Modernity Against Itself

Abstract

“Modernity Against Itself” pinpoints a fundamental division within modernity: an antagonism between artistic modernism and political-economic modernization. I argue that this division is best thought of as a conflictual relationship between aesthetic and social forms. Twentieth-century authors, I contend, saw their art as both linked and opposed to the social forms of their time. “Modernity Against Itself” articulates the complexities of modernity’s interconnected yet conflicting forms in two parts. The first two chapters address the ontology of art by examining the entanglement of the artwork’s form with that of the commodity. These chapters offer readings of key texts in modernist aesthetics, political economy, and psychoanalysis to make a case for artistic autonomy by theorizing the work of art—as envisioned by Wilhelm Worringer and Wyndham Lewis in particular—as a form of fetishism that contests, rather than capitulates to, the logic of commodification. The third and fourth chapters link poetic forms to politics by scrutinizing provocative references to general strikes by Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf to argue that the former’s poem Paris and the latter’s novel To the Lighthouse suspend conventional linguistic and literary meaning in order to represent the strikes’ disruption of the status quo. “Modernity Against Itself” contributes to contemporary scholarly debates by focusing on how modernism—often regarded as famously, even infamously, formal—investigated questions that literary criticism is currently struggling to answer. It endeavors to make a significant methodological intervention by uniting, but not conflating, the aesthetic insights of formalism and the social insights of historicism by positing the relation between literary and social forms as an oppositional relation of non-relation. For it is only by working through the antinomies of form, and not by presuming to resolve them, that the connection between aesthetics and politics can be adequately theorized.