The idea of the modern

Erika Mihálycsa, PhD

 realism
• = “A mode of writing that gives the impression of
recording or ‘reflecting’ faithfully an actual way of
life. The term refers, sometimes confusingly, both to
a literary method based on detailed accuracy of
description (i.e. verisimilitude) and to a more
general attitude that rejects idealization, escapism,
and other extravagant qualities of romance in
favour of recognizing soberly the actual problems of
life.” (Chris Baldick, Oxford Dictionary of Literary
Terms)
 realist vs. modernist textuality
(Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 1996)
realist type of text
• “declarative” (cf. Barthes,
“readerly/lisible”): there is a fixed,
predetermined meaning (put there
by author/author’s intention) that
the reader is to discover
• Its conventions: illusionism; a
narrative leading to closure;
representation of an intelligible
history; a hierarchy of voices
• Illusionism = illusion of reality
achieved by mimesis, detailed, exact,
“objective” descriptions, insight into
character, psychological processes
modernist type of text
• “interrogative” (cf. Barthes,
“writerly/scriptible”): requires
reader’s participation in filling in the
gaps (missing info, lack of
knowledge – ellipses, vacancies
made explicit)
• experiments with fictional world
characterized by fragmentariness,
relativity, skepticism, subjectivity
• if illusionist, “it also tends to employ
devices to undermine the illusion, to
draw attention to its own textuality”
 the dismantling of realist conventions –
language skepticism
“There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe
that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water’,
there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we
had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them.
But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken,
irreparably, it seems… The words on the page will no longer
stand up and be counted, each proclaiming ‘I mean what I
mean!’ The dictionary that used to stand beside the Bible
and the works of Shakespeare above the fireplace, where in
pious Roman homes the household gods were kept, has
become just one code book among many… There used to be
a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we
are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has
dropped out.” (J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 2004)
 Modernism – formal characteristics
(Childs, Modernism, 20)
• focus on the city
• championing / fear of technology
• technical experimentation allied with radical stylistic
innovation
• suspicion of language as a medium for
comprehending/explaining the world
• attack on 19th c. pieties, e.g. empiricism, rationalism, positivism
• systematic, persistent attempts to multiply and disturb modes
of representation / to redistribute the domain of the sensible
(Rancière)
Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie,
1911-12
The picture's metaphorizing of its
subject, as I see it - and I want to call
that subject simply the process of
representation... happens in its
microstructure: the metaphor, the
shifting, is in the relation of procedures
to purposes, of describing to totalizing,
of "abstract" to "illusionism." The
metaphor, if I can put it this way, is in
the obscurity not of consciousness or
inwardness, but of what is most
outward and on the surface in "Ma
Jolie" - what are most matters of fact
or practice about it. Modernism's
metaphors are always directed
essentially (tragically) to technique;
because only technique seems to offer
a ground, or a refuge, in a merely
material world. I did say "seems to.“ (T.
J. Clark 1999, 179)
 The idea of the modern: cultural contexts
and origins
• 1895: X-rays, discovery of radioactivity
• 1900: quantum theory of energy
• 1900: Freud, Traumdeutung
• 1905: Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity
 “We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new
beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with
great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that
seems to ride on grapeshot – is more beautiful than the Victory of
Samothrace… Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the
absolute because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.”
(Futurist Manifesto)
the idea of the
(post)modern:
precursors
 modernity’s crises of belief
• starting point of Modernism = crisis of belief that
pervades 20th-c. western culture: loss of faith;
experience of fragmentation and disintegration;
shattering of cultural symbols and shared norms. At
the centre of this crisis: new technologies of science,
epistemology of logical positivism, the relativism of
functionalist thought.
• responses: utopianism / emancipatory drive 
cultural pessimism: “things fall apart, the Centre
cannot hold” (W.B. Yeats) / Entzauberung (Heidegger)
 Karl Marx (1815-1883)
• “The philosophers have only
interpreted the world in various
ways; the point is, however, to
change it.” (1848)
• Theory of surplus value, inherent
class conflict; capitalism’s insatiable
desires/drives; permanent
revolution; continuous
creation/renewal
vision of organic society eroded –
CONFLICT seen as basis of life in
industrialized West. Capitalism
thrives on disturbance, uncertainty,
progress; market economy recognizes Communist Manifesto (1848)
no extraneous privileges Das Kapital I-III (1867-1894)
 Marx’s legacy - Marxism
• “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of social
relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois
epoch from all earlier ones … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and men at last are forced to face … the real conditions of their
lives and their relations with their fellow men.” (Communist Manifesto)
Modernist art: changing society can only be effected through shock tactics
of avant-garde modernist aesthetics. Disruptive forms, techniques of
alienation take the place of the naturalized forms of realist representation
(cf. Russian avant-gardes; Brecht)
Marxist criticism: purpose if interpretation = to penetrate to text’s “political
unconscious” (=ideological interpretations inherent in language/narrative
under guise of transparent representations of “reality”, through “strategies
of containment” – e.g., symbolism), to its historical / social contradictions
(Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1982)
 Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
• driving force of evolution/history:
natural selection / survival of the
fittest (NOT rational
thought/spiritual belief)

• humans: part of the animal world –

evolving nature takes part of
teleological vision of sense of
history

• levelling effect: liberation from

ideologically-underpinned archaic
rule by clergy/aristocracy — new The Origin of Species by Means of
division: strong vs. weak Natural Selection, 1859
 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• theory of divided mind:
ego embattled between
primitive id
(~subconscious) and
socialized superego
• return of the repressed;
sense of unease in culture
dominance of id
psychosis; dominance of
superego  neurosis
Traumdeutung (1900); The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life (1901); Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1919-20); Das Unbehagen in Kultur
 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
• “God is dead”
• the revaluation of all values:
challenging the foundations of
teleological systems / metaphysical
thought, radical questioning of all
constricting social/aesthetic
hegemonies
• “nihilism”: (a) active – sign of
increased power of spirit; (b) passive
– decline/recession of power of spirit
• theory of Dionysian principle
(~tragic myth, disruption, sensuality,
intuition, generative chaos):
engendered preoccupation with myth
• emphasis on relativity, The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
interpretation, uncertainty 
Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a
language turn/deconstruction
• Language skepticism
Philosophy of the Future (1886)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for
Everyone and No One (1892)
 the crises of modernity:
language skepticism (I)
• “It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that
we know something about the things themselves when we speak of
trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but
metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way to
the original entities.” (Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im
aussermoralischen Sinn”, 1873)

• “Language is not an object or a tool; it merely is its use. Language

is language usage.” (Fritz Mauther, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der
Sprache, 1903)
• “The boundaries of my language are the boundaries of my world.”
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922)

•  the subject is inscribed in language, is a function of

language (Derrida)
 the crises of modernity:
language skepticism
At first I grew by degrees incapable of discussing a loftier or more general subject in terms
of which everyone, fluently and without hesitation, is wont to avail himself. I experienced
an inexplicable distaste for so much as uttering the words spirit, soul, or body... This was not
motivated by any form of personal deference … but because the abstract terms of which
the tongue must avail itself as a matter of course in order to voice a judgment - these terms
crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi. Thus, one day, while reprimanding my four-year-
old daughter for a childish lie … and demonstrating to her the necessity of always being
truthful, the ideas streaming into my mind suddenly took on such iridescent colouring, so
flowed over into one another, that I reeled off the sentence as best I could, as if suddenly
overcome by illness.
Now and then at night the image of this Crassus is in my brain, like a splinter round which
everything festers, throbs, and boils. It is then that I feel as though I myself were about to
ferment, to effervesce, to foam and to sparkle. And the whole thing is a kind of feverish
thinking, but thinking in a medium more immediate, more liquid, more glowing than words.
It, too, forms whirlpools, but of a sort that do not seem to lead, as the whirlpools of
language, into the abyss, but into myself and into the deepest womb of peace. (Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, “The Letter of Lord Chandos”, 1902)