malcolm bull

BETWEEN THE
CULTURES OF CAPITAL

odernism in its various forms has generated a body

of critical and historical writing that is without equal.
Within this field, the work of T. J. Clarkon Courbet, on
Manet, and now in a sequence of essays on painters from
David to Pollockis as exciting as it gets, indeed, as exciting as art history has any reason to be. What makes his achievement unique is not
his sensitivity to the nuances of the primary sources, or his almost physical engagement with the surfaces of paintings, but the conjunction of
these qualities with a revolutionarys instinct for the limitless potential
of particular historical moments. And if he sometimes writes (as he says
Pissarro paints) on a knife-edge, between simplicity and portentiousness, or strong expression and souped-up emotion, so much the better.
No one else would dare.1
Farewell to an Idea is based on the premiss that modernism is our antiquity, already a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely
grasp. The historian of modernism is like an archaeologist who has
unearthed a handful of disconnected pieces left over from a holocaust
that had wiped out the pieces context. That holocaust was the continuation of modernity, the triumph of capitalism, the disenchantment of the
world. Recovering the context of modernism involves the recognition
that it was a desperate, and probably futile struggle to imagine modernity otherwise, a struggle shared, in a century-long co-dependency,
with socialism. Modernism and socialism may both now seem impossible, but impossibility is also the condition of their survival: they are the
art and politics of the time that is not yet ripe.2

new left review 11

sep oct 2001

95

Lets stop there. We need to look at some of these terms. Modernism

is not a lost civilization; it was never a civilization in the first place.
What we are talking about is a series of cultural experiments that took
place in capitalist countries around the start of the twentieth century. In
other parts of the world (save Latin America) modernism is little more
than a footnote in the history of colonialism. Even in the West, modernism had only a limited audience. Exclusively metropolitan, subsidized
by eccentric millionaires and made by bohemians, it left most of the
population untouched. Neither a style (uniform and diffused) nor a culture (multiform and organic), modernism always looked different and
rarely appeared in the same place twice. The episodes that Clark discusses (David in 1793, Pissarro in 1891, Cubism in 1912, El Lissitzky and
Malevich in 1920, Pollock in the late 1940s) may not be representative of
modernism as a whole, but their disconnexion is an accurate reflection
of its scattered distribution.
There were, of course, several modernisms, each with a different trajectory. Architectural modernism and theological modernism were both
attempts to make the ornate structures of the past more functional.
People were meant to inhabit these modernisms, and they often did
not care to. Fundamentalism and architectural postmodernism were the
reaction. The type of modernism with which Clark is concerned was
always different. In literature, music and the visual arts, the rationalization of existing forms was rarely an end in itself. These modernisms
addressed themselves only to those with disposable incomes; they did
not have to cut their costs to accommodate the masses. But in all
except the visual arts, modernism has had little lasting success. Literary
modernism is kept alive only as a canon of set texts. Programmes of
modernist music still cannot be relied upon to fill concert halls. Yet
visual art is now more widely appreciated than at any time in its history.
One thing that histories of modernism need (but usually fail) to do is
explain why modernism in the visual arts had a lasting influence in a
way that other modernisms did not.
Whereas modernism was local, sporadic and exclusive, modernity, characterized by the erosion of traditional ways and the rationalization of
social life, has been global, continuous and inescapable. Establishing
1
2

T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, New Haven and London 1999, p. 61. Hereafter fi.
fi, pp. 13, 89 and 160.

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a context for artistic modernism within modernity usually requires a

double manoeuvre. First extract the modernist seam from the visual culture in which it is embedded, and then argue that this thin seam is so
semantically rich that it reflects, metamorphized, the entire stratum of
social life from which it comes. This has to be a dubious procedure.
When we juxtapose modernism and modernity we are not comparing
phenomena of similar type or extent. Despite appearances, modernism
was never the culture of modernity in the way that postmodernism has
become the culture of postmodernity; there were too many places, too
many media and too many people that modernism never reached. This
makes it difficult to maintain that modernism is expressive of modernity
as a totality, even of modernitys revulsion at itself; and it carries the
implication that modernity found its expression elsewhere. If modernism was not the culture of modernity, something else was.
I will come back to this in a moment. But what about the third term in
the argumentsocialism? Clark sometimes seems to picture socialism
as being, like modernism, simultaneously an expression and a negation of modernity, a parallel counter-culture, modernisms separated,
non-identical twin. This is, at least, tacit recognition of the fact that modernism was even less the culture of socialism than it was of modernity
as whole. Neither in Communist states nor in the social-democratic parties and labour movements of the West did modernism ever establish
itself as the accepted form of expression or communication. In many
cases, it was only briefly tolerated. But it would be equally wrong to suggest that modernism and socialism were separated because, as parallel
critiques of modernity, they were in competition for the same space.
If modernism was often against modernity it was only intermittently
and obliquely opposed to capitalism; the captions to the illustrations in
Farewell to an Idea (Private Collection; X Museum, gift of . . .) tell the
story (untold in the text) of its total and painless assimilation. In contrast, socialisms opposition to capitalism was undertaken in the name
of modernity; and for many people in the world socialism has been the
only modernity there is, not the struggle to imagine it otherwise. To
argue, as does Clark, that since both were opposed to capitalist modernity they share the same utopian impulse is misleading; modernism and
socialism were rarely opposed to the same things.
What Clark means by socialism is perhaps something slightly different,
an ideal never realized. If so, it underscores the divergence of socialism
bull: Clark

97

and modernism in his argument. He suggests that modernism had two

great wishes, a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from
the comforts of narrative and illusionism) and the dream of turning the
sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity.3 But the
failure to achieve those goals is constitutive of modernisms meaning
and identity in a way that the failure of socialism is not. Both modernism
and socialism had their utopian side, yet nobody ever says that actually
existing modernism was a disappointing travesty of what modernism
should have been. Although individual movements may have had crazy
ideas that came to nothing, modernism as a whole does not have an
ideal form: the failure of its projects is what makes it interesting. Would
anyone, even a cynic, make the same claim about socialism?
One problem with Marxist criticism is that it has always been written at
the end of capitalism at a time when capitalism has not been coming
to an end. Whether writing a brutal epitaph or (as is more often the
case) an extended elegy, the Marxist critic always stands with his back
to the future, surveying the wreckage. He rarely sees what is coming.
According to Clark, modernity is tied to, and propelled by, one central
process: the accumulation of capital, and the spread of capitalist markets
into more and more of the world and the texture of human dealings.
At the same time, there can be no modernism without the practical possibility of an end to capitalism existing.4 Capitalism goes on and on but,
for modernism and its critics, it is always late. This positioning creates
a blind spot. During the twentieth century the culture of capitalism has
renewed itself entirely, yet for many critics every sign of that renewal
has been a symptom of its decadence. In consequence, they have missed
something that is, I think, now clear, namely that capitalism has had
two cultures, not one, and that the second is something other than the
senescence of the first.

Classicism and commodity culture

The first culture of capitalism is the one that everyone knows about.
It developed in the secular culture of the Renaissance, used the visual
forms and literary narratives of antiquity as its raw material, and had
naturalistic illusionism as its goal. If it tended to swing between the
poles of neo-classicism and anecdotal realism, that was also the source
3

fi, p. 9.

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fi, pp. 79.

of its enduring strength. It survived not just the transition to industrial

capitalism, but also the convulsive politics of industrialism in nineteenth
and early twentieth-century Europe. This last claim needs some justification, for this is the point at which the first culture is often said to have
broken down. But the period from 1850 to 1950 conforms, in significant
respects, to the pre-existing pattern: nineteenth-century realism was the
last, and perhaps also the fullest expression of the classical aesthetic of
mimesis; the first half of the twentieth century saw the final flourishing
of the classical style.
The suggestion that classicism was the dominant form of high art until
the mid-twentieth century is not as outrageous as it sounds. Not only
did it remain institutionally entrenched until the 1950sthe basis of
the curriculum, the preferred model for public artit was also the form
to which almost all the great modernistsPicasso, Eliot, Stravinsky
reverted after their most daring experiments. In Art Deco, classicism
found one of its most flexible and widely diffused manifestations; in surrealist painting, a new syntax for the old forms. Both socialist realism
and fascist art were variants of classicism (the former, despite its name,
more neo-classical than realist) and between them they dominated the
visual culture of Europe east of the Rhine. But classicism was not a reactionary style, it was hegemonic: the official culture of every state, the
unconscious of every would-be revolutionary. It can only be made to
appear otherwise by separating and discounting official, totalitarian and
decorative art, and by downplaying the classical tendencies within modernism. The classical tradition petered out in the early 1960s, not the
1860s. Pop received the surrender.
The second culture of capitalism is equally familiar, but not everyone
thinks it is a civilization. Before the 1970s it was called mass culture or
kitsch; since then it has been known, misleadingly, as postmodernism.
It can be argued that the continuity between kitsch and postmodernism
is such that they constitute a single culture; and that this culture replaced
not, as the word postmodernism implies, modernism, but classicism.
The differences between the first and second cultures of capitalism
might be enumerated as follows: 1) the shift from mimesis to the meme;
from the imitation of the world to the reproduction of the unit of reproductionor, to put it another way, from iconocity to indexicality; and,
following from this, 2) the acceptance of stylistic eclecticism (classical
models enjoyed their unique prestige on account of their supposed
bull: Clark

99

naturalism, their occasional use as ornament in architectural postmodernism was deeply anti-classical), 3) the reliance on large numbers of
consumers to distribute/create the product, and 4) the erasure of the
social rather than the technical traces of facture.
The preconditions of commodity culture (as I shall call it) were the
expansion of the market and the development of new media. What
poetry and painting were for classical culture, the periodical, the photograph and their progeny (film, radio, TV, video, other electronic media)
were for the culture of commodities. The sources of commodity culture
were various: sometimes (as with popular music) drawing almost exclusively on folk traditions; at others using the classical, sometimes viewed
through the prism of modernism. The so-called postmodern era has
been characterized not by any fundamental change in commodity culture, but by its colonization of the institutions and media of classicism.
For most people, the culture of modernity has been the culture of commodities; or, to put it more bluntly, postmodernism was the culture of
modernity all along. This is true not just for the huge numbers of people
in the twentieth century whose first experience of anything other than
folk traditions has been American-style TV; but also for their predecessors who moved straight from agrarian communities to the world of the
newspaper and the wireless (in neither of which classicism or modernism ever took root). Only for those steeped in the classical tradition did
postmodernism require new forms of attention.
The relationship between the two cultures was antagonistic. They coexisted for the best part of a century, the second growing in the
enormous condescension of the first. Few educated people could believe
that commodity culture was really a culture at all, let alone that it would
supersede the culture of classicism. On this point, Marxists took their
stand with the reactionaries. But the argument has proved unsustainable. There was, and is, every indication that people of all educational
levels (now perhaps especially the more educated, who can afford to
make fuller use of it) find the endless inventiveness of commodity culture to be pleasurable, plausible and spiritually satisfying. Its hegemony
may only just have begun.

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Artists of the fold

What is said above has all been said before, much of it by Perry Anderson
and Fredric Jameson, but classical culture and commodity culture are
rarely juxtaposed like this because each is usually compared not with
the other, but with modernism. In histories of modernism, one or other
of these cultures usually provides the ground on which modernism figures. Indeed, modernisms heroic opposition to its cultural context is
one of its defining characteristics. For Clark
There is a line of art . . . that makes no sensethat would not have
existedwithout its practitioners believing what they did was resist or
exceed the normal understandings of the culture, and that those understandings were their enemy. This is the line of art we call modernist.5

But it was never as simple as that. The modernists appear to be the

major players in twentieth-century art only because classical culture is
written out of the script too early, and popular culture arrives on the
scene too late. In fact, both the cultures of capitalism were there the
whole time, and modernism did not stand out against either so much as
exist in the space between them. That space was narrow.
Clement Greenberg, who had an acute sense of modernisms vulnerability, always tried to argue that commodity culture and classicism were
manifestations of the same thing, the former merely a debased version
of the latter. But for this to be true there would have had to be more
similarity in appearance or function than there ever actually was. Not
only was kitsch often fabricated in different media and used in different
ways, but those differences were visible to the naked eye. The invention
of taste allowed every haut bourgeois to tell them apart. Modernism, in
its repeated attempts to offend bourgeois sensibility, did not so much
oppose itself to classicism and commodity culture as undermine the
attempt to keep them separate. If modernism had been straightforwardly
opposed to both the cultures of capitalism, we would expect to find it
wherever one or the other was strong. But modernism only came into
being where and when the two overlapped. Modernism was strongest
in France, the site of their most awkward imbrication. Where classicism was weak, as in England and the United States, modernism was
5

fi, p. 364.

bull: Clark

101

slow to develop; where popular culture was weak, as in Italy, modernism struggled to found itself on a technological version of modernity.
Where no such overlap existed within their own culture, the modernists
often generated the experience through migrationAmerican expatriate modernism in Europe is the obvious example.
Certain features of modernism become more salient when viewed in
this context. One is its sense of being squeezed. You can feel it in the
bombast of modernist rhetoric, the calls for autonomy, the gestures
toward utopian space. Another is its inveterate doubleness. Clark thinks
that modernisms continual two-facedness . . . has to do with the fact
that art, in our culture, finds itself more and more at the limits, on the
verge of emptiness and silence, but this picture of modernism trapped
between modernity and the void is poetry, not history.6 Modernists were
not partisans resisting the present and pressing on eternity, they were
negotiating the equally tricky but rather more mundane path between
the two cultures of capitalism. Working between two antithetical cultures meant that resistance to the one almost always involved some
degree of complicity with the other. More often than not the doubleness
of modernism is the helpless duplicity of the double-agent.
That makes modernism sound more dishonest than it usually was. But
we need some way of demystifying modernisms relation to the cultures
of capitalism. It did not just happen to exist between the two cultures;
it must also have had some role in their functioning (if not, why did
it survive there and nowhere else?). The first question that needs to be
asked about the relation of modernism and capitalism is not How did
modernism resist capitalism? but What did modernism do for capitalism?. One answer might go something like this. By simultaneously
resisting and mediating the two cultures modernism created a space
between them, a distinct zone where their transgressive intermingling
did not instantly compromise their separation. This liminal space facilitated the long overlap between the two cultures; it was also the route
through which one culture turned into the other. If the space of modernism is the space between the cultures of capitalism, and the time of
modernism is that of their overlapping, the trajectory of modernism is
that which leads from the first to the second.

fi, p. 407.

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We can picture this trajectory as a double fold. Modernism begins

where classicism turns back on itself, and ends where it turns back
into commodity culture. But both classicism and commodity culture
are there all the time, and the route from one to the other is also the
layer between them. There is no need to rehearse the arguments to
the effect that modernism is the passage from the classical tradition to
postmodernismhow materiality of the sign leads to the commodity,
aestheticism to consumerism, the signature to the logo, the genius to
the celebritythese are common to all who see the origins of the latter
in the negation of the former. My point is rather that this passage is not
just a route but also the space between the two cultures and the condition of their long imbrication.

Revolution and modernism

If we think of modernism as a fold in and between the cultures of capitalism, it becomes easier to see where it stands in relation to revolution.
For although revolution has also frequently proved to be a fold rather
than a cut, it is not to be found in the same places. In Western Europe,
revolution was defeated in 1848, almost before modernism began; the
subsequent success of revolution in ever more distant parts of the globe
has no modernist parallel. Whereas modernism is a feature of capitalist
societies, socially and technically able to sustain the overlap of two cultures, revolution has only ever been successful in countries at a much
earlier stage of social and industrial development, societies that are
imagining having industry. Russian modernism is not necessarily an
exception. The brief conjunction of revolution and modernism after 1917
gives the misleading impression that the one fostered the other in social
conditions that were equally conducive to both. But Russia was a divided
society. The characteristic forms of modernism (Malevichs Black Square,
Tatlins Reliefs) were produced in pre-revolutionary Moscow, where the
two cultures of capitalism were starting to overlap. Bolshevism, which
killed off modernism along with capitalism, owed its lasting success to
the fact that Russia as a whole was not like that.
Revolution has remained central to the mythology of modernism, and
Clarks book is an attempt to restate its importance. He concedes that
perhaps the age of revolutions has come to an end, but retains the

bull: Clark

103

hope that a space may emerge for resistance on the other side.7 It
is worth dwelling on this distinction. Where political revolution was
successful, it overthrew the ancien rgime; and where the modernist revolution ultimately proved successful was in helping to undermine the
culture of classicism (which long outlived the absolutist states where
it had flourished). In bourgeois capitalist societies, revolutionary activity has only ever succeeded in offering resistance; similarly, although
modernism has never effected a revolution against the culture of commodities, it has, according to many critics, offered some resistance to
it. If modernisms revolution was against classicism, it was only ever
a resistance movement against commodity culture. The central thesis
of Farewell to an Idea is that the former dynamic produced the latter.
Inspired by the utopian dream of revolution, modernism has repeatedly succeeded in creating hubs of resistance in capitalisms circulating
economy of signs.
The way in which Clark chooses to argue his case is determined by his
longstanding reliance on two critics whose judgements about modern
culture are harsher and simpler than his ownClement Greenberg and
Guy Debord. From Greenberg, Clark derives the belief that modernist
painting is an ability to lay hold . . . of the fact of flatnessthe objects
empirical limits and resistanceand have it be interesting.8 From
Debord, he gets the conviction that art and politics are inseparable, and
that the one can be pursued through the other. Being a Greenbergian
Situationist commits Clark to arguing (contrary to Greenberg, who saw
flatness as modernisms route out of politics) that flatness and revolution
go together. If socialism is modernisms utopia, and modernism socialisms praxis, formalism is modernisms telos. As Clark recently wrote
in these pages: transcendence in modernism can only be achievedis
not this central to our whole sense of the movements wager?by way
of absolute immanence and contingency, through a deep and ruthless
materialism, by a secularization (a realization) of transcendencean
absorption in the logic of form.9
If it is true that modernism had only one Other, then Clarks argument
ought to work. But if modernism was a fold between the cultures of
capitalism, we are likely to reach the opposite conclusion, namely that it
7
9

8
fi, p. 297.
fi, p. 235.
Origins of the Present Crisis, NLR 2, MarchApril 2000, p. 95.

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was modernisms revolutionary qualities that weakened its resistance to

commodity culture, and that insofar as modernism did resist commodification it was not all that revolutionary.

Pissarro: anarchisms art

Within Farewell to an Idea, the test case for Clarks coupling of revolutionary politics and modernism is the long essay on Camille Pissarros
Two Young Peasant Women (Metropolitan Museum, New York, Gift of
Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman) painted in 18912. Here, Clark suggests, socialism put Pissarros normal skillshis sense of decorum and
self-effacing arrogance of techniqueunder extreme pressure.10 The
controversial aspect of this claim is not the idea that Pissarros work
was somehow informed by his anarchism. (The artist himself stated
that our ideas, impregnated with anarchist philosophy, give colour to
the works we do, and all the recent literature on the artist deals with
the question to some degree.11) Its novelty derives from the equation of
anarchism with socialism; the suggestion that Pissarros politics actively
determined the appearance of individual paintings, and the implication
that it pushed his work further along the path to modernism (decorum and self-effacing arrogance of technique are the very qualities that
modernism negates) and thus away from the market.
Aside from the tricky question of how to map anarchism and socialism at
a time when their strategies were diverging, all discussion of Pissarros
anarchism confronts two difficulties. The first, which Clark acknowledges, is that Pissarro came to anarchism only in middle age, at a
time when his subject-matter and technique were already established.
Thereafter, his political interests and his working practices both continued to develop, but without obvious links between them. Discerning the
influence of the one on the other at any particular point is therefore
something of an occult science. Even extreme pressure results in
nothing more than a slight shifting of boundaries between expressiveness and surface integrity, or drawing and colour, or pastoral and
monumentality.12 The second problem is that by 1891, anarchism had
been taken up by writers and artists of many persuasions. Anarchists
close to Pissarro were associated with neo-impressionism, naturalism
10
12

fi, p. 62.
fi, p. 99.

11

Letter to Lucien Pissarro, 13 May 1891, quoted in fi, p. 104.

bull: Clark

105

and symbolism. In this situation, there was no one way in which anarchism inflected the language of its supporters. No easy generalizations
(for example, that anarchism made representation more/less naturalistic) are possible; there is nothing against which to measure that
slight shifting of the boundaries.
Perhaps because of these difficulties, Clark focuses on a single painting
and the circumstances of its execution. He places Two Young Peasant
Women between the Fourmies massacre of 1891 in which ten people
were killed in a May Day demonstration, and the Paris bombings of
1892 for which an anarchist known as Ravachol was eventually convicted. It was a turning point in anarchist tactics: a moment of profound
revulsion at the violence of the state, a brief interlude before the arrival
of the assassin and the lone bomber. Pissarro shared the anarchist
reaction to Fourmies and had some sympathy for Ravachol; for Clark,
therefore, it is not just the anarchist tradition but the unstable anarchist
mood of 1891, vengeful, self-doubting and serene, out of which Two
Young Peasant Women comes.13
The painting shows two women on the edge of a field. The one on the
left is in reverie, her chin resting on her hand; the other kneels in front
of her. Perhaps they are taking a break from work and having a chat
(the painting is also known as La Causette). The scene is not obviously
political, but for anarchists like Kropotkin, peasant life provided the
model for an alternative politics that would be decentralized, agrarian
and mutual. Maybe these womenat rest in the fields, rather prettier
than they might beoffer an idealized glimpse of what such a society
would be like. But by 1891, Pissarro was already aware, acutely at just
this moment, of the razors edge on which such imagining stood; hence
the indeterminacy conveyed by pose, by spatial set-up, even by facial
expression. This is a painting about sociability, and yet, Clark states,
The to-and-fro of feeling between the pictures protagonists strikes me
finally as lopsided. The genre may be anarchist pastoral, but in the
uncertainty of the moment Pissarro has painted a moment of uncertainty: neither of the women is quite sure of the other, of their feelings,
or whether what one had said expressed them properly, or what the
other would make of them.14

13

14

fi, p. 104.

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fi, pp. 90 and 1212.

It is a delicate reading of the painting, brilliantly conjured from the

messy and violent politics of the Third Republic. But the heightened
sense of precariousness on which it relies is contrived. Let us go back
to the peasant woman on the left. When first introduced, she is sitting
on the ground, or on a grass bank, with knees splayed widemaybe
squatting. The suggestion that she is seated hardly seems to need
qualification: Pissarro depicted several peasant women sitting like this,
including the Peasant Woman Sitting: Sunset of 1892; the grass bank
is implied under the line of trees behind her, and the angle between
her back and her left knee is too wide for any other explanation. In
fact, Pissarro only ever depicted women squatting when they were doing
backbreaking work, picking things off the ground. Yet hereafter the
figure on the left is always the squatting woman, no longer sitting on
the ground but perched on her heels, or her hams, or her haunches;
eventually she is even the crouching woman.15
The shift is far from trivial. By removing her comfortable seat on the
grass, Clark gives the figure an awkwardness and tension quite unlike
that of her companion; the lop-sidedness and uncertainty of the composition start here. At the same time, Clarks insistence that she is
squatting is his way of signalling that she is more than a tree (some contemporary critics liked to think of Pissarros peasants as literally rooted
in the landscape, fruits of the soil that supports them16); that Pissarro
has uprooted her and given her a stake in the utopian future described
by Kropotkin. But, deprived of her seat, the womans centre of gravity
falls so far forward that she can only be supported by the canvas itself:
she is leaning on the frame with solid certainty, spreading her body out
and out across the surface. The less she is grounded in the earth, the
more she becomes paint: she folds out laterally across the picture plane,
claiming more and more flat room.17
The redescription of the womans pose does a lot of work in the argument. It effects the shift from anecdotalism to indecipherability; from
organicist antipastoral to anarchist pastoral, and from self-effacing technique to painterly materiality. But that is not all. It also helps to conceal
a potentially relevant source. The clearest statement of Pissarros anarchism, and his most explicit attempt to give it visual expression, was
15
17

fi, pp. 62, 87 and 90.

fi, pp. 90 and 68.

16

Clment-Janin, quoted in fi, p. 115.

bull: Clark

107

a series of pen-and-ink drawings with accompanying texts which he

sent at the end of 1889, under the title Les Turpitudes sociales, to some
young relatives in England. On the title page, Father Time sits patiently
watching the rising sun of ANARCHIE coming up behind the Eiffel
Tower, the despised symbol of modern beauty. Seen from the back, his
poseseated on a flat stone with both knees drawn up in front of him
and his right hand supporting his headis probably as close to that of
the left-hand woman as anything else in Pissarros work at this point.
Les Turpitudes sociales does not get a mention in Clarks 80-page discussion of Pissarros anarchism around 1890. If it did, it is hard to
see how it would fit with the argument that Pissarros political convictions pushed his artistic practice in a modernist direction. Pissarros
little anarchist primer depicts contemporary urban social evils in a visual
language derived from Daumier and Cruikshank. Anarchism may have
affected different artists in different ways, but Les Turpitudes sociales suggests that for Pissarro in 1889 it meant heightened tonal contrast and
expressive linenaturalism forced towards caricature. If the pose of one
of the Two Young Peasant Women is a reworking of that of Time, it is one
in which the symbolic content of the posture has been erased, and where
all the visual indicators of Pissarros political passion are absent as well.
I do not wish to deny that there may be a homeopathic infusion of anarchism in this painting (Pissarro also believed in homeopathy); the point
is simply that Clarks struggle to pin it down and claim it for modernism involves rather more sleight of hand than it should. The painting
was given by Pissarro to his wife, so it is difficult to tell whether it
spoke a language that the market would not be able to convertor convert entirelyinto its preferred (individualistic) terms.18 But the show
for which it was finished was a financial success. Indeed, the period of
Pissarros most active political involvement was almost the only time he
received solid support from a commercial gallery. If socialism and modernism did have the long and uneasy partnership that Clark imagines, it
ought to be possible to point to times when they were working together
against the market. Pissarro is one of the most committed leftists in the
modernist canon. It should be easier than this.

18

fi, p. 114.

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Pollock: failures of resistance?

Writing to his father in 1900, Lucien Pissarro floated an idea that the
old man could not quite follow. Perhaps commercialism was the true
modernism, and all the fin-de-sicle movements in art merely reactions
to it. His father responded that although chromos for grocers could be
made out of any type of art, that did not make commercialism anything
special.19 Almost half a century later, Greenberg was less confident.
Kitsch, he now recognized, was on the way to becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld.20 The avant garde was in a
last-ditch battle against it.
Half a century on again, many art historians have come to doubt whether
even Greenbergs champion, Jackson Pollock, was fighting on his side.
One piece of evidence is a set of photographs taken by Cecil Beaton
for Vogue in 1951. They show models in party frocks posing in front of
Pollocks recent drip paintings. Here, it seems, is visual proof that the
most revolutionary art of its time (painted in defiance of all the conventions of the classical tradition) offered no resistance at all to the culture
of commodities. Those photographs say: Negation is stylish. For stylish
. . . read fashionable. They suggest that modernism served as a cultural
softening-up process in which art prepared the ground for the markets
exploitation of marginal states. In the case of Pollock, those states were
the wordless, the somatic, the wild, the self-risking, the spontaneous,
the uncontrolled, the existential, the beyond or before our conscious
activities of mind.21
To his credit, Clark takes the silent accusation contained in the
photographs very seriously. He accepts that the process these photos
glamorize is not glamorous, and not incidental: it is one that the practice of modernism knows lies in wait for it, and may prove its truth.
His response, like that of a good defence counsel, is partly to try to outperform the prosecution. But amongst the many diversions (William
IX of Aquitaine, Bakhtin, the Unhappy Consciousness, three different
endings) there is an argument. It goes something like this. There is a
danger that the Other to modernismthe normal understandings it
19

Camille Pissarro, Letters to his son Lucien, New York 1943, p. 341.
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Boston 1961, p. 12.
21
fi, pp. 302 and 308.
20

bull: Clark

109

is supposed to be resisting and refusingwill come to seem a dead

formula. Whatever else they do, those photographs show what Pollock
was up against. They help to remind us that the future that works of
art envisage is very often one of misuse and misunderstanding. The
possibility of appropriation by commodity culture is therefore something
that has been internalized by modernism and built into its operations.
It is for this reason that the test of art was held to be some form
of intransigence or difficulty in the object produced. For Pollock, the
attempt to annihilate the very ground of misreading means that his
work must resist abstraction as much as it does illusionism. This is
why abstract and figurative go together in Pollocks practice, why
his work lives on its contradictions, why Pollocks painting turns
back to the root conditions of its own abstractness, and tries to give
them form. The form it chooses is refusal of aesthetic closure: cutting
out, interruption, efforts at infantile metonymy; dissonance meaning
mimesis, meaning sensuousness as well as Gothic-ness, paranoia, and
resentmentthe one set of qualities in the form of the other.22
The argument here is the inverse of the one Clark offered in the case
of Pissarro. Whereas he read Pissarros revolutionary politics into his
painting of Two Young Peasant Women by suggesting that the flatness
of the left-hand figure made the subject unreadable, he takes the reintroduction of figurative elements into Pollocks paintings as evidence of
resistance to commodificationa resistance that bespeaks an underlying continuity with modernisms revolutionary project. Arguments
like this can get a bit slippery (resistance is everywhere if you look hard
enough), and what you make of them often depends on how convinced
you are that the canonical works of modernism are the ones that put up
the best fight against the market. (Clark is confident: no work of real
concentration, or with real complexity etc. can fail to do so.) Taken
together, however, the two arguments give modernism a different role
to that which either posits independently. The problem is not that resistance is signified by flatness in one painting and figuration in the other
(no one wants to reduce mark-making to univalence), but that if the
same ambiguity can function as a sign of resistance in opposing contexts, the resistance it provides must be ambiguous as well.

22

fi, pp. 3058 and 3646.

110

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Clark suggests that modernisms ambiguities are generated through a

combination of negation of the Other and self-negation, but by reusing
the argument with opposing terms he makes the negation of the Other
and self-negation interchangeable. (The most straightforward example
is his defence of abstract expressionism in which vulgarity [i.e. kitsch]
becomes the means through which abstraction liberates itself from
kitsch.) When aggregated, Clarks episodes therefore provide abundant
evidence not of modernisms intransigence, but of its pliability. By
repeatedly blurring the distinction between modernisms refusal of the
Other and its refusal of itself, and arguing that the one refusal may
appear in the form of the other, Clark draws attention both to modernisms doubleness and to the doubleness of its Other. No wonder that, as
Clark observes, modernisms defeats were its victories and its victories
Pyrrhic; it often did not know which side it was on.

Degrees of disenchantment
For Clark, as for Weber, modernitys great uncompleted project is the
disenchantment of the world, the process through which society has
turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit
of the projected future and the accompanying emptying and sanitizing of the imagination.23 This analysis of modernity as a social process
may be fundamentally right, but it is easy to overstate, or at least to oversimplify, the accompanying disenchantment. It would not take an alien
anthropologist very long to locate the idols of our tribe. In Western societies they are housed in the two museums. One (e.g. the National Gallery,
the Metyou could probably guess the function of these buildings even
before the spacecraft landed), a shrine to the first culture of capitalism;
the other (Tate Modern, MoMA), a celebration of the second. Once upon
a time, we supposed that the second museum was a sort of negation of
the first, but the rehangs have given the lie to that.
The two museums do not house objects of the same type. The first
is a relentless paean to the charisma of technique; it includes only
objects in a very narrow range of media, produced in accordance with
specific craft traditions, all arranged in sequence according to a single
narrative. The second, by contrast, works on the principle of plenitude
mediated through the institutions of art. The greater the variety the
23

fi, p. 7.

bull: Clark

111

better: everything in the world belongs here, you just cannot show it
all at once. Nobody knows what sample of commodity culture artists
and curators will buy in next, or how the museum will have to be rearranged to accommodate it. (Although the second museum started
out with abstract paintings, they are unlikely to predominate for long.)
Where the first museum represents a culture that is fixed and timeless,
the second museum works on a different temporality and a different
theory of art. At present, our society seems to need them both: the first
museum stakes capitalisms claim to be grounded in nature and history,
and to possess a universal rationality that can transmute the one into the
other; the second celebrates capitalisms limitless fecundity in the manufacture of pleasures, its mysterious ability to work without foundations,
to turn anything, for no reason, into an exchangeable object of value.
To many people the disenchantment of the world is the difference
between the enchantment of the first and the relative disenchantment
of the second. But, in fact, both museums are the site of the disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world. The first museum houses many
objects whose enchantment was once of a wholly different kind. The
enchantment of all those crucifixes, altarpieces and reliquaries is not
their original magic. The first museum is the place where the sacred
becomes the aesthetic, a lesser enchantment, but still a potent one. In
the second museum, art becomes fashion. This is the true significance of
Beatons photographs. The bad dream of modernism turned out to be
worse than Clark lets on. Art did not just become fashionable, it became
fashion, i.e. a fully commodified practice, without foundation or metanarrative. The institutional theory of art on which the second museum
is built is essentially a theory of fashion, the theory that the fashionindustry never needed to articulate for itself. Again, a disenchantment
perhaps, but also a re-enchantment: merely fashion is an oxymoron.
Within this pseudo-Hegelian triad, art as a whole mediates between religion and fashion, between the Papacy and Prada. Modernism is just
the hinge on the door that leads from one museum to the other, its
role in the disenchantment of the world roughly parallel to that of the
Renaissance in the transition from religion to art. Just as Renaissance
art, by accentuating the aesthetic properties of cultic objects, helped
people to see the natural in the supernatural (and vice versa), so modernism, by emphasizing the contingent properties of aesthetic objects,
has allowed people to see the commodity in the masterpiece (and vice
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versa). If the visual arts did this more effectively than any other, it
was partly because (and this was the advantage of working for collectors rather than audiences) they could be more daringly and doggedly
insistent on the contingency of their language, and partly because visual
artworkswith their minimal demands on our attention (compare the
time it takes to walk round a major retrospective with the time you
need to read Ulysses), their materiality and marketabilityapproximate
most closely to the commodity form.
The historical position this gives to modernism is not a negligible one.
Indeed, it is hard to see how the transition between the two cultures
of capitalism would have happened so smoothly without it. But it corresponds in many respects to Clarks nightmare that
Not only will it [art] forego its role in the disenchantment of the world, but
it will accept the role that has constantly been foisted upon it by its false
friends: it will become one of the forms, maybe the form, in which the
world is re-enchanted. With a magic no more and no less powerful (here is
my real fear) than that of the general conjuror of depth and desirability back
into the world we presently inhabitthat is, the commodity form.24

All that is missing here is an acknowledgement that modernisms role

in the disenchantment of the old world was the enchantment of the
new, and the realization that this dreadful premonition is a repressed
memory. The account of modernism I have given above is, I suspect,
more or less the one against which Farewell to an Idea was written.
For socialism, the disenchantment of the world has always held a utopian promise. If modernism was just a late stage in the history of
fetishism as it progressed from religion to fashion, its role in that disenchantment does not amount to much. Yet it did have some effect.
The commodity fetish is a weaker fetish than the religious fetish. Today,
however, we must look elsewhere for the preservation of whatever living
politics we have.

24

fi, p. 374.

bull: Clark

113