Constellating a Work of Abundance

Abstract

Reviewed by: Constellating a Work of Abundance by Ronald Schleifer Sofie Behluli (bio) A Political Economy of Modernism: Literature, Post-Classical Economics, and the Lower Middle-Class by Ronald Schleifer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 339 pp. Hardcover £75.00. In his seminal essay on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), Walter Benjamin argues that the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century changes in the artistic process of production and re-production have not only altered the ontological basis of art—by threatening its so-called "aura" in particular—but also the aesthetic experience of art itself. Processes of modernization around the turn of the twentieth century, in other words, have permanently changed the way humans produce, distribute, and consume art. In the two sections that bracket this essay, Benjamin politicizes his argument by embedding it in the context of fascism and presents the larger socio-political implications of modernization.1 More than 80 years later, Ronald Schleifer follows in Benjamin's footsteps by articulating an equally ambitious constellation of the institutional history of modernism, the changing sensual and aesthetic experience, and the social organization of the time in his latest book, A Political Economy of Modernism (2018). This comparison to Walter Benjamin seems appropriate as the author begins his impressive study with a methodological chapter in which he elaborates on Benjamin's claim that "[i]deas are to objects as constellations are to stars" (qtd. in Schleifer, 7). The methodology derived from this notion of homologically constellated ideas, [End Page 307] in which the individual parts arrange themselves into a centerless whole, is mirrored by the structure of Schleifer's monograph. The complexity that results from such a nonlinear approach that puts phenomena of various sizes and from various disciplines side by side, rather than in a causal chain or hierarchy, is what makes A Political Economy of Modernism a challenging but ultimately satisfying analysis. One of the harder aspects to parse is Schleifer's use of the notion of "political economy," by which he means the modernist institution and its constellation of "experience, wealth and, social life" (5). Schleifer's dense analysis of this triad encompasses more specifically the scrutiny of modernist literature and the arts and how they are connected to the Second Industrial Revolution, the transition from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism and from the dominance of life-enhancing commodities to life-sustaining commodities, which goes hand in hand with the replacement of necessity by desire, the emergence of the lower middle class, and the resulting shift in aesthetic experience. Schleifer's interdisciplinary analysis, which aims at further defining the "culture of modernism" (ix) that he also discusses in his two previous monographs Modernism and Time (2000)2 and Modernism and Popular Music (2011),3 builds on Benjamin's notion of "constellation" and William Brian Arthur's notion of "complexity" and boils down to the book's global argument that the complex unity of the phenomenon of cultural modernism is best understood as relational, historical, and real in its feedback effects on other institutions at a particular moment in cultural history. These other institutions include institutions of experience, knowledge, and social relationships: the literary aesthetics, the intellectual analyses of post-classical economics, and the lower middle class of [the] title. (39) By focusing on interrelationships rather than hierarchies, horizontally established (economic, semiotic, and cultural) value rather than vertically defined conditions, and social "habits of thought"4 rather than individual events, Schleifer's monograph offers a refined contribution to modernist studies at large. In his endeavor to prove "that such complexity of arrangements also governs, in the time of modernism, that larger phenomenon, the political economy of culture" (7), Schleifer subdivides his study into seven chapters, an interlude on the relationship between semiotics and economics, and a conclusion on cosmopolitan modernism, which are [End Page 308] distributed into three main parts: Part I, Economics in the Context of Cultural Modernism; Part II, Intangible Assets: Modernist Economics; and Part III, Intangible Liabilities: Class and Value in the Time of Modernism. This structural trajectory from cultural modernism to modernist economics and finally to social class shows how fluidly Schleifer moves between disciplinary spheres and institutions...