Modernism’s Missing Modernity

Abstract

This chapter addresses the fundamental issue of the relation between modernist culture and ‘the periodization of a social modernity’. Noting that ‘modernism’, like the continental European conception of the avant-garde, is highly diffuse, it suggests that the only adequate response is to examine more closely the interrelation between modernist culture and its historical background. It calls attention, in this context, to the caesura of the Russian Revolution and to reflections on technology both by Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and by Heidegger (in Being and Time and in his later essay on technology). The way in which these thinkers increasingly problematized the theory of history can be understood, it suggests, as a response to a process of ‘de-imperialization’ in Europe and Asia, which, among other things, reconfigures the artist as a ‘transnational subject’ in a ‘globally redefined field’.