Pragmatic Modernism (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pragmatic Modernism Timothy Wientzen Pragmatic Modernism. Lisi Schoenbach. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 197. $45.00 (cloth). Fueled by the jarring and intoxicating experience of modernization, and variously dedicated to the most unrelenting and utopian visions of the world, modernist literature, it would seem, thrives less on practicality than it does on extremity. Viewed from this angle, modernism would seem to be anything but pragmatic. In Pragmatic Modernism, Lisi Schoenbach takes up and challenges this enduring notion of modernism. Suggesting that modernist studies has too long been beholden to a sense of the avant-garde's privileging of oppositionality, shock, and rupture, Schoenbach attempts to classify an alternative tradition of modernist literature, a "pragmatic modernism," that defined itself "through a gradualist, mediating approach to social change and artistic innovation" (3). This argument builds on the work of American pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey, writers who explored the limits of rupture as an ethical, political, and aesthetic program. For these writers, as for the modernists Schoenbach examines, political and aesthetic renewal were not to be achieved through a wholesale liquidation of existing traditions and social institutions. Instead, modernists like Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and Marcel Proust shared with pragmatists a deep respect for the routinized structures of thought and action much loathed by the avant-garde. Schoenbach explains that, unlike the avant-garde, "pragmatic modernism" is guided by "a deep respect for and awareness of the power of habit, placing an exhaustive illumination of habit at the center of its meditations and grounding its vision of social change within existing social and political institutions" (6). But rather than standing as a kind of rear guard that simply celebrated habits of mind and body, and the social institutions that codify behavior, pragmatic modernism is characterized by a "dialectical" notion of habit. "Pragmatism's great insight," Schoenbach suggests, "was that habit could be generative and productive on the one hand, and potentially stultifying and disabling on the other" (6). Pragmatic modernism thus maintains a critical relationship with the habituating forces of modern life, even as it affirms the biological and social necessity of institutionally engendered habits in both aesthetic innovation and political life. [End Page 609] In focusing on habit, Schoenbach does more than simply call attention to the term's political and aesthetic currency in the modernist period; reading dialectically, Pragmatic Modernism breathes new life into a stalled critical term. The book's introduction usefully contextualizes a longstanding misreading of habit's place within modernist culture. Even as a distrust of bodily and cognitive repetition informed the techniques of the avant-garde—including, most importantly, those of surrealism—Schoenbach reveals the extent to which a positive and enabling notion of habit subtended an array of literary and political engagements with the crises of twentieth-century life. Looking in equal measure at the genre of the manifesto and early-century theories of political modernity, she demonstrates that even the thinkers most ardently opposed to the habituating forces of modern life relied on habit as a necessary force against which personal and political innovation might take shape. In a reading of Benjamin's "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," for example, Schoenbach demonstrates a typically modernist angst about habit, which, nevertheless, does not succumb to the easy romanticization of spontaneity. In Benjamin's thinking, it is the "oscillation between habit and shock" that becomes the primary "experience of modernity" (38). As in the work of James and Dewey, habit functions as a baseline of action and possibility—an inevitable and necessary aspect of life upon which modern writers depended in theorizing political modernity and constructing models of aesthetic innovation. Guided by this dialectical approach, Schoenbach examines the role of habits and their institutional contexts in the work of Stein, Henry James, and Proust. These chapters elucidate the political and aesthetic strategies of pragmatic modernism by mapping its interest in the interplay of stasis, repetition, and predictability on the one hand, and change, rupture, and spontaneity on the other. Since her work persistently dwells on the utility and necessity of habit, Stein emerges in this analysis as paradigmatic of pragmatic modernism. Eschewing a route well worn in Stein criticism...