated a form - ' e commodity form: or perhaps one might better say that
new types of museums now joining the more traditional art •rsistent and deeply entrenched narratives of this kind are
galleries along with new types of collective art projects and ely to be overdetermined and invested by a number of
exhibitions - on into its third or postmodern, globalized '.fferent kinds of explanatory energies. Thus, the technolog-
stage. Yet a theory (or narrative) that threatens to swallow • l motif can also be seen to return here (no matter that the
up 'postmodernity' as such retroactively as simply one even ••eological narrative of technological progress is fully as
more extensive modernist innovation, thereby canceling the .uch a construct as this artistic one of modernism as such),
break on which the notion of a later stage was founded, sofar as the option of framing aesthetic analyses in terms
clearly foregrounds the omnipresence of the commodity form f technique makes the pull of this particular interpretive
as its explanatory mechanism. The modernist telos in art . ·ntre of gravity inevitable, even though posing problems for
replicates the restless telos of fashion as such, in which the ''e language arts, whose alleged techniques are conjectural
rhythms of commodity production are inscribed. The market ' comparison with painting, music or architecture. These
narrative (to which we will return in a moment) is a persuas- ·•roblems, however, turn out to be productive ones: for it is
ive one, which becomes more satisfying if, with Adorno, we '.• though in return for the acknowledgement, by the other
inscribe the process of commodification within the work of lrts and media, of the supremacy of poetry and poetic
art itself, now grasped as a resistance to that content which 1:fanguagein the modernist system of the beaux-arts, poetry
homeopathically adopts its form. The work of art thus seeks : graciously returned the compliment by a willingness to
by ever greater objectivation to generate a substantiality that . adopt, however metaphorically, the technical and material
cannot be absorbed by commodity logic. This theory has in accounts the other arts gave of their own structure and
addition the merit of grounding and overdetermining that internal dynamics (we will return to this interesting exchange
depersonalization, that movement from subjective expressioll' agreement later on).

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

But once the decision has been made not only to read ~n to separate themselves off from their objects. Better
change as innovation, but also to transcode the latter in
1
some earlier and traditional contextual unity between

!
terms of technique and of technical developments within the ' places, bodies and gestures, a situational unity in
rds,
medium itself, the transfer is complete, and the modernist ich language does not ~et enter~ain an ind~pen~ent, let
teleology can be celebrated perfectly adequately and with a ne an autonomous, existence, is here posited m slow
new force within the framework of technological (and some- f"a,ggr~gation under the forces of differentiation and
times even of scientific) progress as such. This is to say that !iParation.
the various defences and apologia of an emergent modern ,tOne can also speak (as we have, above) of the onset of a
art can now borrow the force of an already-existent techno- ~minalism which has the ~arad~xical effect of 'mak~ng
logical ideology, which becomes a blind behind which the Ji'range'both the word and its obJect, both now emergmg
more embarrassing logic of the commodity form and the 'o a peculiar new semi-autonomous existence. The tra-
market can operate. • '·anal or even early modern treatises on the subject deal
However, in the perpetual back-and-forth between form '·th feelings and emotions in the form of linguistic systems
and content, the latter inevitably asserts its rights and poses a structural kind: the various named emotions are lined
the problem of how an explanation of modernism in terms ' against each other in pairs and clusters, positive, negative
of poetic technology could account for anything more than d intermediary (whether in Aristotle's Nichomachean
poetry about machines (futurism) or, in a pinch, about urban ·'hies or in Descartes's Treatise of the Passions). It is very
renewal (as in Baudelaire's inaugural 'Tableaux parisiens'). ''heh like those systems of colour that always formed the
1, .t great example of Levi-Strauss's structuralist doctrine.
What does technology have to do, in other words, with that
other claim that modernism innovates in the subjective realm µe must not imagine any linguistic deficiency seizing on an
as well, pushing back the boundaries of the known world of '.dividual emotion-word, even though new ones tentatively
the soul, and exploring feelings and passions, emanations ,;pear from time to time to modify the system, while older
from the unconscious, that had hitherto remained respecta- ries are occasionally renamed; rather what happens in
bly concealed from view? 'odern' times is that the whole system of such words enters
It is a momentous objection, which is not convincingly •'.locrisis and as it disintegrates, saps the representational
•. '
addressed by the purely negative principle of depersonaliza- rce of any individual one of its elements. The problem of
tion that has so far been proposed. In order to grasp this ~ing these now unfamiliar and unnamed 'feelings' and
dimension of the phenomenon, we find ourselves obliged to ~motions' (the latter also being abstract 'names' that no
return to that 'crisis of representation' which was only briefly '°nger really correspond to identifiable entities) then flings
touched on in the discussion of language, but which now subjective content as such into the well-known 'crisis of
suggests the hypothesis of a moment in which the conven- representation' and, by making representational 'solutions'
tional and traditional linguistic codes of feeling and emotion provisional and unauthorized by forms of social and collec-

154 155
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

tive sovereignty (that have in any case themselves been ' ·st innovation. As has already been shown, it is not a
undermined during the revolutionary period), releases such er of new materials so much as the continuous invention
solutions to the teleological logic of fashion as well. 'siew taboos on the older positivities. This is a decisive
But we must also briefly register a reciprocal process for ' ention, evidently modelled on the old Horkheimer/
in the kind of linguistic separation and differentiation we are rno Dialectic of Enlightenment, according to which each
examining here, it must not be thought that the new linguis- osed advance in knowledge and science is grasped as a
tic configurations do not exercise a shaping influence of their of defamiliarization which relegates the previous
own on the subjective materials they are supposed to be only ,ment of rationality to the status of a superstition, eventu-
mor~ adequately ?aming. It is one of the self-promoting leading on into an anti-theoretical wasteland of positiv-
glories of modermsm that it often creates its objects and . This new explanatory perspective now grounds the
subjective references by virtue of the very power of its names. ed telos of modernist innovation (and the fetishization
Nor is this process merely a matter of suggestibility and the ',the New) in a far more satisfactory and intelligible
Girardian mimetic and imitative behaviour. The Russian ess. Each subsequent generation, beginning, if you like,
Formalists were perhaps the first to discover, in what they • the Romantics, feels the unsatisfactory inherited linguis-
called the 'motivation of the device', that an empty figure ,, •schema of subjectivity to be an artificial convention,
can often summon up a reality with which to fill itself out. It , ·eh it is challenged to replace with some newer represen-
is something, on the aesthetic level, akin to the paradoxes of ·onal substitute. What looked like the progressive uncov-
the old James-Lange theory of emotion (for which the ·, g of new realms of subjectivity - from Baudelaire's
subjective experience follows the gesture of expression rather ivalent sado-masochist 'satanism' on down through
than preceding and causing it), and rehearsed again only bauldian ecstasy and Dostoyevskian self-abnegation and
recently in Paul de Man's now scandalous chapter on ·ection all the way to the various collective unnameables
'Excuses', in which the 'authenticity' of the subject is grasped ,. twentieth-century literature - is now seen to be a perpet-
as little more than the after-effect of the posture and syntax , I process of unnaming and refiguration which has no
of his (or her) speech act. 8 eseeable stopping point (until, with the end of the modern
Most often, however, the autonomization of representa- lf, it reaches exhaustion).
tion, and the concomitant de-subjectivization of artistic 1But this is the point at which to introduce the public or
language, is discernible in the increasingly spatial detours ihe audience, and to open this process up onto a wider social
through which the new sentence must pass in its effort to ~ntext. We did not need to wait for Pierre Bourdieu's
reconstruct some former feeling in a way that successfully therapeutic demystification of the pretences of the aesthetic
eludes and evades its pre-existent form as a convention and IDograsp what is at stake in all this for the artist's personal
as a cliche, at least for a time. ltlotivations. 'Baudelaire's problem,' Paul Valery observed,
This is the point at which we must return to Adorno's in what was taken at the time to be his practitioner's
extraordinary reversal of the conventional account of mod- tynicism, 'must have ... posed itself in these terms: "How

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART ll: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

to be a great poet, but neither a Lamartine nor a Hugo nor •••nant as anything we have mentioned hitherto. This_ is
a Musset" .' 9 This imperative, which Valery terms Baude- ' at is often called the autoreferentiality or self-designation
laire's raison d'etat, need not, however, be taken as a • the modern, and the way in which modernist work_scan
debunking of the poetic inventions of the modernists: it is ' often be seen, implicitly or explicitly, to be allegories of
inherent in the crisis of subjective representation which is • tir own production. The point is not only that the e~er-
itself but a sub-set of what we have called the autonomiza- • t artists of modernism have no social status or institu-
tion of non-Euclidean language. al social role except as ill-defined positions within. t~e
It also corresponds to what is sometimes improperly called ••••heme, not yet even intellectuals in any strict sense; It 1s
a crisis in reception or of the public itself. Yet we need not • o that their works are increasingly unclassifiable, and
posit some hitherto-unified public which is then gradually in to resist the commercial categories of the genres in the
fragmented throughout the period of hegemony of a . rt to distinguish themselves from commodity forms_at
bourgeoisie ever more firmly in control of power and culture. . same time that they invent various mythic and ideolog1~al
For the strength of Luhmann's concept of differentiation lies fWll.Sfor some unique formal status which has no social
in the way in which it posits formation and rearticulation •• ognition or acknowledgement. In this void, they are
together and at one within the same process: the public liged to recognize and acknowledge themselves; and au~o-
begins to differentiate at the very moment in which it comes 'ferentiality is the very dynamic of this process, in which
into being as a newly identifiable social institution: the ••• work of art designates itself and supplies the criteria
1
emergence of the new bourgeois reading public is at one .bereby it is supposed to be used and evaluated. It is not
with its fragmentation into articulated sub-groups that grad- ' . ssary to see this level of the work's meaning as an
ually become autonomous in their own right. This is why lusive one· rather it constitutes one allegorical level - for
the new bourgeois art - the new modernist art - is at once '
artists themselves no doubt the anagogical one - among
ny others.
' '
confronted with a public introuvable. In its crudest form we
may assert that at the very moment in which it conceives its :1Still, this level tempts the artists on to conceive of th~ir
vocation as high art, the latter finds its public confiscated by • bitions on an ever-greater scale, which will culminate_10
mass culture: which is not to say that the vocation is not 'book of the world' itself, that Book as which, accordmg
itself inspired and thematized by the coming into being of ••. Mallarme the world is destined to end up. And this is
mass culture as such, itself an inevitable result and by- S: n the moment ' to evoke, however unseasonable it may
product of the cultural differentiations we have in mind here. ,eem today, that ultimate claim of modernism to a relation-
Thus, Balzac was a writer of bestsellers and Hugo very much -1iip with what Andre Malraux called the Absolute. Indeed,
a popular poet: something that will no longer be possible for on a wholly different scale from the great manifestos of the
their followers. time (from Breton back to Cezanne's, Rimbaud's and Mal-
But this situation now leads us on into another feature of larme's letters), Malraux's Voices of Silence, along with
modernism in the arts, which is as formative and as deter- Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture, can be considered

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY

to be one of the great ideological apologias for modernism

in general, for the most part considerably more substantial
than most of what has passed for philosophical aesthetics 2
(save no doubt for Adorno and for Kant himself).
We can convey the claims for the absolute more modestly
and recognizably by quoting Adorno one last time, to the
effect that 'in order for the work of art to be purely and fully
a work of art, it must be more than a work of art' .10 The
purely aesthetic is in other words indissolubly linked to the e have sought, following our maxims,_to rec?~struct that
requirement that it be ultimately impure. We thus here touch torical situation of 'modernity' in which artistic modern-
on the ultimate ambiguity of the slogans of differentiation m can be grasped as an intelligible social process; and we
and autonomization: language, and the aesthetic itself, can •••ve drawn on any number of coordinates an_dele_mentsof
never be fully autonomous without passing over into autism older theories of modernism, while attemptmg vigorously
and schizophrenia, gobbledygook and the sheerest 'inanite rewrite those in ways usable for our own very different
sonore': even nonsense rhyme (Lewis Carroll) or the auton- uation. . .
omous superlanguage of a Khlebnikov must retain that thin Now it is time to return to those older theones, which I
final thread of reference that requires us to rephrase the ·nhenceforth designate simply as the ideology of mode~n-
characterization 'autonomous' into that of semi-autonomy. as such, its own ideology as it were (and not som~thmg
The Absolute is precisely this last tenuous thread, the most ' torically reconstructed after the fact, as we have tned _to
powerful of all, which connects even the most non-Euclidean in the preceding section). This ideology can be ea~ily
art, from Mallarme to Jackson Pollock, with all the other ognized and identified: it is first and foremost that which
differentiated worlds of reference and thereby, in an extra- •• sits the autonomy of the aesthetic, the . supre~~ value
ordinary dialectical reversal, endows it with its revolutionary ·thout which however committed the vanous cntics and
power. '.actitioners ~ay be to art itself and its specificities and
. ssimilable experiences, such commitment cannot really be
ntified as the ideology of the modern. Another way of
tllying this is that the arguments pro~osed a_ndmars~a~led
~ ideologues of the modern in this specifically_h~1ted
l,.istoricalsense all turn around the problem of the 1ust1fica-
tion of the autonomy of art itself. They do n_otmerely see~
to foreground a specific kind of artistic techn~que or exp~n-
ence, or to argue for one kind of art or medmm as. agamst
another _ even for a newer art as against a convent10nal or

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

traditional kind. They argue not only for a philosophical ►rely perceptible line between the notion of autonomy and
differentiation - whether phenomenological or structural, '·· at designation named the semi-autonomous: it is a slippage
material or experiential - between art and other kinds of om adjective to substantive, if you like, from the structural
experience or other zones or levels of social life and struc- d the descriptive to the ontological) which is no doubt
ture. Descriptions of that kind are here always pressed into eply embedded, like a faint hairline crack, within this
the service of a more fundamental aim, namely to endow the uster of words (Luhmann's differentiation does not register
aesthetic with a transcendental value which is incomparable at all on its apparatuses); but it marks a fundamental
(and indeed which does not need to be completed with lk>rderline, a frontier on which the ideologues of modernism
descriptions of the structure of other kinds of experience, tJke their stand in a telltale embattled formation which
social or psychological; which stands on its own and needs eometimes leaves the rest of us perplexed.
no external justification). ~.·We can s~ake off this perplexity by ~e~embering that
But I have pronounced the fateful word 'differentiation', /pdier perplexing feature of our own descnpt1on, namely the
so omnipresent in the preceding discussion; and it can now Jbsolute. This last in fact stands for :Whatever extra-aes-
be seen (leaving Luhmann and his particular linguistic codes Mtetic justifications are finally evoked m order to ground
and slogans aside) to be a constant feature of the history of ... d to remotivate what we have been calling the semi-
the various philosophical aesthetics as such from Aristotle to j,utonomy of the aesthetic: such justifications - whether they
Lukacs. Why single out modern critics and aestheticians - 1k in human psychology, in history or in society, or even in
modernist critics and aestheticians and theorists - for some l'eligion itself - must necessarily be refused and repudiated
specific historical judgement which is not simply applicable t-Ythe ideologues of the modern. But the refusal is some-
to all the (Western) aestheticians in the history of philos- ► ..,. es masked by the position that it is art and the aesthetic
ophy? It is a question that can be narrowed and reinforced ~If which in fact for them constitutes the Absolute, a
by the present context: for have we not here very specifically ~ition that is then vulgarized in terms of this or that
deployed the notion of an autonomization of the aesthetic ~ligion' of art and similar slogans, all of them internally
field for the account of modernism in the preceding section? .. ntradictory and ultimately meaningless. It is not only that
And does this account not simply confirm the conclusion we ~ is not religion, and could only be pressed into the latter's
are here attributing to the ideologues of modernism, namely ~ice as a submission to an external authority and value;
the autonomy of aesthetics as such? Is the most visible !Jbe very term Absolute, if it means anything, designates a
difference, namely that I have posited this autonomy as the tanscendental motivation, an appeal to something outside
end result of a historical process, whereas on the whole the ·Lhepractice in question and enveloping it. But it is also
aestheticians of the modern see it as a transhistorical or ·c;ertainthat in our time, religion is so vague and tenuous a
timeless and eternal status - is this difference really the discursive field that its vocabulary can itself be appropriated
crucial one? Is it the only one? , by other causes; indeed, where it is most closely associated
No, the fundamental distinction lies elsewhere, on that · With the aesthetic one most often discovers that it is little

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

more than an excuse for the thoroughgoing autonomization ~intessentially modern, to whose practice did it corre-
of the latter. A comparison of these aestheticizing (mostly) Jpond?And what are we to call these last, how are we to
Christian rhetorics with T.S. Eliot makes the difference at tinguish them from what it would be embarrassing to call
once clear and palpable: Eliot's work points to a genuine 'genuine' modernists or the 'real' modernists? Let's deal
Absolute, that is to say, a vision of a total social transfor- ••'th this last at once. I will call the postwar artists 'late
mation which includes a return of art to some putative odernists'; and in a final section I will sketch in an account
earlier wholeness. The religion of our contemporaries is a • the structural differences between their production and
conservative containment strategy without content, a reac- l(t,atof classical modernism, whose practitioners I will (not
tion to the intellectual, if not the political, threat of progres- !Jithout some hesitation) refer to as 'high modernists'.
sive and revolutionary positions. ~ Working back from that conclusion, in a penultimate
It will have become minimally clear that the affirmation ~tion I will have to characterize the 'uneven development'
of the autonomy of the aesthetic is a contradictory one, • the ideology of modernism itself, the varying national
which it requires a good deal of (ideological) footwork to • uations in which in equally various forms it arose, and the
sustain. We will examine its dynamic and requirements in a ite different national ideologues who developed such
moment, after positing several other hypotheses designed to s. But before considering the various aesthetics through
situate this aesthetic ideology of the modern (or of modern- ·eh an ideology of modernism emerged in the various
ism) historically. Indeed, in what follows, I will argue that ~t-1945 nation-states, as well as the artistic climate of that
this ideology - even as a theorization of modernist artistic tate modernist practice to which they most immediately
practices - was not contemporaneous with the modern , rresponded, I must give a little more specificity to that
movement itself, as I have described it in the preceding ology itself.
section. It is a belated product, and essentially an invention F.
The first thing one wants to say about the ideology of
and an innovation of the years following World War II. This ,-odernism is that it is an American invention, and that it
assertion raises several conceptual problems about ideology flad some very specific historical determinants. I hasten to
itself: namely, the problem of its relationship to practice (in Jd.dthat we want to distinguish between external and inter-
this case artistic practice), and the problem of the relation- pi determinants, between pressure of events and political
ship of both ideology and practice to the historical situation [lituations and those of aesthetic form itself. Both will be
in question. llealt with here, in that order.
For instance: if the ideology of modernism was not devised I, Late modernism is a product of the Cold War, but in all
by the modernist artists themselves, as the theory of their tinds of complicated ways. Thus, the Cold War spelled the
artistic practice, what was their ideology? And if the ideology end of a whole era of social transformation and indeed of
of modernism was a belated construct, which did not corre- Utopian desires and anticipations. For the emergence of
spond to the practice of the nineteenth- and twentieth- consumerism and the spread of a culture of consumption
century artists and writers whom we think of as throughout this whole period is evidently not at all the same

164 165
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

as the heroic moment of the conquest of productivity that at in 1945. As far as modernism is concerned, we
preceded it (and which did not even, in the two protagonists ainly must register a kind of aesthetic 'uneven develop-
of the Cold War, end with the destruction of World War II). nt' on a world scale. For obvious reasons, the Axis powers
Now, what was wanted in the West and in the Stalinist East ••• ed their moment of modernism, as did the Soviet Union.
alike, except for revolutionary China, was a stabilization of three countries (I omit Japan) had vibrant modernisms in
the existing systems and an end to that form of properly 1920s and until they were abruptly cut short around the
modernist transformation enacted under the sign and slogan ' e time in the early 1930s. On the aesthetic level, this
of modernity as such, or in other words, classical or high ation certainly justifies Habermas's well-known slogan of
modernism. Now the Absolutes of the latter have been dernism as an unfulfilled promise, as an unfinished proj-
reduced to the more basic programme of modernization - . What is crucial for us is not only that they did not
which is simply a new word for that old thing, the bourgeois elop artistically, but that they also failed to reach their
conception of progress. As has already been observed, mod- ment of theorization, which is to say, in our present
ernization stands for the transfer and/or implementation of ntext, the moment in which some properly 'modernist'
1
industrial technology already developed; for its replication thetic practice could be codified in the form of an ideol-
rather than its invention (stamped out of the ground or born of modernism. Meanwhile, in the so-called Western
full-grown from Zeus's brow). Politics must therefore now ocracies this moment is also absent, but for different
be carefully monitored, and new social impulses repressed or sons. Indeed, in the Anglo-American core countries mod-
disciplined. These new forms of control are symbolically re- ism remains a secondary or fairly minor impulse until
enacted in later modernism, which transforms the older er World War II. In France things are different yet again:
modernist experimentation into an arsenal of tried and true ough Baudelaire's seminal use of the word 'modernite'
techniques, no longer striving after aesthetic totality or the ., ks the centrality of French art in the modern period, the
systemic and Utopian metamorphosis of forms. And yet - word 'modernisme' has only come into use in the last
and this is the point of conferring the new term 'late modern- years, marking a strange kind of theoretical belatedness
ism' on a whole historical period - such proto-modernist which I will briefly return later on. The single exception
aesthetic modernization continues a while longer after World that of architecture, where the CIAM and Le Corbusier
War II, until the 1960s puts an end and a full stop to the • essively popularize the slogan of the modern and work
postwar itself and to what Habermas might call a modernist igently at constructing its ideology. (As we have seen,
catching-up or retrieval, to a continuation of the modern Wever, it is important to distinguish between the sympto-
that wants to think of itself as the latter's completion and , tic value of the adjective 'modern', which crops up in
fulfilment. But what form can the attempt to continue and :. thetic discussions well before the period in question, and
complete the unfulfilled promise of modernism have taken? the slogan of modernism as such, a substantive that is not
Let's go back to the world situation confronted by the ."7envery current in the architectural field.)
artistic United States and its ideologues after the German What the Cold War situation offers, then, is not so much

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 PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY
A SINGULAR MODERNITY
► say that both Stevens and the New ~riticism prepared the
an artistic
. .as an. ideological opportunity. Certainly abst ract " ce in which an ideology of modermsm could emerge.
exp~ess10msm m painting was a very great and durable But it is now time to say what that ideology was. It is to
achievement.
A · But when I suggest that late modernism wa s an found in the New Criticis~, but ~b~ve all in the ~riticism
. me~ican phenomenon (or more properly a US one), I have fltat emerged from the American pamt1~g of the p~nod; and
~n mmd the theory of art, the ideology of modernism, which , js associated with the name of the ma1or theoretical figure
It was the very role of abst~act expressionism pre-eminently Ii1 the late modern age and indeed that theoretician who
to have generated and ~h1ch then accompanied it every- i.ore than any other can be credited as having invented the
~here_ ~broad as a specifically North American cultural !.teology of modernism full-blown and out of whole cloth, I
1mpe_nahsm.The story is brilliantly told in Serge Guilbaut's ~an Clement Greenberg. It is indeed supremely ironic that
classic ~ook How Ne~ York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, It should be the very isolationism of the 'ideologies of
and I will not re~e~t tt here. The development is replicated, ptonomy' in the various arts that has obscured the historic
but on a more hm1ted national scale, in American poetry, ilchievement of Greenberg until very recently indeed, so that
whe~e the rich and complex oeuvre of Wallace Stevens begins !lis paradigmatic relevance for, say, doctrines of poetic
to d~splace those of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, both of them t,nguage was rarely acknowledged at the time. I will quote
tarmshed by politics, or in other words by extrinsic and ~-few passages designed to give the flavour of his interven-
extrap~etic, extraliterary concerns. But the politics of Pound -on as well as to demonstrate the way in _which a theory of
and Ehot (as s~spicious and right-wing as both may have llesthetic autonomy could be constructed m the areas of the
been) was the sign that they were genuine modernists, that is
to say, that they held to the Absolute and to Utopianism in ►isual arts:
~ays no longer so ~ppropriate for the postwar era (altho~gh It was not to be an about-face towards a new society, but
It has also been said that the Europeanism of the American an emigration to a Bohemia which was to be art's sanctu-
~oet Eliot could function as a kind of aesthetic NATO ary from capitalism. It was to be the task of the avant-
1deo~ogyand prepare the British integration into the postwar garde to perform in opposition to bourgeois society the
contment). function of finding new and adequate cultural forms for
Stevens meanwhile is abstract enough to enable transfers the expression of that same society, without at the same
and translations, export strategies, being in this utterly dif- time succumbing to its ideological divisions and its refusal
ferent from the far-too-American William Carlos Williams to permit the arts to be their own justification. The avant-
(although, in another sense, Stevens, who said of himself garde, both child and negation of Romanticism, becomes
that he ~a~ the last American never to have visited Europe, the embodiment of art's instinct of self-preservation••••
As the first and most important item upon its agenda
offered md1genous credentials of a high-cultural 'vernacular'
the avant-garde saw the necessity of an escape from ideas,
order). Stevens's poetry can be seen as literature and as which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles
th~ory al~ke; his ~ractice is essentially what he himself, along of society. Ideas came to mean subject-matter in gen-
with the mfluent1al New Criticism, made theory of: which is
169
168
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

eral. • • • This meant a new and greater emphasis upon he anti-Stalinist development, then, tends to overlay this
form, and it also involved the assertion of the arts as ' ·-bourgeois position in such a way as to combine both
independent vocations, disciplines and crafts, absolu~ely ' ·political praxis and the bourgeois public sphere into a
autonomous, and entitled to respect for their own sakes.11 • e entity, identified as extrinsic to the work of art. Both
The history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive •, left insistence on politics and the bourgeois rhetoric of
surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance dom get assimilated as 'the ideological struggles of
consists chiefly in the flat picture plane's denial of efforts •• ·ety' in the passage quoted above. The latter constitute
to 'hole through' it for realistic perspectival space.12 ' n 'content', or what Greenberg here calls 'ideas' or 'sub-
-matter'; and they make it possible to identify as politics
Two discussions are necessary here - one on Greenberg's lf, of whatever ideological persuasion, what must be
historical and political situation and one on the complex ' ised from the work of art in order for it to become
phenomenon of the transfer of a theory of painting to the ething more purely aesthetic (it being understood that
other arts and media - before we come to some more general slogan of purity or 'pure poetry' is an older language).
understanding of the way in which an idea of aesthetic ·,Buttwo advantages are thereby secured. First, the Marx-
autonomy gets constructed in the first place. model can now be retained and developed in a new and
Greenberg's initial Marxism is well-known, and also the •'rtling form: the purification of the work and the extirpa-
Trotskyist position from which a disillusion with Stalinism of everything extrinsic to it can now be seen as the way
determines his separation of art from politics in general. \ which art defends itself against a hostile environment
These are, however, two relatively distinct frameworks. The ether that be capitalism or simply middle-class preju-
Marxian stance posits an antagonism between modernism in e). Greenberg's aesthetic programme can now be cel-
the arts and its bourgeois context; and the levels within ated as 'art's instinct of self-preservation' against all the

t
Marxism itself enable a slippage of the interpretation of that ees hostile to it, whether political or social alike.
antagonism from an anti-capitalist position to an anti-bour- Then too the new process - whereby art's true subject-
geois rhetoric. The latter, then, no longer grounded in an . tter becomes 'intrinsic' and is discovered to be the
analysis of the socio-economic system, can easily deteriorate ,aterial medium itself - can now be reidentified with the
into social antipathies that no longer determine a politics at ~ernist telos and with the New and innovation, and for
all, marking out an enclave position within bourgeois society ta emergence a new genealogy can be constructed whose
which Greenberg's contemporary disciples have found them- llarrativeturns precisely around this tendential elimination
selves able to characterize as that of a 'loyal opposition to ii the extrinsic (now grasped as figuration), on the way to
the bourgeoisie'. (This ingenious and risible twist would IOme more complete 'surrender to the resistance of its
seem better to fit the role of many postmodern artists within medium'. This new teleological narrative - which can now
an omnipresent commercialism, than that of either high or organize and coordinate the various spasmodic claims for
late modernism as such.) innovation in the classical period - also accounts for the

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

equally startling appropriation by Greenberg of the old term • ourse is positioned at the very centre (or summit) of
'avant-garde', designed to transform his aesthetic into a e modernist systeme des beaux arts. It is a misleading
manifesto and the painters he appreciates into a full-blown im, to the degree to which the representation of this
collective movement. But the older avant-gardes were tative status of the autonomy of art is itself unrepresenta-
scarcely pure or formalistic in this sense, and very specifically . For does not poetry itself 'aspire to the condition of
emphasized and passionately championed just that political sic'? Yet when one turns one's representational attention
mission and content (of whatever type) that Greenberg •.music itself, is it not rather to be described as a poetic
equally passionately wishes to banish from art. ourse from which the extrinsic dimension of meaning
Greenberg's greatness as an ideologist (if one can really ' s been sublimated to the point of ineffability? Music is
distinguish it from his perceptual genius as a critic) was not n figured as a kind of signification without cont~nt, a
only to have seen how to parlay these dilemmas in the social d of absolute language which says nothing: except, m the
and political area into new aesthetic solutions in their own ideological move, itself, which it designates absolutely,
right; nor only to have found a way to reconstruct a modern- :the void as it were. Thus, in a kind of circular flight, the
ist tradition in such a way that the new solutions come as • • ious arts - better still, the media of the various arts -
the very climax of his new ideological narrative; but also to m their absolute quality only by borrowing representa-
have known how to seize the day, and to have grasped the : nal features from the next (thus, Schelling famously said,
onset of the Cold War not as the end of hope and the " chitecture is a kind of frozen music'; and so forth).
paralysis of the productive energies of the preceding period, •· So it is that if the autonomy of art means some absolute
but rather as the signal opportunity to forge a brand-new • "tualization or sublimation beyond the figural, it can
ideology that co-opts and reawakens those energies and lectically equally well be represented in terms of an
offers a whole new (aesthetic) blueprint for the future. solute materiality (Being and Nothingness, as Hegel
The second comment will deal with the problems posed •inted out, amounting to the same thing). The most para-
by the transfer of such an ideology and such an aesthetic - ~cal form of the equation will be that in which the
so apparently medium-specific - to the other arts. It is a two- ••teriality of language is affirmed, something that is surely
way street: we have to show not only how a celebration of . nt to evoke a type of being a good deal loftier than those
the materials of oil painting and the surface of the canvas e 'vibrations in the air' (of which Marx spoke) or that
can possibly find any equivalents in, say, the language arts; oustic image' to which Saussure will consign his concep-
but also why those arts should need the transfer in the first n of the dimension of the Signifier (unaware of the extra-
place, why they could not simply develop their own ideolo- : . inary theoretical destiny reserved for this concept in more
gies of autonomy independently (as indeed the New Critics tlecenttimes). Surely the most consequential proponents of
seemed to have done for literature). die materiality of language turn out to be those (from their
For we face a paradoxical situation in which literature, lifferent perspectives, Paul de Man and Jean-Frarn;ois
but even more specifically lyric poetry, non-narrative poetic ~}'otard) who go all the way and affirm the ultimately

172 173
 PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY
A SINGULAR MODERNITY

tic language as such, namely poetry and poetic language,

~ca?dalous position that language is inhuman. The scandal
1s itself a two-way street: for the proposition can now is then promoted to centrality over th~ other _formsof
effortlessly be appropriated by any number of spiritualism language arts. For all self-respecting. 1de~log1sts of .a
· ry modernism, then, a purely poetic d1scou_rse~1!1
~techn~callyinhuman is then also the breath that God infuse~
mto his mortal and organic creation). But most often thi · titute that fixed star towards which all other lmgmsttc
omena navigate at their peril; and the impos~ible ideal
?1-ater~ality- the. ultimate mind/body problem at this stage:
~nwh!ch a material language reveals its radical incompatibil- i~me 'definition' of poetic langu~ge a~ _suchwill become
ity with that other human capacity par excellence which is •,.better mousetrap of all modernist cnttcs from the New
'consciousness' - suggests the bestial. Thus Lacan's notion '•ticism onwards (and back behind them, of the older
of the emergence of the human organism into the alien •••sian and Czech Formalists). So it was that the first great
' • in the edifice of modernist ideology is witnessed as
element of the Symbolic Order has most often science-
fictio?al. overtones; language then becomes a strange prop- · 'ty as 1957, when Northrop Frye (in The. An~tomy of
'· 'cism) asserts the equal primacy of narrative 1~se~f,_ fol-
erty mfhcted by a race of extraterrestrial travellers on the
unhappy human animals they found wandering about the , ed in that by Barthes, the structuralists and sem1ot1c1ans,
planet during their brief visit. ' iscovered Bakhtin, certain Freudianisms, all of whom
•~eoffered so many nails for the coffin of the specifically
In r_eality,however, it is the demands of ideological repre-
sentation that are acknowledged in such theories: the ;; ernist literary ideology.
material 'languages' of Greenberg's oil paint, the tangible :: •ut now we need to return to the preconditions of the
gesturality required by canvas and the 'painterly' surface, 'struction of such an ideology in the first place. It might
lend the concept of the autonomous work of art a certain , argued that all of philosophical aesthetics wa_smovi_ngin
dramatic content, and enable us to talk about technique in "s direction since Kant; or indeed that Kant himself ~s the
some non-instrumental way. This is the sense in which ' philosophical inventor of a doctrine th~t finds ~tsh1stor-
literature, or a purely literary aesthetic, suffers from a pro- l fulfilment very precisely in these late 1deolog1es~f th_e
found envy of the other arts; it longs for the solidity of their odern. It is an important objection, founded on a h1ston-
teleological histories, and for the certainties and reassurances J&raphythat organizes the historical record into continuities
of their selected materialities. Literature - in the age of lither than reconstructing it as so many breaks and gaps;
commodification - wishes it could be a thing, as the objects "1d it deserves a more extensive answer than I am able to
of the other arts seem to be; like Saint Anthony at the end of Bve here. 1J I believe that ~~nt's aesthetics freed ~rt from
Flaubert's vision it constantly murmurs its deepest longing: budal decoration and pos1t1oned a new bourge01s art to
'Etre la matiere!' lttrry Utopian and, later, modernist values. But it seems to
And this is why, after the very significant flirtation with l'le a historical mistake to reappropriate the Kantian system
the enviably substantial modernist aesthetic of painting, it ~r an anti-political and purely aestheticizing late modernist
fastens on that substitute or second-degree materiality of deology. This is yet another case in which, as so many

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

contemporary thinkers and historians have shown us, tra- Eliot's project of a restoration of culture is not congenial
1
dition is in fact a modern and even a contemporary, a late modernism.)
postcontemporary or postmodern invention, and the citation or what is called culture in all its forms is rather ~n
of authorities from the past is little more than a kind of tification of the aesthetic with this or that type of daily
pastiche. The autonomy of art today stands for little more , It is therefore from culture that art as such - high art,
than high literature as such, which is to say modernism and '.t art however you wish to celebrate it - must be
its canon. • renti~ted; and this operation takes place historically on~y
But I need to support these opinions - for expressed in . e very beginning of the television age, w~en what will
this way they are little more than personal opinions - with •••r on be stigmatized as mass culture is in its mf~ncy• .
some account of the operations whereby the notion of . • fact, however, all the great theoreticians and 1de~log1sts
0
autonomy is constructed in the first place, the enabling act the autonomy of art, the ideologists of modernism (as
that is its precondition. sed to its genuine practitioners), from Green~e_r~ to
One would think it was an easy matter: the autonomy of · rno and passing through the American New Cnt1c1sm,
art is surely secured by separating art from non-art; by tin a~eement that the concept of culture is the true enemy
purging it of its extrinsic elements, such as the sociological ;~rt as such• and that if one opens the door to 'culture',
or the political; by reclaiming aesthetic purity from the : rything cur'rently reviled under the term of cult~ral stud-
morass of real life, of business and money, and bourgeois ·'pours in and leaves pure art and pure literatu~e 1rred~em-
daily life, all around it. This is, however, in my opinion not y tainted. But it should be obvious that th_1smomtory
the case at all, even though the ideologists of the aesthetic ferentiation is very far indeed from a separation between
have described their achievement in that way and have made • aesthetic and the non-aesthetic: rather it is a disjunction
such separation of the aesthetic from everything non-aes- ·!!rnal to the very sphere of the cultural itself, in~ernal to
thetic (and all the other academic disciplines) the cornerstone aesthetic in its widest sense, for high art and literature
of their position and the very definition of aesthetic auton- in that sense as cultural as television, while advertising
omy as such. pop culture are as aesthetic as Wallace Stevens or Joyce.
What remains true in this position is only the act of Nor is it difficult to see why this foundational move needs
separation or disjunction as such, but it does not take place • be made: culture, from Schiller and Hegel on (and as late
exactly where they designated it. The autonomy of the Eliot), is pre-eminently the space of mediati~n between
aesthetic is not secured by separating the aesthetic from a .. iety or everyday life and art as such. Culture 1s the place
real life of which Kant showed it was never a part in the first llrherethese dimensions interact in either direction: art enno-
place. Rather, it is achieved by a radical dissociation within bling everyday life (as Matthew Arnold wished), or social
the aesthetic itself: by the radical disjunction and separation bfe on the contrary trivializing and degrading art and the
of literature and art from culture. (This is for example why ,.iesthetic. Culture thus stands as the blurring of the bound-

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

aries and the space of passages and movements back and nces over the last forty years. Thus, on all sides, the will
forth, the locus of transmutation and translation from one s to reduce culture to a pejorative word: culture is bad
level or dimension to the other. If one sees this ambiguous ' ture, mass culture, commercial culture. The humanists
space as mediation, as the greatest artists have always done, surrender it without qualms to autopsy by the social
then the social pole of culture stands not only as content and nces, leaving literature untouched and out of reach, in an
raw material, it also offers the fundamental context in which in which its own specialists can continue their work
art, even in its modernist form as the Absolute - especially isturbed by extrinsic questions.
in its modernist form as the Absolute - has a genuine ·i/Butthis Literature is in fact a new invention: it does not
function to redeem and transfigure a fallen society. If on the 11.dfor the immense archive of representational and cul-
other hand, like the critics and theorists I mentioned, one al (indeed overwhelmingly religious) material accumu-
feels a malaise in the face of this blurring of the boundaries, , d over the ages of human history: rather it is in fact that
an anxiety about the indeterminacy in which it necessarily ••e delimited historical phenomenon called modernism
leaves the work of art itself, it then becomes crucial to break ' ng with such fragments of the past as modernism has
the link, to sever this dialectical movement, to challenge and sen to rewrite in its own image). So we have here several
philosophically to discredit the concept of culture, in order ·•ntifications: high literature and high art mean the aes-
to protect the space of art against further incursions or , ·c minus culture, the aesthetic field radically cleansed and
contamination. I should add that the specialists on the other ·, ified of culture (which mainly stands for mass culture).
side of this new boundary - the social scientists - are not t fighting slogan of this new value has developed in recent
necessarily hostile to such a move on the part of the aesthet- • rs (at least in the United States) into that new and old
icizing modernist critics. For this radical disjunction protects • ression 'the canon', which is to say simply the list of
their disciplines as well: it makes of culture some minor t books, 'the best of all that has been thought and said',
realm of inquiry in sociology, but above all it cleanses and \our right-wingers like to quote Matthew Arnold. The
purifies their various theories and inquiries from all those and concept has the advantage of proposing an alliance
questions about culture and ideology and consciousness that een the older philologists (if there are any left), who
are so messy and troublesome and that threaten to reintro- e a genuine historical interest in and commitment to the
duce the non-quantifiables of human freedom back into a t, and the newer aesthetes who are the true ideologists of
carefully delimited and positivizing, testable, falsifiable, area e (late) modern. It thus serves to disguise the basic reality
of tests and questionnaires, of statistics. It should be added ,,-ant to insist on here, namely that this purely aesthetic or
that the disjunction of culture and art, which in the eyes of • ·stic canon, on closer inspection, stands revealed as little
the social scientists restores art and the aesthetic to that ~,.orethan modernism itself.
sandbox in which they rightly belong, has the added advan-
tage of shielding their disciplines from that onslaught of
sheer theory that has emanated from the so-called human

17R 179
 PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

rent contexts, touched on the late aesthetics of both Paul

Man and T.W. Adorno, and indeed each is certainly to
3 \counted as a modernist in his own fashion (as are,
• losophically and aesthetically, yet in their various unique
s, Deleuze, Lyotard and Foucault, whose 'poststructur-
, - to raise a flag of heated debate and passionate
ord - might rather have seemed consistent with some
er narrative of the postmodem).
But if it cannot be deduced, as a kind of organic and evo- ut what is important in de Man and Adorno (in the
lutionary development, out of the aesthetic heritage of Kant, sent context) is the way in which in their late work a full-
what we are now calling the ideology of modernism must • ated ideology of the modem reaches a moment of true
be thought of as an ideological project, on which any num- -critical and 'reflexive' ambiguity which can be said to
ber of individuals have laboured collectively, without t doubt on the whole ideological project, but as it were
necessarily being aware of the historic task in which they the other side, and after having gone all the way
are severally involved. More than that, it must be seen as a ugh it. Their stories can thus be told in two distinct
project that re-emerges over and over again with the various • ys: and the option that consists in seeing them as supreme
national situations as a specific and unique national-literary d richly conceptual exponents of some more widely shared
task or imperative, whose cross-cultural kinship with its modernist aestheticism is surely far less interesting that
neighbours is not always evident (either at home or reading according to which each keeps faith with a
abroad). And when we reckon in that unevenness of devel- ply rooted dissatisfaction with the trivializations of the
opment of which we have already spoken above, the non- ely aesthetic which propels them towards a deconstruc-
synchronous dynamic of various belated or premature •n of the autonomy of art on the one hand and a reinven-
modernisms, their 'catching-up' (in Habermassian terminol- n of the classical modernist Absolute on the other: in
ogy) or indeed their untimely exhaustion, a multitemporal rt, an effort to articulate the vocation of art to be
and multilinear picture of the construction of the ideology ehow more than mere art.
of modernism emerges which cannot be flattened out into These positions are therefore too complex to serve as mere
any simple model of influence or of cultural and poetic strations of a trend or tendency, and I propose therefore
imperialism, of cross-cultural diffusion or of teleological vir- spend a moment or two on other ideological constructs -
tuality (even though all these options offer locally satisfying Ilk> less rigorously conceptualized and of genuine philosophi-
narratives). ~l intensity - which more clearly mark the specificity of the
We are obliged, therefore, to exercise selectivity and to french and the German post-1945 literary situations respec-
sketch in just a few of these parallel yet utterly distinct and :'tively.These situations are, to be sure, virtually the reverse
historically specific trajectories. We have already, in very ;'bfeach other as far as modernism is concerned: for we

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

conventionally assume that the French tradition of modern- truction that can never know any empirical embodiment
ism is in many ways the oldest of all, going back to Baude- :!realization: all of its particulars are also specific and
laire and Flaubert and the pre-revolutionary 1840s; while in ••orically unique, and the function of the universal in
Germany, current (post-1989) convention has it that the rich lysis is not to reduce them all to identity but rather to
modernisms of the Weimar period are not really reinvented w each to be perceived in its historical difference.
or completed even with the Gruppe 47 after World War II ril'his is at any rate the spirit in which I wish to argue that
now seen as having been too political or politicized to hav: • in the work of Maurice Blanchot that we will observe
laid the basis for some truly aesthetic late modernist renewal. . most suggestive and enlightening construction of some
To put it this way, however, implies the existence of a . perly French 'ideology of modernism' or 'ideology of
norm for the development of modernism and its aesthetics: µietic autonomy'. To be sure, such an argument involves
some master evolutionary line from which each of these , werful and provocative renarrativization of a long and
national developments can be grasped as a kind of deviation ' plicated career, of which many alternate versions already
{however historically determined). I have said that the ideol- • t. Blanchot can be (and has been) seen as a novelist who
ogy of modernism is in many ways an American phenom- ··dually became a critic and a literary theorist, either
enon and an American invention; but this will {justifiably) •• use of the formal exhaustion of his initial Kafkaesque
be discounted as an American point of view on the matter. ,ms, or (what amounts perhaps to the same thing) because
What I would rather argue here is a position that takes its ithe
,, gradual intensification of his consciousness of the pure
lead from Marx's description of capitalism, for which each • of writing as such. He can be seen (which is also true) as
1
national trajectory - including the central illustration, and "ght-wing nationalist and ideologist in the 1930s, whose
the oldest one, of British capitalism as such - is uniquely .·•-German and anti-Hitlerian nationalism leads him to
overdetermined by the empirical specificities of the national itical disillusionment and depoliticization early enough in
cultural and historical situation as such, in such a way that •' game for honour to be saved, and who rediscovers the
1
- although in the abstraction there exists an inescapable and ' e form of the collective political gesture in the postwar
irreversible dynamic of the development of capitalism as : vement of protest against the Algerian war and in the
such - there is no 'basic' historical paradigm, all the paths of • t convulsion of May '68 that eventually followed. He
capitalist development are unique and unrepeatable. What is , finally, be seen as the quintessential literary theorist (or
dialectical about this argument can be formulated as a very ,,,ologist) of a certain poststructuralist textuality or textual-
different conception of the relationship between universals . tion, the productivity of his eclectic groundwork acknowl-
and particulars to what obtains for bourgeois empiricism or J~edfrom their very different perspectives by Foucault and
common sense, namely that the particular is something you •rrida alike. 14
range beneath a universal as its mere example, and the , These are all, as I observed, viable and persuasive narra-
universal is something under which you range the particular ~es, which do satisfying work within the contexts for which
as a mere type. For the dialectic the universal is a conceptual ~y are constructed. Mine will be quite different, and will
'

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

concentrate on those purely literary essays (mostly review ) and 'La litterature et le droit a la mort' (in La Part du
columns for various reviews and journals) which marked the ).
relatively fallow period between the bitter end of Blanchot's '/But it is first of all precisely this process of reduction and
fascist commitment and the onset of the great wars of cisely this monotony that is our exhibit here: and this can
national independence of the postwar period. The collections shown to be an operation with two indispensable
in which these essays are largely assembled, Faux pas and • ments or steps. In the first, the narrower circle of an
La Part du feu, are generally neglected in favour of the more onomous French culture and literary history is opened up
mystical and absolute statements of the early structuralist ' the larger postwar international community that at the
years, such as L'Espace litteraire and Le Livre a venir, if not • of World War II replaced the essentially European space
for even more pronounced poststructuralist (and even post- 'the great rival powers of both world wars; and this is a
poststructuralist) statements such as L'Amitie, L'Ecriture ' re dramatic gesture than the mere addition of this or that
du desastre, or La Communaute inoperante. There is an •eign title (it is well known that writers like Faulkner and
obvious reason for this neglect: with two single exceptions mmett already had an enthusiastic French readership in
(one in each book), the earlier essays are all very narrowly ' 1930s). One does not have to raise the cliche of some
critical and author- or text-specific, ranging from local stud- '"tier French chauvinism or cultural Malthusianism to see
ies of Balzac and Moliere, or Pascal and Mallarme, Baude- 1
Blanchot's remarkable appreciations placed the Ameri-
4
laire and Lautreamont, to appreciations of Kafka and ' s centre-stage after the war (and with them any number

Holderlin, Henry Miller and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and 'other potentially exciting foreign and international literary
Faulkner, Musil and Rilke, Jiinger and Uwe Johnson, Blake 'ditions); and also to grasp the value of the gesture that
and the Hindu scriptures. Blanchot has interesting things to :tuates German literature itself at once immediately after
say about all these foreigners (as well as about his own Occupation. This is, then, first a powerful reconstruction
classics), but the reader may be excused for ultimately com- ,a literary canon which had in prewar days been almost
ing to the conclusion that what he has to say about all of 1
lusively French.
them is somehow always the same, and that the interest is That he should then say 'the same thing' about all these
an interest in one single omnipresent yet perhaps narrow and , erent books, that he should celebrate each one in its turn
specialized thought, which has to do with the paradoxes of , a rehearsal of the interminable paradoxes of the act of
the text or of reading, in the so-called poststructuralist •• 'ting itself - this is then the crucial second step. For each
period. 15 The various writers and literary texts may then JJorkthen, whatever its period or language, whatever its
easily be taken to be so many vehicles or pretexts for the illmediate national or cultural-political situation, is also
restatement of a philosophical experience he then attempts ~n as participating in a ritual that is forever the same, the
to formulate head-on in some less mediated way, in the two ihual of literary writing, the celebration of what we are here
theoretical essays entitled 'De l'angoisse au langage' (in Faux ailing the autonomy of art. For this is the true originality of

184 185
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

Blanchot: if it is said that Mallarme, or after him Valery, The titles of the two programme essays I mentioned b,fore
developed this notion of the reflexivity of the act of writing us clues as to the nature of the operation. For the word
long before Blanchot, then it must be added that for them ' goisse' in the first title clearly enough designates the
such self-consciousness projected a new kind of literature ' tral concept of Sartrean existentialism (which I have long
which remained to be produced, and for which their aesthet- ,; ught was better translated as 'anxiety' rather than
ics stood as a kind of manifesto. For Blanchot, on the other ' guish'); while the appearance of 'la mort' in the second
hand, every act of writing is posited as already presupposing •· s out to reference the French revolutionary tradition and
and including just such reflexivity, which is a moment of all 1particular Hegel's description of the Terror. Yet as extra-
'1

literature, and not just 'le livre a venir'. Yet these essays, of rary or extrinsic as both of these philosophical concepts
a seemingly modest and topical ambition, do in fact project ' y at first seem, it must be understood that formally each
a programme in their own right: but it is an aesthetic, or •• atizes a certain kind of autonomy: for Sartre, anxiety,
better still, an aesthetico-ideological, programme, and not a ,:. the consciousness of freedom, has no content and is
stylistic or literary one: it involves the construction of a new • petually with me, underneath the surface, where I try to
concept of literature, very different from that of the (specifi- • 'p it concealed and from which it erupts, in a movement
cally French) schools and movements (symbolisme, existen- • t wipes the slate clean and is somehow absolute; while
tionalism), which had governed the writing of literary history el's Terror is in fact absolute, a pure revolutionary
hitherto. Nor does this simply mean an enlargement of a ·•.dom which threatens the content of all individual lives
French canon to an international one: it involves the replace- ·versally and thereby those of its instigators and the very
ment of a national conception of the various arts along with of the Revolution itself as well. These are apparently
conflicting ideological positions on their various social and rly dramatic equivalents indeed for the purely literary
historical functions with a new conception of the autonomy ture.
of the aesthetic in which Blanchot is able shrewdly to ,Yet both essays pursue an unremitting and unequalled,
acknowledge the content of these various social and histori- placable, rooting out of the various 'interests' that could
cal, ideological and political, levels, at the same time that he ,· t or sully the Kantian disinterested act. Everything that
transforms them all, by an extraordinary sleight of hand, d conceivably motivate the act of writing - from self-
into a single eternal gesture of literary writing and the ression to communication, and running the gamut of all
literary act. conventional justifications for art as such - is unmasked
But how is this achieved? For it was achieved in France, ' an impossible contradiction. Even the conclusion 'he
and so universally and imperceptibly that the nouveau 'ites to say nothing and because he has nothing to say, he
roman, when it replaced the literary existentialisms with its • ites to demonstrate the impossibility of writing' is itself
own more literary and aesthetic forms, scarcely acknowl- ... dermined, and the absolute negativity with which we are
edged Blanchot's preparation of the terrain and scarcely . ereby left - 'le non qui n'est pas non a ceci, a cela, a tout,
seemed to need to do so. • is le non pur et simple' 16 - is itself meaningless. Blanchot's

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

greatness lies in this absolute excess, whereby the logic of ernism indispensable. Karl-Heinz Bohrer, editor of the
the autonomous and the intrinsic is pushed to its ultimate kur and a conservative polemicist of incisive vigour,
limit and its ultimate meaninglessness (without, however, the rs an anti-dialectical aesthetic which is both original and
pathos of thematization, and without threatening to under- racteristic, notably in his essays in Plotzlichkeit (trans-
mine the aesthetic position itself, as it risks doing in de Man 1
d as Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appear-
or Adorno). . e).18 The antipolitical thrust of this aesthetic is necessarily
Now we can better appreciate the function of the existen- .re overt, owing not only to the 'engagement' of postwar
tial or revolutionary analogy. Each of these concepts - rman literature and the existence of a German Democratic
anxiety and the Terror - has already achieved a thorough- • ublic next door, but more immediately to the Marxian
going purification of that extrinsic outside world in which it •• ntation of the then hegemonic Frankfurt School. (Haber-
operates: the variety of human feelings and emotions is s's parallel effort, on the left, aims rather at transforming
obliterated in its differences and into an intense conscious- e still powerfully dialectical positions into an undialecti-
ness of freedom that has no content; while the Terror essentially social-democratic and reformist, theory of
achieves much the same absolute and democratic formalism ernity in the famous doctrine of a recovery of modern-
for society itself (and also for History).17 Now the new :.s 'incomplete project'; Habermas's conception of the
ideology will be sealed by an exchange between these terms: : thetic as such is a secondary and ancillary one.) Yet the
that of aesthetic autonomy will be ratified by its replication • tence of an influential secondary and oppositional cur-
in the form of the existential or the political, which promotes in the German tradition, in Romanticism and the Schie-
it to something like a supreme value; while the very content as well as in Schelling, and in Nietzsche as well as in
of the existential and the political categories will be imper- • •degger and Carl Schmitt, makes it possible to assimilate
ceptibly withdrawn and volatilized by their aesthetic ana- ted features of the contemporaneous French poststructur-
logue, leaving an ambiguous situation in which modernist m to some properly indigenous stance; at the same time
affirmation can still be endowed with political or existential centrality and prestige of German philosophy make it
justification when need be, but where existential commit- essary to accompany a sharply anti-historicist and anti-
ment and political praxis to come (May '68) are somehow .•.itical argument (unnecessary in that form either in France
already suspiciously 'aestheticized', as Benjamin put it in a '..in the United States) with a decisive differentiation of the
memorable pre-war moment. thetic from philosophy as such (a rather different inaug-
The German case will be altogether different from this al autonomization, paradoxically secured by the properly
one. The 'incomplete modernity' of the German situation ilosophical authorization of Kant's exclusion of the 'con-
and its forced opening onto the outside (in philosophy and t' from aesthetic appearance and judgement).
sociology as well as in literature) make a crash course in ij The conception of 'suddenness', the radical temporal
cosmopolitanism unnecessary, but render a detour through i.-eak, the rewriting of the new in terms of a concrete
the past and a reconstruction of a properly German way ro •perience of time, and of the phenomenological identifica-

188 189
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY
PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

tion of a . temporality
. that supersedes the time of conti nu1ty
· etization of Benjaminian 'political decisionism' and of
an d o f h 1stonca1 elaboration now enables Bohrer to d. •denunciation of progress and continuous time (concepts
' 1sen-
ga~e a pure form, that ?f the moment or the instant, around commonly read as Benjamin's critique of Second Inter-
which the new aesthetic can be organized. His work then • ·onal and Stalinist conceptions of history):
shuttles back and forth between the contingent experienc f
, dd , eo jlf we look at Benjamin's metaphor of the moment in the
su enness (a novel _and productive instrument, as he
observes, for the analysis of fictional as well as poetic texts) ·•ight of [European literary modernism], then our task is to
and ~~e abstract concept of the moment as a basis for the /emphasize its nature as moment without resorting to the
rew~1tmgof m~r~ ~ro~erly aesthetic categories. Yet this very \toncept of an actual Messiah. Put in terms of these literary
m~diatory poss1b1hty 1s what sets fateful limits to this oper- ,,inodels,the topos of the suddenly appearing moment does
.·•not point to a Messiah but rather is the moment of a
ation at the same time that it enables a range of historical
and philosophical references. '1Jp0liticalaesthetics of perception.21
The very violence with which the experience of suddenness ''e position is far bolder than analogous contemporary
tears the present of time out of its continuum and allows it '·'• t-Benjaminian' reflections on Messianism (let alone on
to subsist in a kind of strange autonomy can then be ,ferary communism'), and makes the agenda a good deal
transferred onto the conceptual level, where the now-domi- • arer. For Bohrer will now adduce the momentaneities of
nant form of the moment declares its independence from the "e classical modems (Proust, Joyce's epiphanies, Musil's
s~nch~onic as well as the diachronic texture of history and • er state') to posit the transfer of a properly Utopian
h1stoncal temporality. This is the point at which the concept ()ment from Utopian (and revolutionary) politics in real
of the moment can be autonomized as that of 'aesthetic 0e to that of the realm of aesthetic appearance.
appearance divorced from being ... [and] bought at the ',,Yet the very possibility of such a 'transfer' demands closer
pnce o~ the s~rrender of historical categories' 19 (an argument . mination: we have been using the notion of transfer as a
for which Nietzsche is the central figure and exemplar); or, ,ay of theorizing the reinvestment of energy from one
more exactly, at which the more restricted claim can be , adigm to another as one of the conditions of possibility
~ade that 't~e concept of appearance is ... compatible with the emergence of the new structure (here, and elsewhere
history~ but its "phenomenal" character resists any temporal •• our present context, that of aesthetic autonomy). Bohrer's
determmation'. 20 This is then a construction of the auton- .',turn to the Romantics, however, identifies the situation of
omy of the aesthetic in terms of temporality, rather than in e transfer with greater historical precision, and offers a
terms of some implicit notion of the incommensurable levels .istorical genealogy of that 'mode' which he will characterize
of ~ocial. life, and it enables a rather different argument Js an 'aesthetic of perception':
agamst history and the political than what is to be found in
Greenberg. The appropriation of the Benjamin of the final That mode guaranteed or at least anticipated something
structurally new, and it also corresponded directly to
'Theses on History' is characteristic and may be seen as an
Schlegel's and Kleist's reflections on the French Revolu-
190
191
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

tion. Suddenness, the category of radical temporalization rsession of notions of revolution as process by that of
so central to the modern literary awareness, is no esoteric •volution as a single apocalyptic moment.
cipher but has a concrete and elementary reference. The This is why it is important to affirm, over a?ain~t_Bohrer,
fragmentary nature of romantic literature - Adorno • t although his depoliticized and indeed ant1-poht1cal ae~-
described it formalistically as a method and an intellectual tic of the moment may well 'resist any temporal determ1-
style; it is commonly misunderstood as random association tion' it cannot do without historical preconditions. Even
- this fragmentary nature is the appearance of the sudden .the :esthetic moment is itself outside of time, even if the
in prose. It is only through suddenness that the constel- • nception of artistic modernism as ~ stepping _out of time
lation is created with which the aesthetic figures of roman- d history be accepted, it is an expenence that 1s surely not
tic prose - paradox, cipher, irony in Schlegel, and ailable or accessible at every moment of history, but only
emotional excitement and astonishment in Kleist - are certain moments of possibility which have their own
always firmly bound to the perception or intelligibility of
ique and characteristic structure, which history h~s it~elf
an event in the historical, revolutionary process. The
etermined'. This is the sense in which even the ah1stoncal
despised romantic 'occasionalism' is the morality of the
ust be historically explained; and Bohrer's victory over
split second, the annunciation of the potentially universal
for the particular. At certain times, however, specific sen- arxism's alleged ~rop~nsi~y to gro~nd t~e modernist works
tences are more dangerous than general principles. That is their historical s1tuat1on 1s short-hved mdeed.
~ Two more comments will conclude our discussion of this
true of Kleist's sentence: 'Perhaps, in this manner, it was
finally the twitch of an upper lip or the ambiguous finger- ginal and provocative construction of a belated id~ology

E
ing of a cuff that actually toppled the order of things in the modern in the German post-1960s. The first 1s that
France.' 22 hrer's moment out of time is a singularly unstable prop-
~sition which risks either falling backwards into the timeles~-
It is characteristic, and supremely revealing, that Bohrer's ikss of aesthetics that lay claim to cover all aesthetic
trajectory should here intersect with that of Blanchot, traced liacperience from the ancient Greeks to the present (today,
above. For the evocation of the French Revolution as the ~eh an aesthetic would have to be expanded to envelop
very prototype of that 'instant' that will then reorganize l,ther cultures altogether); or being capsized prem~turely into
aesthetics and literature (in its modernist 'suddenness') alike, '~iritualism and some properly Bergsonian doctrme of et~r-
is, as we have seen, more precisely identified by Blanchot as b.ity (for Bergson, in analogy to the aesthetics of Baudelaire
the Terror (as it is theorized famously by Hegel). The appeal himself, the present in time is doubled by a stran?e and
to this foundational moment - a moment in time and in jdentical present out of time which is explicitly identified as
history, which is nonetheless grasped as a moment that eternity).
finally separates itself from time and from history - is Deleuze is not referenced in Bohrer's work here; yet an
evidently grounded in an even more preliminary choice analogy with the Deleuzian return to Ber~son ma_ybe p~rti-
between two paradigms of revolution as such, and in the nent and revealing above and beyond that mterestmg nauon-

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

alist impulse that leads both writers to search out indigenous the computer and cyberspace, but its spiritualist and
precursors for their essentially post-historical systems. The • rgsonian origins put a more suspicious face on the matter,
first intimations of Bergsonianism in Deleuze can perhaps be d minimally suggest that it is not so easy to find a
found retrospectively in the well-known conception of an terialist way out of time or indeed out of history (even
ideal schizophrenia proposed by the Anti-Oedipus: already a er the latter has 'ended').
perpetual present, outside 'normal' phenomenological time, ' , The other comment has to do with the fate of an aesthetic
and a liberation and disengagement from the shackles of the Bohrer's in some new postmodern dispensation from
past (the family, and its alleged reinforcement by Freudian- • :hichthe very effort to re-create an ideology of the modern
ism) and of the future (work and the capitalist routine). We '
1
d of aesthetic autonomy has evaporated. But as the
may leave aside the question of whether this prophetic • mple of Deleuze suggests, the attempt to theorize a
concept - in which, as opposed to the ego-fortress of the werful form of the moment outside of time may well
paranoid, the Deleuzian schizophrenic stands as a hero of rvive its purely philosophico-aesthetic context and live on
true freedom - does not simply replicate one of the most ' other related areas. I by no means intend to replay the ad
fundamental rhythms of capitalism, namely its reduction to minem (and essentially East German) attacks on Bohrer
the present, rather than constituting a critique of it. At any the author of an impressive and elaborate study on Ernst
rate, Deleuze tells us that he abandoned the notion in the . ·nger and his 'aesthetics of terror'; 24 but we do not have to
face of all the tragedies and devastation of the drug culture aracterize Jiinger as a Nazi writer to underscore, as Bohrer
among his students in the 1970s, 23 replacing it with the more s consistently, the intimate relationship between violence
interestingly collective concept of the nomadic horde or content and the 'moment' as form. For there is a demon-
guerrilla unit. It is a move that suggests that the ideological able slippage between the temporal violence with which
and paradigmatic alternative to the aesthetization of the ' e empty form of the moment is disengaged from the
moment lies in a revival of anarchism. But I believe that the ntinuum of time and the awareness that it is the very
older atemporal temptation resurfaces in one of the most '. perience of empirical violence itself that offers a supremely
enigmatic and yet central innovations of late Deleuze (essen- 'vileged content for the representation of such a form.
tially in the film books) as what he calls virtuality. This is as onically, in postmodernity, the loftier status of the example
it were a new and different way of making the present self- • the French Revolution is here replaced by the proliferation
sufficient and independent from those dimensions of past i..·fwhat can be called violence pornography in mass culture.
and future from which the earlier concept of the schizo- b"his historical and contemporary development then augurs
phrenic also wished to escape: and this very precisely by way /poorly for the outcome of that call for a reinvention of
of Bergsonian idealism, in which a flimsy present comes classical modernism in our time that the aesthetics of Bohrer
gradually to be thickened and autonomized by the comple- (like Lyotard's cyclical account of postmodernism) so elo-
mentary reality of eternity itself. Deleuzian virtuality has quently stages.
been saluted as the first new philosophical conceptualization It would be tempting to conclude this sketch of ideologies

194 195
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY

of modernism and of aesthetic autonomy with a return to

the source, as it were, and a consideration of the aesthetics
of Wallace Stevens, supremely the example of such a con- 4
struction in the 'original' US context. Perhaps Harold
Bloom's account of the way in which Stevens's work has as
its precondition the repression and transformation of Whit-
man can serve to suggest the direction such a discussion
might have taken. 25 In any case, the name of Stevens, as the
originator of poetry that is at one and the same time for it is now time to conclude by sketching in the concrete
modernist theory, and of theory that is at one and the same .context in which the ideology of modernism came into being.
time modernist poetry, can serve as a bridge to our next and iJndeed, ideology is not only to be characterized negatively as
last section. i)Vhat used to be called 'false consciousness', it is also,
,positively and necessarily, always the theory of a practice;
Jnd in the current instance, the ideology of modernism and
.of the autonomy of art is the theory of that practice we have
,called late modernism or neo-modernism,2 6 the survival and
,transformation of more properly modernist creative impulses
-afterWorld War II.
": To be sure, at this stage in our argument we can retrospec-
::rivelygrasp the distinction between a theory of the modern
and a practice of late modernism as an artificial one, imposed
on us by the demands of exposition (or Darstellung). For
insofar as the neo-modern is a replay and a repetition of
high modernist practice as such, what guides such practice
.:andenables it in the first place is very precisely that moment
in which the modern has been theorized and conceptually
named and identified in terms of the autonomy of the
aesthetic. Thus, it is the very emergence of some full-blown
ideology of modernism that differentiates the practices of the
late modern from modernism proper.
This very theoretical certainty - the codification of the
older modernist practices and their organization into a con-
vention that serves as a model - has often been characterized

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

as a kind of reflexivity which is then projected backwards m the modernist and proto-modernist or Romantic notion
onto some initial modernist practice itself. But that reflexiv- the artist as seer or as the guardian of the Absolute.
ity is in fact utterly distinct from the autoreferentiality or 1
i Yet the late modernists took that modern vision of the
I'
self-designation we have identified in the modems them- , ist who is more than a mere artist as their model: and
selves; and before touching briefly on two paradigm cases of , e we meet the paradoxes of repetition, which, as has so
the neo-modern - in the works of Nabokov and Beckett_ ' en been said, can never take place in any first time, but is
we need to grasp the fundamental difference between these ays second when it first happens. I can try to say this
two historical moments. • other way by suggesting that the situation of the first or
The classical modems - to continue to use this rather , ssical modernists can never be repeated since they them-
unsatisfactory designation whose awkward and problemati- 'lves already exist. The classical modernists came into a
cal status itself derives from the very historical difference we 'orld without models (or at best with religious and pro-
here seek to clarify, insofar as it reflects the difference ' etic ones), a world without any pre-existing social role to
between an untheorized and nameless practice and the newly ,,. For they did not for the most part wish to become
theorized and conceptually identified and conventionally 1
ofessional artists in any standard nineteenth-century sense
named and recognized productions - the high modems as t the metier and the apprenticeship. Nor did they wish to
such were reflexive or self-conscious about representation .rdorse a system of artistic genres in which the task of the
itself. Most often they allowed representation to follow its ' ist is simply to replicate a given form and to supply new
own semi-autonomous course, according to its own inner • amples of it (with whatever distinctive twist). These first
logic: that is to say that they allowed it to separate itself : oderns seek support in patronage wherever possible, rather
from its content and its object, and as it were to deconstruct an in the market; and for the learning of the metier, they
itself. They were content to foreground what we may call ,·bstitute fantasmatic images of the supreme works of the
the arbitrariness of the signifier (rather than that of the sign), st, such as Dante's Commedia. Their freedoms are utterly
releasing the signifying material to demonstrate its own lind and groping; they know no identifiable public ('I write
dilemmas and internal contradictions, those - following . 'r myself and for strangers,' Gertrude Stein famously said).
Greenberg's terminology - of the medium itself rather than , d in the absence of any determinate social status or
whatever object it might have sought to 'represent'. !function - they are neither artists in the conventional sense
But the reflexivity I want to attribute to the late modern- /nor intellectuals - they borrow all kinds of windy notions of
ists is very different from this one (which of course also ,genius and inspiration from the Romantic era, and surround
continues to inform their own work): the late modernist themselves as much as possible with disciples who endorse
reflexivity has to do with the status of the artist as modernist, 'these private languages and offer a simulacrum of the new
and involves a constant and self-conscious return to art Utopian community.
about art, and art about the creation of art. This status is a So my fundamental point is this: that the first modernists
fundamentally different one, psychologically and socially, had to operate in a world in which no acknowledged or

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

codified social role existed for them and in which the very essary for the construction of an autonomous work: the
form and concept of their own specific 'works of art' wer e repetitive loop from which content is decisively
lacking. But for those I have been calling late modernistse luded (the master-slave format passing over into the
this is no longer the case at all; and Nabokov is unlike Joye; amm-Clov relationship as one of 'mere' neurotic depend-
first and foremost by virtue of the fact that Joyce already cy motivated by the physical handicaps borrowed from
existed and that he can serve as a model, not to speak of a adimir and Estragon). We will have understood something
scripture and the space of some 'subject supposed to know' damental about late modernism by grasping everything
some absolute Other. ' at came to seem unacceptable to Beckett himself in the
Such imitation was unavailable to the classical modernists 'legorical schema that staged the British Empire (Pozzo) in
whose works designate their process of production as a~ • relationship to its colonies in general and Ireland in
anagogical level of allegory, in order to make a place for rticular (Lucky): to be sure, this schema also included the
themselves in a world which does not contain their 'idea'· ramatization of self-expression and thinking - Lucky's
this formal autoreferentiality is then utterly different fro~ comprehensible monologue, which is also explicitly a corn-
the poems about poetry and novels about artists in which , and performance, and in which that extraordinary devel-
the late modernists designate themselves in their content. 'pment of Irish modernism is re-enacted, from which Beckett
This is not to minimize the extraordinary qualities of the late imself emerged, but from which he equally wished to free
modems but merely to insist on their more classifiable ~?d to di~tan~e himself (b! continental_ exil~)- E:idently this
relationship to the new concept of modernism itself. tmd of h1stoncal and nat10nal self-des1gnat1onm the figure
The ostentation with which Nabokov re-enacts his aes- f an artist who is also literally a 'lac~ey ~f imp~rialism' w~s
thetic certainties is as symptomatic of this new situation as ormally undesirable; yet we must mev1tably Juxtapose It
is Beckett's reticence and the pudeu with which (in German)
he permits himself the theorizations of his 'Letter to Axel f. ith the formal splendour of the same kind of national
f.llegory in Nabokov's Lolita, one of the rare and unques-
Kaun', 27 not to speak of his even more unspoken discomfort fionable masterpieces of the late modern.
with everything 'allegorical' about Waiting for Godot. This h Here too, as has so often been observed, we confront an
discomfort no doubt has to do with the externalities of the iallegory of the passionate attraction, for a world-weary and
Lucky-Pozzo episodes, as distinguished from the quite differ-
1overcultured (high literary) Europe, of that brash and vulgar
ent representational schema of the Vladimir-Estragon frame, .idolescent United States and its mass culture: the personifi-
1.

whose doubling in the form of the pseudo-couple precludes cation, for that sealed and doomed Europe, no longer the
allegorical events just as surely as it evades subjective centre of the world but definitively marginalized by the
expression and anything that could be psychologically inter- Marshall Plan and the Cold War, of an America whose
preted. That dimension (which will triumphantly be rewrit- unpredictable future Hegel himself had already celebrated,
ten as Endgame) spells out in advance the operations in a famous passage of the Philosophy of History:

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 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the jlre unstable and one-time affairs: but where Nabokov's
ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History ~alization is unrepeatable, and followed by more predictable
shall reveal itself - perhaps in a contest between North ~itations of the masters (in particular, with the pretentious
and South America. It is a land of desire for all those who Iida), we will see that Beckett's form proves propitious for a
are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe. ~ansition into a more productive late modern area.
Napoleon is reported to have said: 'Cette vieille Europe ~. The condition of possibility of both allegories is exile
m'ennuie.' It is for America to abandon the ground on
Jtself: and we now need to specify the historical differences
which hitherto the History of the World has developed
itself. What has taken place in the New World up to the l,etween this constitutive condition of the late modern and
present time is only an echo of the Old World - the ~e seemingly analogous situations of the earlier modern
expression of a foreign Life; and as a Land of the Future, !fivriters(not to speak of the more obvious break when, later
it has no interest for us here, for, as regards History, our .n, exile becomes migration as such, and the pathos of the
concern must be with that which has been and that which ~litical refugee becomes t~e multi~ul~uralism of the 'guest
is. In regard to Philosophy, on the other hand, we have to i,vorker'). For Joyce was evidently still m Ireland throughout
do with that which (strictly speaking) is neither past nor !his 'exile', while Prouse was just as surely in exile in his Paris
future, but with that which is, which has an eternal liapartment;Judaism was surely a more fundamental form of
existence - with Reason; and this is quite sufficient to ~ile for Kafka than the political vicissitudes that dogged
occupy us.28 Beckett's life in France, let alone those that drove Nabokov
~ America, or immobilized Gombrowicz in Buenos Aires.
Lolita's overtly allegorical structure could not be disguised ~\ I think that it is Deleuze's theory of the 'minor language'
or sublimated by the more fantastic embroideries of Pale !thatwill help us clarify these distinctions in a more intrinsic
Fire, where it persists in the double plot linking the American ►nd purely literary way. 29 The theory in fact remains a
poet and the 'Balkan' king-in-exile. Nor, given Nabokov's ~odernist one for, as I have observed, Deleuze remained
equally ostentatious repudiation of Freudian psychoanalysis l-ssentially a modernist, and everything prophetically 'post-
as sheer content, is the overlay of the libidinal - something lmodern' about the second volume of the film books is then
like a relatively innocent and unperverse, newly named !withdrawn by their aestheticist framework and that very
'perversion' in the caricatural form of an 'attraction' to .,pen philosophical commitment to art and to the New that
'nymphets' - any more explicable in its own terms, without (ntakes it incongruous to characterize Deleuze as a 'closet'
the assimilation of the Lolita figure to an allegory, not only ilnodernist: however much he may have been an 'apartment'
of art but of the new world-language-to-be, American Eng- tnodernist and a sedentary one, quite different in his own
11

lish; and the transfer of the dialectic of modernist teleology dife and practices from that nomadic condition he famously
1

- the aesthetic taboos, the rhythms of technique and trans- ;celebrated (and which one is tempted to juxtapose to
gression - onto more officially moral and sexual prohibi- Ortega's famous speculation on the kind of figure Goethe
tions. Both Beckett's and Nabokov's allegorical 'solutions' Would have been had he chosen a 'weather-beaten' nomadic

202 203
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

existence more open and receptive to all the social and kieplicated by the circularities of the later Beckett plays and
historical currents of his age). The theorization of a minor povels; both of them posited rather awkwardly in the form,
language is appropriate here because it posits the elaboration ,et ultimately allegorical of late modernism itself in its
of an autonomous artistic language from within the daily bistorical situation as generalized repetition. Meanwhile the
hegemonic one, a linguistic space subtly and imperceptibly rery power of Nabokov's extraordinary sentences - I quote
differentiated from the koine of the masters, in a kind of piy favourite one, about the refrigerator: 'It roared at me
concealed and invisible out-trumping of Mallarme's call for ~ciously while I removed the ice from its heart' 31 - is derived
outright poetic secession from the fallen speech of daily life. from the imperative to make each sentence autonomous in
The point to be made is a crudely tangible one: namely, its own right, and to close the circuit or seal the loop of
that that subtle and untheorized construction - radically internal reference by the hiving off of a complete new
specific in the unique language-situation of each true 'mod- finguistic event from a purely empirical and insignificant one.
ernist' writer - of what Deleuze politicized as the emergence tlere the individual sentences all mean the Sentence itself.
of a 'minor language', but which I have preferred to identify ~1 In Beckett, however, it is the incomplete sentence that

more generally as the differentiation of a non-Euclidean tonstitutes the mechanism: a kind of aphasia in which the
linguistic realm and logic, has here, in the situation of the ,rntactic conclusion, known in advance, does not have to be
late modems, been materialized as the brute fact of the ~ven: This movement is then act~d out in t~e well-kn?~n
confrontation with another language altogether: for Nabo- 'unfimshed anecdotes or conversational gambits of Waiting
kov of American English, for Beckett of French. It is as for Godot, which get completed only later on, in the next
though that 'alien word' that Bakhtin prophetically detected 1kene, and which model the empty present of existential
in the absent presence of dead languages within liturgical temporality. Yet if Beckett's unfinished utterances are ulti-
speech,30 has now, in the internationalism of the Cold War, ltlately more productive than the extraordinary closures of
become the reality of the contingent fact of the existence of :Nabokov's linguistic inventions, it is because the former
multiple national languages. But where this scandalous :tnable a transition - a momentary overlap and coincidence
multiplicity (after Babel) propelled writers like Mallarme in which a fundamental transfer can be effectuated - which
(and Benjamin) to project some unfallen universal 'language .is that of two distinct moments of literary history. The
as such' beyond the individual real languages, for the late unfinished sentence, which first carried the whole pathos of
modems the empirical availability of the foreign language existential anxiety and marked a time of waiting which is
opens up a space for the elaboration of poetic autonomy as never fulfilled, can now be re-functioned as the bearer of a
the sheerest imitation of internal modernist constructions. structural and textual logic from which all existential affect
It is an autonomy that will then be formally acted out on has been removed: the sentence as time becoming the sen-
the two levels of plot and style as what I will call a closing tence as text and securing Beckett an equally fetishistic value
of the circuit. The doubles by which Nabokov seals his in the next, or structuralist and poststructuralist, period.
narrative (Quilty as a bad double of Humbert Humbert) are A seemingly more marginal similarity between the two

204 205
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

writers will now put us on the track of a final feature of late irhe medieval reference is thus very useful indeed, insofar as
modernist practice. No one can have missed the multitudi- ft underscores the temporality of the concept, its ebb and
nous disabilities and physical handicaps in Beckett's work in ftow in the vicissitudes of history, as a signal of some
general, but perhaps one of the most poignant moments in l,reakdown of the conceptual process or system. But the
Lolita has been less discussed. I mean the deafness of her ~sis of epistemology signalled by the re-emergence of_the
'real' husband, the young man she marries when she also ~roblem of contingency in the nineteenth ce_ntury (or smce
'grows up' at the end of the novel. 32 He is to be sure 'deaf' J.ant) is perhaps at first masked by the prestige of emergent
to her whole painful and embarrassing prehistory: but I f ience and by the tra~sfer of epistemolog_icalclaims to that
think the marker also extends to the very realm of content Jrholenew realm of mtellectu~l produ~tion t~~t do~s not
itself in both writers, to the universal disability of reality ►gin to experience its own ep1stemolog1calcns1s until ~ell
itself as what you have to say, despite the putative autonomy l,Jito the twentieth century. At any rate I want to posit a
of a late modern linguistic realm in which you ought by ,ubtle yet fundamental distinction. between the _aesthetic
definition to have 'nothing to say' (Blanchot). This maiming reoccupations with chance and acc1~ent, as those mformed
j>.·•
in the content, this ostentatious incapacitation of 'reality', t,ighmodernism, and the less thematic and more formal and
which is to say, of the raw material from which the work is Jepresentational problems posed by contingency in what I
to be constructed, must now be traced into the form itself, pave been calling late modernism.
where it takes the form of the philosophical category of :~ It is a tricky argument to stage: the old medieval idea (is
contingency. ~t really a concept in _any po~itive sense?) is strateg~cally
It will be said, with justification, that the problem of ~vived by the new ex1stent1ahsms, ~nd most em~hat1cally
contingency can be detected much earlier, in all the original testaged by Sartre, who tells us that lt had somethmg to do
modernisms themselves, as a sign of the failure of the form ,_,ith movie-going as a child: 33 to come out of a theatre of
completely to master and to appropriate the content the human and humanly produced images was to undergo the
work has assigned itself (or better still, which it has assigned ~hock of the existence of a_real world o_fnoisy ~nd chaotic
and proposed itself as the task of the work to incorporate). 'urban daylight. The expenence of contmgency 1s thus not
The concept of contingency is of course an even older one, ~nly dependent on a certain per~~ption of the _world, it also
emerging in medieval theology, where it is the unique exist- bas as its fundamental precond1t1on an expenence of form
ence of a thing that is scandalously inassimilable to that \vith which that world is dramatically juxtaposed.
universal which is its idea and which is associated with the But was not Cubism already an attempt to confront such
divine. Contingency is thus the word for a failure of the idea, an experience, by multiplying the shards of form into which
the name for what is radically unintelligible, and it belongs the old stable everyday object began to shatter? And does
to the conceptual field of ontology, rather than that of the not every line of Ulysses bear witness to an ever-changing
various epistemologies that succeed and displace an ontolog- empirical reality which Joyce's multiple forms (from the
ical philosophy in the 'modern' period (or since Descartes). Odyssey parallel on down to chapter form and sentence

206 207
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY PART II: MODERNISM AS IDEOLOGY

structure themselves) are unable to master? What I want triumphalism assimilated to the image and at length, defini-
overhastily to argue here is that, in the modems, such form ·tively, to the sentence itself.
is never given in advance: it is generated experimentally in In both Nabokov and Beckett alike the sign of this new
the encounter, leading on into formations that could never aesthetic contingency can be read in the new category of the
have been predicted (and whose incomplete and interminable anecdote. An anecdotal core or given always marks the
multiplicities the innumerable high modernisms amply inassimilable empirical content which was to have been the
display). pretext for sheer form. Indeed, this is what made up the
The next step of my argument will then be obvious: it •paradigmatic nature of Beckett's late plays: the shock lies in
posits a change in dynamic when the structure of the form is 'discovering, at the heart of these eternally recurring spec-
known in advance, as a given and as a set of requirements tacles, an empirical situation - unhappy marriage, intolerable
to which the raw empiricities of the content already selected youthful memories, a banal family structure, with irreducible
in advance must dutifully submit. That form can be simply names and characters, the bourgeois dwelling at a certain
characterized as the autonomy of the aesthetic or of the 'date, the punctual biographical events that stand out unre-
work of art: and it has been our argument here that as an deemably from the failure of a drab and sorry life - which
ideal and a prescription, a supreme value as well as a might have offered the material of a dreary realist novel and
regulatory principle, aesthetic autonomy did not yet exist in jnstead persists as the indigestible brute facts to which the
the modernist period, or only as a by-product and an after- torm reverts over and over again in its vain attempt to
thought. 'Everything in the world exists,' Mallarme famously dissolve them. The form itself - autonomy - and the anec-
said, 'in order to end up as a Book'; and it is certain that the dotal content on which it depends yet which it cannot
late modernist experience of contingency can begin to con- ,manage to appropriate into its own substance - these stand
struct its genealogy here. What separates late modernism's •in a necessary dialectical relation with each other and indeed
certainties from Mallarme's groping discoveries is precisely produce each other reciprocally. Late modernist contingency
the historical Mallarme himself and his lapidary hints, which is then precisely this dialectical process and constitutes the
they already know in advance and repeat. An experiment experience of the failure of autonomy to go all the way and
whose necessary failure he emblematized in the shipwreck of fulfil its aesthetic programme.
Un coup de des (which fails to abolish chance as such) is in This is, however, a fortunate failure: for the replacement
late modernism drawn inside the work and domesticated as of the varied and incomprehensible Absolutes of modernism
sheer thematics (or in de Man's useful expression is now by the far more modest and comprehensible aesthetic auton-
thematized). So the open and endless, interminable combi- omies of the late modern not only opens up the space and
nation process of that solemn aesthetic high mass he called possibility for that theorization we have characterized as the
Le Livre becomes, in Robbe-Grillet, a combination scheme ideology of modernism, it also enables and authorizes the
whose successive results are always in a kind of monotonous production of a far more accessible literature of what can

208 209
 A SINGULAR MODERNITY

then be called a middlebrow type. This can no longer be said

to be a popular literature, in the older strict sense of the
term; but then, in the postwar situation of an emergent mass CONCLUSION
or commercial culture, such a popular literature no longer
exists anyway. It does not seem unduly restrictive, in an age '11faut etre absolument moderne!'
of mass education, to suggest that the public of such a
middlebrow late modernist literature and culture can be
identified as the class fraction of college students (and their
academic trainers), whose bookshelves, after graduation into honic or not, Rimbaud's great cry has always been felt to be
'real life', preserve the souvenirs of this historically distinc- exciting: probably because it does not limit itself to assuring
tive consumption which the surviving high modernist aes- rps that we are modern already, but gives us something to
thetes and intellectuals have baptized as the canon, or l,ilo.
Literature as such. But that canon is simply modernism, as It is worth remembering those states that, at their moment
the late modernists have selected and rewritten it in their ,in the past, were universally considered to be the most
own image. Its 'greatness' and timeless permanence is the ~odern: Frederick the Great's Prussia, Lenin's system of the
very sign of its historical impermanence; and it is with this ;toviets, and a little later, the party-cum-dictator system of
late modernism that postmodernism attempts radically to ~ussolini's fascism. All confirm Max Weber's prophetic
break, imagining that it is thereby breaking with classical ;judgement that bureaucracy is the most modern form of
modernism, or even modernity, in general and as such. '.SOCial organization. If we no longer think of them as modern
ln this way (with the possible exception of the first named),
~t is because, woefully, they turned out not to match the
!degree of efficiency also promised somewhere in the stereo-
itype of modernity. But the United States today is not very
refficient either. What is more significant in all these cases is
ithat the modernity of the states in question is a modernity
!for other peoples, an optical illusion nourished by envy and
!hope, by inferiority feelings and the need for emulation.
Alongside all the other paradoxes built into this strange
'Concept, this one is the most fatal: that modernity is always
,a concept of otherness.
As for efficiency, it also involves the other, but in a rather
different way. The West has long since found itself unable to
think the category of the 'great collective project' in terms of

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