Modernism’s Other WorkThe Art Object’s Political Life

Abstract

This book challenges deeply held critical beliefs about the meaning—in particular the political meaning—of modernism’s commitment to the work of art as an object detached from the world. Ranging over works of poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, and film, it argues that modernism’s core aesthetic problem—the artwork’s status as an object, and a subject’s relation to it—poses fundamental questions of agency, freedom, and politics. These political questions have always been modernism’s critical work, even when writers such as Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, and William Gaddis boldly assert the art object’s immunity from the world’s interpretations. Upending our understanding of relationships between aesthetic autonomy and politics, we see that autonomy from the world was never, for the modernists, a failure of relation to it, which is to say that an art object’s autonomy means not liberation from the whole world, but freedom from others ascribing meanings to art objects. Moreover, the reader’s or viewer’s relation to the art object became a way to envision the political subject’s ideal relation to a changing, rejuvenated, but essentially liberal state at a time when the discourse of threatened autonomy pervaded both high and mass culture. For the modernists, the freedom of the art object from the reader’s meaning presented a way to imagine an individual’s complicated liberty within the state. Autonomy and threats to autonomy, particularity and universality, detachment and incorporation are all treated in light of liberalism’s perceived promises or failures.