Selling Modernism: Resisting Commodification, Commodifying Resistance

Abstract

SELLING MODERNISM: RESISTING COMMODIFICATION, COMMODIFYING RESISTANCE VICTOR LI Dalhousie University W RITING in the late sixties, Theodor Adorno pointed to a certain sim­ ilarity between modernist art’s promotion of experiment and novelty and capitalism’s injunction to make it new: “As soon as capital does not ex­ pand, or, in the language of circulation, as soon as capital stops offering something new, it is going to lose ground in the competitive struggle. Art has appropriated this economic category. The new in art is the aesthetic coun­ terpart to the expanding reproduction of capital in society” (31). Fastening on this structural similarity between modernist art and capitalist commod­ ity production, revisionist readings of modernism have begun to question its opposition and resistance to bourgeois culture and society. Thus, in his last lectures and writings, Raymond Williams insisted on the need to ex­ plore how modernism “quickly lost its anti-bourgeois stance, and achieved comfortable integration into the new international capitalism,” and how modernism’s “forms lent themselves to cultural competition and the com­ mercial interplay of obsolescence, with its shifts of schools, styles and fashion so essential to the market” (35). From a critical postmodernist perspective, Andreas Huyssen states that a crucial question “concerns the extent to which modernism and the avant-garde as forms of an adversary culture were never­ theless conceptually and practically bound up with capitalist modernization” (183). Huyssen’s question becomes Tom Crow’s provocative argument that, functionally, “the avant-garde serves as a kind of research and development arm of the culture industry: it searches out areas of social practice not yet completely available to efficient manipulation and makes them discrete and visible” (253). In this essay, I will discuss three representative instances in which mod­ ernism’s adversarial function, its resistance to the commodity world of mod­ ern bourgeois society, becomes, in an ironic twist, the very production of a commodity. My first example is drawn from an early moment of capi­ talist modernization: the nineteenth-century capital of fashion, Paris, and the appearance in it of the flâneur. My second example focusses on that high-point in the history of literary modernism, the publication in 1922 of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. My third example moves forward to the fifties English Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , 19, 1, March 1993 and sixties and examines the self-conscious and desperate efforts of the Situationist International, a politicized avant-garde group, to resist and subvert the increasingly all-pervasive consumerist logic of commodity production. FROM FLÂNEUR TO SANDWICHMAN In the mid-nineteenth century, Paris was the capital city of the spectacle and the commodity (the Bon Marché, for example, was founded in 1852). Opposed to the society of mass production and consumption was the dandy, Baudelaire’s “virtuoso of non-utilitarianism, . . . the perfect example of life as a personal art” (Grana 192). The dandy who strolled through the city was the flâneur, at once at home and not at home in the city. “Botanizing on the asphalt,” as Walter Benjamin puts it, the flâneur strolled through the city in an idle and aimless fashion, ostensibly uninvolved in its commerce. “[The flâneur’s] leisurely appearance as a personality,” Benjamin argues, “is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. It is also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace” (54). Aside from walking at a turtle’s pace, the flâneur also cultivated the ability to see the city anew, the city not of urban commerce and urban planners, but the city of the “first glance,” as it were. Here is Benjamin again on the poetry of flânerie: Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance — nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for quite a...