Modernism under Review: Matei Calinescu's Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987)

Abstract

What can Matei Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity teach us today? One might be tempted to think that it is enough to know that Calinescu provided a foundational account of relations between what he identifies as ‘the clash between the two modernities’: ‘two conflicting and interdependent modernities – one socially progressive, rationalistic, competitive, technological; the other culturally critical and self-critical, bent on demystifying the basic values of the first’.1 And indeed, Five Faces of Modernity is still often invoked as the locus classicus for discussion of what critical shorthand now terms the relationship between political modernity and aesthetic modernism (or, in an even shorter hand, between modernity and modernism). The magnitude of the challenge faced by Calinescu – to think political modernity and modernism together – is perhaps best measured by the fact that when the journal Modernism/Modernity was founded in 1994 editors Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallberg considered that the most difficult task they faced seventeen years after the first edition of Calinescu’s book was ‘bring[ing] into dialogue writers in the social sciences engaged by issues of modernity and modernization and scholars of the literary and fine arts committed to the history of modernism in the arts’.2 Rainey and von Hallberg explained that although ‘scholars of the humanities have borrowed a great deal lately from social, political, and economic historians [. . . ] we have a long way to go before we can claim that these two large divisions of professional intellectual activity are in dialogue with one another’ (2). Since then the borrowing has gone on apace (with some reciprocal influence, especially on the writing of history