Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 20:57:54 -0800 (PST)
Subject: WHOSE MODERNISM? MODERNISM VS POSTMODERNISM (PART 1)


WHOSE MODERNISM?  MODERNISM VS POSTMODERNISM -- PART 1

by Ralph Dumain

"They became what they beheld." -- William Blake

1.  I love Marshall Berman's work, and I prefer his broad,
sociological definition of modernism to the narrow definition that
restricts the term to a certain set of literary productions,
sometimes called High Modernism.  Berman's vision is broad and
democratic.

In my view, modernism represents a massive social change in
history, perhaps the most decisive of all time -- modern
capitalism, the scientific revolution, the beginning of
secularization of society, the industrial revolution.  Cognitively
its effects are just as deep, not only in terms of the impact of
the scientific revolution, but in terms of a consciousness of what
we are and what our environment is.  The mind discovers what it is
in and for itself, distinct from its environment.  Conversely, the
mind becomes increasingly more conscious of the artificiality of
the institutions it has created and learns to distance itself from
its own phenomenology -- myth, religion, etc.  Modernism means the
awakening of the human mind and the discovery of self for self.
Before modernism, the discovery of self reached its limits in
Diogenes or Taoism or some of the more advanced forms of esoteric
thought, but it was still impossible to fully realize
consciousness of the artificiality of human institutions and the
non-eternal nature of the world as it is until the capacity to
alter one's environment, physical and social, and new cognitive
tools to do so were discovered.  Praise be!  Amen!

2.  Then the question becomes: who benefitted from this change and
how, and what people in what circumstances of life are evaluating
in retrospect?  I think I need not review the destructive side of
modernity, or imperialist capitalist industrial civilization, but
I want to emphasize the question of who reacts to this experience
and who gets to tell its story.  When the educated intellectual
elite begins to turn against modernity and the Enlightenment, one
must immediately be on one's guard.  For it is just those very
people who are most accustomed -- they have not change a bit! --
to assume that they set the tone and the standards for everyone
else, and that their experience is the only experience, no matter
how they prattle on about de-centering.  Charactersitically, their
perception of the world is governed by steroptypes.

Historically speaking, the emancipatory gains of modernity were
not even defended by the intellectual elite in certain parts of
the world, but by the workers.  The intellectuals in places like
Germany were ready to throw in the towel.  Their turn toward
nihilism and irrationalism was part and parcel of the turn to
fascism as they became disillusioned with classic bourgeois
civilization now entering a crisis-ridden new stage.  As C.L.R.
James put it: who defended the great heritage of civilization?  It
was the workers!  Never will you get this from reading these
French shits.  But if you read up on the history of working class
autodidacticism, atheism and freethought, the appropriation of
culture, science, philosophy, and literature through self-study,
labor schools and colleges, correspondence courses -- it was the
workers who defended these sacred values when everyone else was
willing to toss them over.  I've known many of them myself.

Why should I care about played out, dried-up overeducated snobs --
the French above all others -- who have grown so bored with
themselves and with the world, they are ready to put an end to the
Enlightenment, without bothering to consult anyone but themselves
and people just like them?  How characteristic of intellectual
elites that they should presume their own condition is
everybody's.  They only look at how elites appropriate culture.
They create historical myths that apply mainly to people just like
themselves.  Their categories are assumed to be everyone's. Their
problems are assumed to be everyone's.

3.  What is the situation like for the rest of the world?  Almost
all of humanity is consumed by mind-numbing drudgery.  They have
one foot in part way into modernity and one foot all the way in
primitivism.  They have not discovered the Enlightenment; they are
still engulfed in barbaric, superstitions and religious ideas and
customs.  They not have had the opportunity to discover who they
might be outside of the narrow social roles in which they live out
their lives.  They would give their eyeteeth to have a bourgeois
self.  Their thinking is several hundred years behind the times.
They have not even learned to think modernism, let alone anything
beyond.

Yet while the elite thumbs its nose at its own cultural capital,
which it nonetheless clings very tightly to, somewhere in the
world, as we speak, some poor soul has dropped her heavy load for
the day, is reading a book or taking a class, is beginning to
discover that she is more than her labors and duties, but begins
to be conscious of who she is.  And there, right now, as we speak,
the Enlightenment is happening.

4.  Why is it so necessary for the petit bourgeois intellectuals
-- above all the French -- to attack humanism and the coherence of
the self?  Precisely because they are the ones most imprisoned in
their own egos, the most mesmerized by ideology, in which they
live, move, and have their being, and yet so aware are they of the
impotence of their own reason and their own social determination,
so hollow and empty are they, that they would love to shed their
illusory selves if they could.  For while others are trying to
escape the social relations in which they are trapped, the
intellectuals are either looking for something to relate to or
banish the problem from their minds.

This is not entirely new: it is a recurring pattern.  so
enthralled are they by their own precious self-consciousness, they
assume that nobody else could be conscious of what they are not,
or they wallow in the idea of unreflective primitivism which they
believe is characteristic of all but themselves.  Primed by
isolation, guilt, the sense of uselessness, they would do anything
to belong or do anything to avoid belonging; they think the
destruction of the individual is the way to end their isolation,
and so they proclaim the self as a bourgeois illusion, and thin
that anti-humanism is hip.  There is another name for this
attitude: fascism.

5.  Literary intellectuals are the worst: surveying, typing,
classifying, bureaucratic in their world and outlook, their world
is depersonalized and everything they behold.  The administration
of cultural capital is what most exercises them; individual
personality is erased, even within literature.  They forget who
they are or what they need and other people need to cultivate
outside of their peculiar social role.  Frederic Jameson is just
like the rest: he spends too much time reading French.

(5 April 1996, 11:50 pm EST)


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