AKSHARAM

Manosh Manoharan
+919544060505

“Modernity and Modernism”

David Harvey
1
Modernity is transient, fleeting.
 Baudelaire defined modernity in his seminal essay 'The painter of modern life'
(published in 1 863).
 According to him, modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is the one
half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable.'
 Baudelaire’s formulation sees artist as someone who can concentrate his or her vision
of city life, understand their fleeting qualities, and yet extract from the fleeting
moment all the suggestions of eternity it contains.
 David Harvey attempts to discuss modernism and modernity by focusing on this
remark by Baudelaire.
 This paper is based on the particular definition of modernity given by Baudelaire.
2
Baudelaire’s definition is a dual formulation. It conjoins the concepts of ephemerality
and eternal. It sees modernity as both ephemeral and eternal.
 In this paper, David Harvey focuses on this conjoining of the ephemeral and the
fleeting with the eternal and the immutable.
 Modernism as an aesthetic movement has wavered from one side to the other of this
dual formulation.
3
David Harvey observes that we can understand modernism better, if we use the concept
of ‘tension’ proposed by Baudelaire.
 Armed with Baudelaire's sense of tension, we can better understand some of the
conflicting meanings attributed to modernism.
4
Modern life is characterized by so much ephemerality and change.
5
A number of modern writers have dealt with fragmentation, ephemerality and chaotic
change as characteristics of their age.
 A variety of modern writers tried to deal with the sense of fragmentation,
ephemerality, and chaotic change.
 Those writers include Goethe, Marx, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky among others

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Manosh Manoharan
+919544060505

6
Modernism has a liking for insecurity, and chaos.
 Most 'modern' writers have recognized that the only secure thing about modernity is
its insecurity, its liking for 'totalizing chaos.'
7
The consequences of suffusing modern life with the sense of the fleeting, the ephemeral,
and the fragmentary are,
 Modernity has no respect even for its own past, let alone that of any premodern social
order.
 The transitoriness of things makes it difficult to preserve any sense of historical
continuity.
 Modernity is not only a ruthless break with preceding historical conditions, but is a
never ending process of internal ruptures and fragmentations.
 “How to discover the 'eternal and immutable' elements in the midst of such radical
disruptions” becomes a serious problem.
8
The project of modernity came into focus during the eighteenth century- The
Enlightenment
 The project of modernity demanded an extraordinary intellectual effort on the part of
Enlightenment thinkers.
 The Enlightenment thinkers attempted 'to develop objective science, universal
morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic.'
 The idea of Enlightenment was to use the accumulation of knowledge generated by
many individuals working freely and creatively for the pursuit of human emancipation
and the enrichment of daily life.
 Enlightenment thought embraced the idea of progress, and actively sought that break
with history and tradition which modernity espouse
 Enlightenment thinkers welcomed the maelstrom of change and saw the
transitoriness, the fleeting, and the fragmentary as a necessary condition through
which the modernizing project could be achieved
 Enlightenment thinkers expected that the arts and sciences would promote not only
the control of natural forces but also understanding of the world and of the self, moral
progress, the justice of institutions and even the happiness of human beings.
 In short, the Enlightenment project was optimistic.

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 AKSHARAM
Manosh Manoharan
+919544060505

9
The 20th century shattered the optimism of the Enlightenment project.
 The twentieth century - with its death camps and death squads, its militarism and two
world wars, its threat of nuclear annihilation and its experience of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki - has certainly shattered this optimism.
10
Some thinkers believe that the logic behind Enlightenment is a logic of domination and
oppression.
 Some thinkers believed that Enlightenment project was doomed to turn against itself
and transform the quest for human emancipation into a system of universal oppression
in the name of human liberation.
 This was proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno in their The dialectic of Enlightenment
(1972).
 Writing in the shadow of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, they argued that the
logic that hides behind Enlightenment rationality is a logic of domination and
oppression.
11
There are those, like Habermas, who continued to support the project of Enlightenment
 Enlightenment thought internalised a whole lot of difficult problems and possessed a
few troublesome contradictions
12
The project of modernity has never been without its critics.
Its critics include:
 Edmund Burke
 De Sade
 Malthus
13
Modernity is destructively creative and creatively destructive at the same time.
 Modernity found its proper representation in the mythical figure of Dionysus ; 'to be
at one and the same time "destructively creative" and "creatively destructive"
 The only path to affirmation of self was to act in this maelstrom of destructive
creation and creative' destruction even if the outcome was bound to be tragic.
 The image of 'creative destruction' is very important to understanding modernity
 If the modernist has to destroy in order to create, then the only way to represent
eternal truths is through a process of destruction that is liable, in the end, to be itself
destructive of those truths.

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Manosh Manoharan
+919544060505

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The Enlightenment project lost its privileged status with the arrival of Nietzsche.
 By the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly after Nietzsche's
intervention, it was no longer possible to accord Enlightenment reason a privileged
status in the definition of the eternal and immutable essence of human nature.
15
Artists, writers, architects, composers, poets, thinkers, and philosophers had a very
special position within the modernist project.
 The modern artist had a creative role to play in defining the essence of humanity.
16
When Rousseau replaced Descartes's famous maxim 'I think therefore I exist,' with 'I
feel therefore I exist,' it was a crucial moment in modernity

17
If flux and change, ephemerality and fragmentation, formed the material basis of the
modern life, then the definition of the modern aesthetic depended the artist’s
positioning with respect to such processes.

18
How to represent the eternal and the immutable in the midst of chaos?
 Naturalism and realism proved inadequate.
 The artist had to find some special way to present it.
 Modernism could speak to the eternal only by freezing time and its fleeting qualities.

19
Modernism witnessed rapid commodification and commercialisation of cultural
products which began in the nineteenth century.

20
Artists spent much more energy struggling and against traditions in order to sell their
products than engaging in real political action.

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Manosh Manoharan
+919544060505

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Modernism is characterised by the maelstrom of ambiguities, contradictions, and
pulsating aesthetic changes.

22
Modernism was a complex and often contradictory affair.

23
The complex historical geography of modernism makes it doubly difficult to interpret
exactly what modernism was about.

24
Modernism, after 1848, was very much an urban movement.
 It existed in relationship with the experience of explosive urban growth, strong rural-
urban migration, industrialisation and mechanization.
 Modernism was 'an art of cities' and evidently found 'its natural habitat in cities

25
Modernism as the cutting edge of social change
 The fierce and traditional resistances to the capitalist modernisation in Europe made
modernism much more important as the cutting edge of social change.
 Modernism confronted the sense of anarchy, disorder and despair.

26
There are strong objections even within modernism to the idea that the machine and the
factory provide a conception to define the eternal qualities of modern life.

27
The de-politicization of modernism occurred with the rise of abstract expressionism

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Manosh Manoharan
+919544060505

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Modernism lost its appeal as a revolutionary antidote to some reactionary and
'traditionalist' ideology.
 Establishment art and high culture became such an exclusive preserve of a dominant
elite that experimentation within its frame became increasingly difficult.
 It was almost as if the universal pretensions of modernity had, when combined with
liberal capitalism and imperialism, succeeded so well as to provide a material and
political foundation for a cosmopolitan, transnational, and hence global movement of
resistance to the hegemony of high modernist culture.
29
The movement of 1968 has to be viewed as the cultural and political harbinger of the
subsequent turn to postmodernism.

30
Somewhere between 1968 and 1972, postmodernism emerged as a full-blown though
still incoherent movement.

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