Surpassing Modernity

Ambivalence in Art, Politics and Society

Andrew McNamara

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350008359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Théorie et critique de l'art

For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain the surpassing of modernity. Discussion is stranded in an impasse between those who view the term modernity with automatic disdain-as deterministic, Eurocentric or imperialistic-and a booming interest that is renewing the study of modernism. Another dilemma is that the urge to move away from, or beyond, modernity arises because it is viewed as difficult, even unsavoury. Yet, there has always been a view of modernity as somehow difficult to live with, and that has been said by figures we regard today as typical modernists. McNamara argues in this book that it is time to forget the quest to surpass modernity. Instead, we should re-examine a legacy that continues to inform our artistic conceptions, our political debates, our critical justifications, even if that legacy is baffling and contradictory. We may find it difficult to live with, but without recourse to this legacy, our critical-cultural ambitions would remain seriously diminished. How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.

CHAPTER ONE

What are we talking about? Narratives of modernity and beyond

A landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds

Stop for a moment to consider the sky. Watching the clouds roll by, it is easy to imagine a similar view having been enjoyed for centuries, even millennia. Clouds, of course, are ever changing, though a perennial feature of our atmosphere. Taking into account the tremendous changes that occur in contemporary life, it is easy to conclude that this might be the last sight that will remain vaguely constant and untouched throughout one’s lifetime. In his essay, ‘Experience and Poverty’ (‘Erfahrung und Armut’) of 1933, Walter Benjamin invited his readers to picture such a scenario when recalling the experience of his generation born in the last years of the nineteenth century and just emerging into adulthood when the First World War erupted:

A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.¹

Only a view of the clouds remained the same, whereas on the ground everything was in flux. Despite the triumphant calls of progress often associated with modern development, Benjamin’s generation were treated to its stark duality. The collective experiences of his generation were felt as brutal assaults: ‘Strategic experience … contravened by positional warfare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral experiences, by the ruling classes’ (Benjamin 1933/1999: 732). This generation witnessed so many profound dislocations: a collapsing imperial order but still imperialism; the dramatic shift of economic relations between city and country; the attendant population concentrations in cities; the catastrophe of mechanized warfare, including chemical (or gas) warfare in the trenches; and subsequently the hideous travails of constant economic crisis. These were all factors, according to Benjamin, that had exposed a new physical frailty and further impoverished collective experience.²

For Benjamin, the problem is not simply the common perception that the pace of accelerating industrial, scientific, and technological change outstrips the capacity to grasp or accommodate it – or even that modernity has a dark side.³ This is all taken as read. The nature of experience had been challenged and transformed. Benjamin delineates this concern from his earliest writings in which he suggests that experience has been devalued at the cost of certainty and a secure, standardized justification of knowledge in the modern world. By contrast, experience, being ephemeral, is reduced to the value of ‘fantasy or hallucination’ compared to the neo-Kantian focus, which for him represents ‘the extreme extension of the mechanical aspect of relatively empty Enlightenment concept of experience’.⁴ The ‘coming philosophy’, according to Benjamin in 1918, would set its philosophical compass in a different direction: ‘Total neutrality in regard to the concepts of both subject and object’ as well as based on the assertion that the ‘conditions of knowledge are those of experience’.⁵

Looking back on both experience and his own contemplation of it, Benjamin declares that everyone once knew what experience amounted to: ‘Older people passed it on to younger ones’ (Benjamin 1933/1999: 731). Nowadays such an idea of a shared, communal experience has largely become a foreign concept due to the emphasis on personal experience and the waning of traditional customs. Modernity places great strain on the capacity to integrate the vagaries of individual experience into a coherent set of inheritable customs, common experience, or collective memory. The profound rupture of the war of 1914–18 showed that if there was an endpoint to all this development and disruption, then it was not necessarily a human endpoint in the conventional sense. ‘Nature and technology, primitiveness and comfort, have completely merged’, Benjamin remarked elliptically (Benjamin 1933/1999: 735). The war of 1914–18 had already dispelled fanciful, near-utopian projections of technological change – or at least postponed them for another day. Mechanization and technology were reorganizing all relationships, rural–urban, human or otherwise. One form of fragility therefore was the malleability of human and technological boundaries. In a fragment ruminating on the popularity of Mickey Mouse cartoons, Benjamin suggested that the cartoon character’s appeal at the time related to the fact ‘that the public recognizes its own life in them’. But what they recognized in this mercurial creature was something miraculous that hinted at the eclipse of the human: ‘Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.’⁶ Two years later in ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin observes that Mickey Mouse’s life is ‘full of miracles’ because he refashions the ‘wonders of technology’. Largely without employing ‘any machinery’, Mickey Mouse makes fun of technology; he improvises an almost Dada-like mechanical performance out of his body, ‘out of his supporters and persecutors, and out of the most ordinary pieces of furniture, as well as from trees, clouds, and the sea’ (Benjamin 1933/1999: 735).

Mickey Mouse could be pieced together a whole lot better than the unfortunate combatants of Benjamin’s generation that ‘from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world’, referring to mechanized warfare and the extreme scale of losses of life caused by what would subsequently be called the First World War.⁷ This is one source of the physical frailty Benjamin refers to: the tiny, frail human body thrown into ‘a force field of destructive torrents’. Human malleability did not prove as miraculous as Mickey Mouse’s improvisations. Charles Péguy – who thought that the world had transformed more in his own lifetime than in the previous 2,000 years – soon died on the battlefield.⁸ August Macke, the German expressionist, died within two months of being enlisted and sent to the front; while Franz Marc died in 1916. The futurists, who exalted speed, steel, and technology, lost Antonia Saint’Elia and Umbe rto Boccioni, who both died in 1916. Blaise Cendrars, who rejoiced in an image of creative fever and mobility before the war, lost an arm. Apollinaire was shot in the head the same year. He survived only to be claimed by the Spanish flu pandemic at the end of the war. The pandemic was truly a global phenomenon, assisted on its path by railways and shipping criss-crossing the world with goods and soldiers; it too exposed both a frail human body and the stark duality of an interconnected development.⁹

The war exacerbated the decline in ‘communicable experience’: soldiers returned from the front unable to articulate their experience of modern warfare. Instead, silence prevailed. Within ten years there was a flood of books on the topic – indeed a surfeit of information – but an incapacity to communicate such an experience. In fact, there was more and more information about everything, not just the war, but this was all unassimilable. Obviously there had been a ‘tremendous development of technology’, but at the same time ‘a completely new poverty descended on mankind’. An ‘oppressive wealth of ideas’ – ‘the revival of astrology and the wisdom of yoga, Christian Science and chiromancy, vegetarianism and gnosis, scholasticism and spiritualism’ – had swamped people, Benjamin notes. Older ideas were revived and sat precariously alongside new ideas. For Benjamin, the resulting ‘horrific mishmash of styles and ideologies’, heightened modes of distraction, and the highly attuned personal investment in idiosyncratic activities or lifestyles, spells bankruptcy rather than enrichment because culture is also divorced from experience (Benjamin 1933/1999: 732). Benjamin’s account speaks not only of industrial-technological transformation, which of course is pivotal, but a growing gap between private, individual experience and any collective, inherited or inheritable experience. Modern experience has instead made us view everything as if wondrously unique, expendable, atomizing, and unfathomable. If experience once connected communal and private life, now any coherence of cultural transmission between the two is lost. Thus Benjamin draws a distinction between two standard German terms for experience in order to point to the difference he believes is a defining characteristic of modern cultural life. Erfahrung points to experience as integral to lived common experience, ‘organised and articulated through collectively shared, traditionally fixed meanings’; whereas Erlebnis suggests lived moments of cultural experience that are essentially disparate, highly individualized, potentially vivid, but atomized.¹⁰

Nostalgia, Benjamin warns, is no antidote to the dilemma of the impoverishment of experience. On the contrary, it is necessary to confront the contemporary, bluntly and boldly, without any cultural facades. If modernity produces a surfeit of information and choices as well as an impoverishment of experience, then only a contemporary approach to the challenge will be feasible. Such a task will require both ‘a total absence of illusion about’ the age, and total allegiance to it. Benjamin concurs with Adolf Loos that there can be no return to previous times, only the affirmation of modern life despite all its travails. ‘When I look back over the centuries and ask myself in which age I would prefer to have lived’, Loos asks himself in his 1908 essay ‘In Praise of the Present’, then ‘my answer is in the present age’.¹¹ In turn, Benjamin’s 1933 essay quotes Loos’s insistence that he writes only for people with ‘a modern sensibility’. Benjamin links Loos with Paul Klee – a seemingly unlikely pairing, because they ‘both reject the traditional, solemn, noble image of man, festooned with all the sacrificial offerings of the past. They turn instead to the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a new-born babe in the dirty diapers of the present’ (Benjamin 1933/1999: 733).

Stripped of illusions, exposed to the raw and confronting aspects of modern life, Benjamin claims to follow the example of moderns like Klee and Loos by advocating for a ‘new, positive concept of barbarism’. Such a strategy means starting ‘from scratch; to make a new start’ – a clarion call that recalls Bertolt Brecht’s dictum of starting with the bad, new things rather than the grand, old things. It also echoes the tone of Benjamin’s 1931 essay, ‘The Destructive Character’, in which he suggests ignoring the summits of cultural attainment and, as an alternative, clearing a path in order to make room in the culture. ‘Some pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them, others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them.’ It is the latter path that Benjamin calls ‘destructive’, which makes posterity accessible again and thus heralds a new role for art and culture in modernity. Even this destructive character is an odd blend of the transgressive and the traditional – ‘The destructive character stands in front line of the traditionalists’, Benjamin declares. This is not atypical of his approach; Benjamin almost savoured placing antagonistic positions into dialogue, which was his primary way of dissecting and navigating such a culture. After all, Benjamin’s reputation has been sustained by his incisive accounts of modern art and literature, as well as his inventive explorations of modern culture and experience. Anticipating his thesis on history, it also provokes ‘an insuperable mistrust of the course of things’ because, more ominously, it is forged by the awareness ‘that everything can go wrong’.¹²

Benjamin refers in passing to Mary Wigman, the modern dancer, in his fragment on Mickey Mouse, which is apt. If Mickey Mouse improvises the technological in a way that conjoins the modern and the archaic, then Wigman performed an expressionist style of dance that was sometimes described as ‘barbaric’, sometimes as ‘formless’.¹³ The female pioneers in dance of the Weimar period conveyed human frailty to a new level of expression in which nature, the mechanical and the primitive found stark expressions. But if there was anyone to take Benjamin’s dictum about starting with the discards, the detritus, then it was Anita Berber (1899–1928), who exemplified these barbaric tendencies. Berber left the stage and made her whole existence a kind of performance long before the time there was a term for performance art. She took expressionism to a limit – she mixed traditional, even delicate, traditional or classic dance movements with exaggerated gestures and forms: ‘Aestheticizing the addictions, compulsions, and mechanized rhythms defining the modern body’.¹⁴ No action was too extreme. It came at the cost of her life. Berber was a new bar barian in Benjamin’s sense. She anticipated the cultural icons of the 1960s by dying before reaching thirty in a forlorn Dionysian spin out. Berber became the personification of the Weimar Republic by acting out its unlivable pressure points, its loss of civility and degradation. Her lesson was to light a fuse and run as fast as you can because it is true that, as Benjamin says of the destructive character, the alternative could be worse! She took every option open to her when few existed for women – or were only available in times of social chaos and collapse. Berber straddled high and low art. She was a trained dancer, and danced professionally while also modelling. She also appeared in film, did cabaret, and reportedly danced naked, which prompted accusations that what she doing was striptease.¹⁵ Berber was probably too associated with scandal for Benjamin’s liking, yet her performances still resonate in their stark brutality, which transcends Toepfer’s account of her as a case of ‘textbook dysfunctionality’. She managed to personify the age: there is no mutuality of recognition, just an awareness of being an object, enticing and rebuffing attention from both males and females alike. Berber thus amplified expressionism in bodily form. By 1925 Otto Dix portrays her as a shrunken figure much older than she was with coarse features in a languid sexual pose. She died aged twenty-nine in November 1928. Berber may have personified an untenable place at a particular time and place, but she personified an implicit point that Benjamin seeks to make: there is no time that is one’s own with modernity; it is always escaping everyone.

Benjamin’s 1933 essay, ‘Experience and Poverty’, condenses many of his ruminations on modern experience up until that point. It was written under the pressure of a particular point in time: ‘The economic crisis is at the door, and behind it is the shadow of the approaching war’ (Benjamin 1933/1999: 735). It does not always pay to be right. The piece appeared in the short-lived émigré journal, Die Welt im Wort, published in Prague in December 1933.¹⁶ As bad as the events had been between 1914 and 1918, even more monstrous events would unfold. Adolf Hitler had been German chancellor since late January and many writers like Benjamin were already in exile.¹⁷ The situation in Germany would make anyone pause to consider how circumstances reached such a point – just as they had in 1914 when the world erupted into conflict seemingly sparked by the obscure byzantine politics played out in Sarajevo. The consequences meant that creative destruction was felt too literally for his generation. Benjamin was already warning of the next war and, like the writer Ödön Horvath and a vocal minority, was predicting that the rise of fascism made another major cataclysm inevitable. How did these destructive torrents relate to a purported poverty of experience and how did they provide an insight into how to ameliorate them? This consideration concentrated Benjamin’s attention in late 1933 as he sought to grasp both the tentative and irresolute state of his speculations and the affirmative aspects of modern culture and experience in such a precarious situation.

There are several ways of understanding the image Benjamin wants us to contemplate. The first is of looking up to the sky to witness the last untransformed vista amidst a chaotic state of flux, a world being torn up, remade, and reconfigured. At the same time, what was occurring on the ground could not be regarded as a straightforward sequential process. Clouds do change constantly, but Benjamin’s basic meaning is clear: everything on the ground surrounding that generation had utterly transformed. To say that this generation had ‘experienced’ this upheaval would be a stretch, for Benjamin’s major point is that such transformations challenged the very basis of experience. The image of living amidst ‘a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds’ is not one of peaceful repose set at a distance from upheaval, but that of a glimpse of one last constant within a whirlwind of events, explosions, destructive forces unleashed uncontrollably, transformation without rhyme or reason. It is only with modernity that one has to face the conclusion that looking at the sky would be the last sight to remain constant and untouched while everything else changed throughout one’s lifetime. Benjamin places a question mark around the word ‘experience’. What does it mean to ‘experience’ the ephemeral, the changing, that which disrupts you physically, propels you beyond your physical limits – or which alternatively instigates a process that far outstrips human limits?

Today it is no longer even possible to rely on the comfort of looking up to the sky for the last vestige of an untransformed, constant view in life. The once pristine glimpse of the sky is interrupted by airplanes, drones, telegraph poles (if they remain); in addition, it is pervaded by a vast repertoire of satellites, radio waves and signals, GPS systems, radio telescopes, UHF band transmission, etc. Would the difference today be one of intensity and extensiveness rather than the specific parameters outlined by Benjamin? The contemporary Berlin artist Hito Steyerl extends the metaphor of the clouds by focusing on this crowded skyline in her work. Steyerl invites us to contemplate the sky as a scene of vast dissection. As she notes in a 2014 essay, ‘Too Much World’, we refer now not only to clouds plural, but ‘The Cloud’ – a skyline overwritten by a largely invisible network, in which we store everything:

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Image Credits
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The surpassing urge
• 1 What are we talking about? Narratives of modernity and beyond
• 2 We petty-bourgeois radicals: Reflections on Polke’s Wir Kleinbürger! (We Petty Bourgeois!)
• 3 What is art supposed to do? The modernist legacy, the Arab Spring, a censorship case in Sharjah, and artist arrests in the Year of the Protester
• 4 Inversions and aberrations: Visual acuity and the erratic chemistry of art-historical exchange in a transcultural situation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright