The Contemporaneity of Modernism

Literature, Media, Culture

Michael D'Arcy, Mathias Nilges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317423645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

At a juncture in which art and culture are saturated with the forces of commodification, this book argues that problems, forms, and positions that defined modernism are crucially relevant to the condition of contemporary art and culture. The volume is attuned to the central concerns of recent scholarship on modernism and contemporary culture: the problems of aesthetic autonomy and the specific role of art in preserving a critical standpoint for cultural production; the relationship between politics and the category of the aesthetic; the problems of temporality and contemporaneity; literary transnationalism; and the questions of medium and medium specificity. Ranging across art forms, mediums, disciplines, and geographical locations, essays address the foundational questions that fuse modernism and the contemporary moment: What is art? What is the relation between art and the economy? How do art and technology interpenetrate and transform each other? What is modernism's logic of time and contemporaneity, and how might it speak to the problem of thinking genuine novelty, or the possibility of an alternative to the current stage of neo-liberal capitalism? What is modernism, and what is its history? The book is thus committed to revising our understanding of what modernism was in its earlier instantiations, and in accounting for the current moment, addressing the problems raised by modernism's afterlives and reverberations in the 20th and 21st centuries. The volume includes essays that consider literature, sociology, philosophy, visual art, music, architecture, digital culture, television, and other artistic media. It synthesizes the most recent thinking on modernism and contemporary culture and presents a compelling case for what happens to literature, art, and culture in the wake of the exhaustion of postmodernism. This book will be of interest to those studying literature, visual art, media studies, architecture, literary theory, modernism, and twentieth-century and contemporary culture more generally.

Part I Modernism's Temporality

1 Abstract in Concrete Brutalism and the Modernist Half-Life

C.D. Blanton

DOI: 10.4324/9781315689272-1

Every culture is characterized in part by what it conceals and obscures from view, by what its habits of mind prevent it from acknowledging and appropriating.

—Alasdair Macintyre¹

Is it possible to have forgotten modernism? If so, is it possible to remember it?

These are the questions guiding the meditation that follows, itself an attempt to register both modernism’s current strangeness and its distance as a formal idea. To the first, I shall respond simply: modernism is not only forgettable but in practice forgotten. Although its sensible forms surround us, encompassing the increasingly opaque evidence of something, we have (perhaps inevitably) lost the language of its coherence, lost our capacity to recognize a set of intentions that (perhaps) once seemed obvious. This is not to suggest, of course, that we are without some version of a thing we can agree to call modernism, now safely ensconced in familiar academic canons and conferences, proliferating almost indifferently as an object of professional study, or recirculated globally as a reified aesthetic effect. It would be impossible to forget those things, pressing upon us from every side as they do, seemingly amassed now in what Susan Stanford Friedman terms “a planetary epistemology of modernity, of modernism”—an epistemology capable of thinking the concept’s near frictionless global circulation.² But I do wish to argue that we have lost contact with a deeper set of animating ideas and formal possibilities that once gave those things their force; that our attempt to inhabit or conceive modernist forms reveals a cognitive gap, the absence of some category or notion, some set of historically informing effects and ends, that those forms once presupposed. If modernism once afforded such an epistemology, that is, it is less clear that it does so still.

In answer to the second question, then, and on the issue of modernism’s contemporaneity, I shall prove more equivocal. If it is true that we lack some category or notion that a certain modernism once historically presupposed, then it will surely prove impossible to retrieve the thing forgotten, to restore a history no longer (quite) ours. And yet, those forms remain—evidence of something, certainly, even if we cannot say what. A painting or a poem, a building or a design—a style that once conveyed a history or a plan—confronts us even when its informing concept does not, a standing particular without a current universal, a cryptic reference to some general fact no longer in force.

It is just this conundrum or contradiction of modernism’s partial contemporaneity—the historical division of aspects that allows it to linger as an aesthetic, available to sense and experience, even as its formative concept and the shape of its historical necessity withdraw—that I wish to explore: a strangely suspended shape of historical existence I will term modernism’s half-life. Rather like a chemical element in the process of decay, I want to suggest, the modernist artwork continues as a kind of material counter-factual, a thing once true but now mysterious. And though it no longer summons its own moment in full force, it may also stand as a refusal of our own. Formally, then, I take modernism’s contemporaneity as a sensible presence combined with a less intelligible absence, a conceptual stumbling block of the sort that Alasdair MacIntyre has described in a rather different context:

Yet the absence of that culture is still … a background fact in the dominant culture of our own time, a present absence, a scheme of belief which may have been disowned but which in the manner of its disowning still shapes contemporary cultural institutions and intellectual dispositions.³

The problem is therefore two-fold: to isolate and steal a glimpse, first, of that modernist remnant sensibly available to us even as its idea vanishes; but then to find or invent the critical language in which its disappearing formal coherence might be reconstructed or re-imagined.

Three Rival Versions of Style

Canary Wharf

The starkness of the problem can be apprehended along the course of a simple walk, I submit, of no more than a few hundred meters, through more or less familiar sights. Beginning on the Isle of Dogs, in the former Docklands of London’s East End, at Canary Wharf, this stroll would move north, across what was once the West India north dock and quay, out of the gleaming district that now rivals and extends the City of London’s place at the center of the global financial industry. The former center of a mercantile empire has now, in effect, dispensed with older commodities, all those material wares that now pass through deeper water ports downriver at Tilbury. What was once the world’s busiest shipping complex is now a tangle of multi-national banks, insurance and investment companies, brokerages, legal firms, and regulatory agencies. The shell of the former West India middle dock has become the Canary Wharf Underground station; above it a familiar geometric matrix of steel and reflective glass.

These angular shapes of the financial district remain relatively new, of course, having risen in the three decades since the Thatcher government closed the old docks and subsequently created the London Docklands Development Corporation and the Isle of Dogs Enterprise Zone. As fully as any single built environment, then, the Docklands seem to embody an emergent historical logic fully: ours. Since the Big Bang of 1986 and the systematic deregulation of financial markets, one center of exchange has displaced another. Not only detached in space from the apparatus of credit and trade on which its margins depend, the district quite literally displaces an older mode of production, rooting out the old wharves while trading one commodity market for another. Where older goods once were stacked, gathered from around the world, now stands the center of a neoliberal order, equally global, perhaps more so: “A massive gleaming financial centre surrounded by a shanty town,” as one local resident memorably describes it.⁴ Although it seems impossible fully to grasp the intricacy of Canary Wharf’s implied or intended system, it is also impossible not to recognize the dematerialized economy it incorporates. It is, after all, fully ours.

Lansbury Estate

Nearby, to the north of all this abstracted wealth, lies Poplar, the borough of which the Isle and its docks once formed an uneasy part, and beyond Poplar the rest of what is now Tower Hamlets (reaching from Spitalfieds to Bethnal Green, Mile End to Wapping) and the greater East End. Once home to dockworkers and local tradesmen, now to immigrants from many of the same Asian and African regions that once supplied the docks, Poplar has played its own pivotal role in recent social history. It was the target of the first sustained German air raids (by zeppelin) in the first war, far more heavily and systematically damaged in the second.

It is in fact the effect and scale of that destruction that has lent Poplar a certain iconic distinction in the century’s latter half. In 1949, a thirty-acre site along the East India Dock Road, across the old City Canal from the Isle and recently bombed, was dedicated by the London County Council for the development of new housing, undertaken according to principles first codified in the Council’s comprehensive plan of 1943.⁵ By 1951, construction had begun on the Lansbury Estate, conceived as a “Live Architecture Exhibition” supplementary to the larger Festival of Britain, itself convened a few miles upstream on the South Bank to mark the Great Exhibition’s centenary. Designed to showcase a new model of neighborhood design and town planning ready for export from London to the New Towns and beyond, the estate’s first phase included:

30 six, four, three and two-storey blocks of flats, maisonettes and terrace houses providing new homes for about 1,500 people, with special provision for the aged; a home for about 45 old people; secondary, primary and nursery schools for about 1,050 children; a Roman Catholic Church to seat 700 and a Congregational Church to seat 400; a shopping centre with 38 shops and maisonettes above; and three public houses.⁶

Named for George Lansbury, former borough mayor and late Labour Party leader, the exhibition quietly recalled Lansbury’s leadership in the 1921 Poplar Rates Revolt.⁷ But it more loudly acknowledged an accommodation with the longer social history of Poplar itself. The structurally related crises of housing and local governance that had once fuelled ‘Poplarism’ (attracting the support of Clement Attlee, among others, then mayor of neighboring Stepney) also drove a decades-long investment in public housing, making Poplar something of a social laboratory. By the early 1980s, when Thatcher’s government intervened with strategies of privatisation, “97.6% of all dwellings in Tower Hamlets … were owned by local authorities.”⁸ If Poplar might be taken, fairly enough, as the iconic emblem of the postwar housing crisis in general, both in London and across Britain, the Lansbury Estate would provide Poplar’s emblem in turn.

That historical gesture is echoed in the estate’s architectural style, which (like the Festival generally) freely tempered aspirational futurism with nostalgia to project a reassuring yellow-brick image of integrated living:

The development will represent a cross section of the different types of development planned for Lansbury as a whole. The buildings will be grouped round closes and spaces of differing sizes and character. The layout is, in fact, a series of neighbourly groups linked by open spaces and with an improved road arrangement. While this type of layout will be new to London’s East End and the contrast between old and new is likely to be striking, a feature of most of the buildings will be the use of London stock bricks and purple grey slates which are the traditional building materials for this part of Poplar. The whole development will be seen as an urban landscape in which all the elements have been planned and designed together.⁹

From the outset, Lansbury thus answered a dual functional imperative, designed not merely to provide housing but also to convey an interpretive language for a larger “urban landscape,” a kind of political promissory note on the welfare state at large. But that entailed an aesthetic paradox. While its bricks and slates materially refer to its surroundings, the estate’s “neighbourly groups” also import an oddly disruptive element “new to London’s East End”: an implicit social arrangement grounded less in Poplar than in a national ideological standard of acceptable domesticity. The estate’s architectural rhetoric—the language of cultivated tradition underwriting the Festival in general (the “Festival Britain,” as Michael Frayn once put it, “of the radical middle-classes”)—thus belies the imposition of a subtly alien stylistic pressure, carefully crafted to render Poplar typical and transposable, the metonymic instantiation of a larger (and ultimately unsustainable) cultural fantasy.¹⁰ The County Council’s 1943 plan had conceived London as “a living and organic structure” (2) and likened its own work to “the grafting of a new, vigorous growth upon the old stock” (3). But in the case of Lansbury, that organic metaphor required a contrived projection of the postwar consensus, an ideological colonization by way of an approved national style.

As a piece of quiet architectural propaganda, then, Lansbury succeeded. John Betjeman admired it as a national trust, alongside City churches and Victorian railway stations, while Lewis Mumford held it up as an architectural model worthy of international emulation, both a template for a restored social order and a glimpse of an emergent political compact “based not solely on abstract esthetic principles, or on the economics of commercial construction, or on the techniques of mass production, but the social constitution of the community itself, with its diversity of human interests and human needs.”¹¹ And though its political success proved more ambiguous—within months, Attlee’s postwar government had collapsed, and construction would proceed haltingly for three more decades—the underlying intention caught in Mumford’s humanist language lingered. Successive governments of both parties (grudgingly or no) continued to grant Lansbury’s underlying premise regarding public housing, while embracing its sentimental style.

It is easy to recognize—in either Canary Wharf or the Lansbury Estate—an effect of what might be termed ideological manifestation. In each case, the architecture seems to summon a certain hegemonic orthodoxy into material shape, providing a common referent for a period’s less fully articulated idea of itself: cautiously Keynesian or boldly neoliberal, a social organization dependent on the configurations of monopoly or finance capital, respectively. That one such vision seeks to refute and displace the other, as the voice of Aneurin Bevan becomes Thatcher’s or Blair’s, strangely underscores the commonality of the deeper formal effect. What the two sites share is a power of social intentionality that we can instinctively read, an architectural capacity both to embody and to express a normative idea, an understanding not merely of a social whole metonymically indicated but of the larger mode of production itself. What is divulged in each, that is, is not merely an architect’s design or a minister’s policy but an underlying logical force, capable of impressing itself as a legible aesthetic fact.

Robin Hood Gardens

Between the Lansbury Estate’s yellow brick and Canary Wharf’s steel-and-glass lies Robin Hood Gardens … for the moment at least. Bounded by the approach to the Blackwall Tunnel on the east, by the East India Dock Road to the north and the older Poplar High Street to the south, the estate is now iconic for different reasons. Designed and built by Alison and Peter Smithson for the Greater London Council (the L.C.C.’s successor, itself dissolved by Thatcher in the year of the Big Bang) and completed in 1972, the site has inspired controversy since 2008, when a campaign led by the Twentieth Century Society and the editors of Building Design to have the structure officially listed by English Heritage failed to achieve the support of a New Labour government.¹² A year later, a Ministry of Culture already suspicious of modernist architecture reiterated that refusal, granting a Certificate of Immunity from future listing and effectively authorizing Tower Hamlets Council to proceed with plans to replace it. The first stages of demolition began in 2013.

Robin Hood Gardens is not the only remnant of the New Brutalism to be seen (for the moment, at least) in Poplar. In London as elsewhere, the Brutalist a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Contemporaneity of Modernism
• PART I Modernism’s Temporality
• PART II Modernism’s Literary Afterlives
• PART III Modernism’s Global Economies
• PART IV Modernism’s Media
• Afterword
• List of Contributors
• Index