Modernist Politics Research Articles

Postmodern Politics Found in Tamil Modern Poetry

One of the two notable elements of modernist politics that emerged in the West was fundamentalism, and the other was identity politics. Postmodern politics encompasses the inadequacies of modernist politics and alternative political ideas. The three elements of unleashing politics, the politics of remnants, and the politics of difference give rise to a fundamental understanding of postmodern politics. It is also necessary to divide it according to the Tamil context into differential feminist politics, Dalit feminist politics, Dalit politics, rainbow coalition or fusion politics, marginal politics, and Periyarist politics. Based on this, the postmodern politics found in the poems of modern Tamil poets such as Salma, Sukirtharani, Sivakami, Thirumagan, M.T. Muthukumarasamy, and T. Kaverinadan have been explained through this article.

Fight and build: solidarity economy as ontological politics.

This essay explores the potential of solidarity economy (SE) as theory, practice, and movement, to engender an ontological politics to create and sustain other worlds that can resolve the existential crises of ecological destruction and historic inequalities. We argue that such a politics is necessary to go beyond the world as it is and exceed the dictates of a dominant modernity—capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy—that positions itself as the only singular reality—or One World World (Law J (2011) What’s Wrong with a One World World. Heterogeneities. http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2011WhatsWrongWithAOneWorldWorld.pdf). What is needed are alternatives to development in contrast to alternative developments. Over the past decade, the SE movement in Massachusetts has advanced a fight and build approach, which has reframed economy as a matter of concern, as something that communities can, and already do, shape themselves—and that powerfully disrupts the reality of a singular capitalist economy. At the same time, the heterogeneous elements of SE are caught up in and assembling political projects with multiple orientations: modernist, social justice, and ontological (Escobar, Pluriversal politics: the real and the possible, Duke University Press, Durham, 2020). SE movement can remain stuck in a modernist politics of growing and scaling businesses and jobs. Even though a social justice approach attends to power and is more amenable to a relational view of reality where things only exist in interconnection, it too can remain mired in One World World liberal politics of redistribution and market ‘solutions’. How SE movement might actualize an ontological politics is a matter of care, an attunement to how relational worlds are coming into being and maintained. As an ontological politics, SE is not about economy qua economy at all, but about creating and sustaining worlds, pluriversal realities where we can be in solidarity with other people, beings, and planetary life systems.

Arguing with Photographs: Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, and Modernist Political Engagement

Arguing with Photographs:Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, and Modernist Political Engagement Naomi Toth (bio) In 1931, Virginia Woolf hit on new idea for a book: I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book—a sequel to A Room of One's Own—about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps—Lord, how exciting!1 This new book, soon entitled The Pargiters, was to be an "essaynovel" opening up a new avenue for formal experimentation after the text she was then completing, the "play-poem" The Waves.2 Integrating the world of "fact" into the aesthetic domain, connecting the sexual and professional spheres through the novelistic form, this work also promised to inaugurate a new phase in Woolf's approach to the relationship between literature and society. Yet by 1933 she had abandoned the project; the manuscript's remains were divided up into a novel, which became The Years, and an essay, which became Three Guineas. What went wrong? Tracing the destiny of the manuscript's material reveals that The Pargiters's failure cannot be explained simply as a retrospective recognition of the essay and the novel's generic incompatibility. Nor may it be understood as a return to the "fact" versus "vision" opposition which characterized Woolf's interventions in debates on modern fiction in the 1920s. Rather, it has to do with Woolf's ambivalent attitude to a third term, "argument." For though she refers to The Years as a novel of both "fact" and "vision," she maintains its status as art by siphoning off the analyses [End Page 67] and explanatory discourse of The Pargiters manuscript and channeling it into the essay Three Guineas. As a result, the two texts establish different relationships to consensus: the essay adopts an overtly non-consensual, clearly political stance; the novel, on the other hand, retains an ideal of harmonious unity which, while not exactly affirmed, is nonetheless entertained and advanced, tending to smooth over differences between men and women, soldiers and civilians, belligerents and pacifists. This outcome suggests that the principles of aesthetic autonomy and its attendant drive for cohesion and unity, principles that have been operative since the emergence of the modern institution of literature itself, remain persistent in Woolf's thinking about writing, determining the composition of The Years and Three Guineas, and ensuring that The Pargiters's promise of a new form of literary political engagement went unrealized.3 And yet, an attentive reading of Three Guineas allows us to deconstruct the premises of Woolf's separation of argument from aesthetics. Her engagement with photography, a medium poised on the frontier between the factual and the aesthetic, is key to this move. By analyzing emotional reactions to photographs and the political positions they engender, Three Guineas demonstrates how excluding argument from the presentation of "facts" masks the power stakes at play in representation itself. The essay also implicitly suggests that the same process might be at work in attempts to suppress argument from works of "vision." Woolf's recourse to photography therefore allows her to develop a politicized approach to both "facts" and "vision", providing her readers with the tools to critique the aesthetic autonomy The Years attempts to maintain. In other words, she hands us the arms with which to read her work against itself. This makes Three Guineas, which results from the exclusion of argument from aesthetic "vision," exemplary of the contradictions that traversed the literary avant-garde's relationship to social and political change in the 1930s. Fact, Vision, and Argument In attempting to unite "fact" with "vision," Virginia Woolf reconfigures the terms of the debate over avant-garde poetics she had engaged in during the 1920s, which had seen her pitting "materialist" "realists" interested in "facts" against "spiritual" "moderns" who focused on the "visions" of the "mind."4 Indeed, in the years following World War I, she consistently opposed the "surface" reality of "evidence" and "fact"—a category in which she included sociological detail as well as didacticism—to the "vision" of the "depths" beneath them, beyond external reality.5 The writers she variously labels "materialist," "realist," or "Edwardian," in addition to being prisoners of...

How Modernism Provisions Us for the Future

How Modernism Provisions Us for the Future Timothy Wientzen Bronstein, Michaela. Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 268 pp. $78.00 hardcover. Matz, Jesse. Modernist Time Ecology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. 308 pp. $54.95 hardcover; $54.95 e-book. Watts, Kara, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett, eds. Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. 264 pp. $85.00 hardcover. Rupture—once the byword of modernist politics—is in a sorry state. Over the last decade, categories of rupture have gained widespread currency in an array of economic and political movements intent on undermining institutions—particularly international ones—at the very moment in history when we need them most. In Modernist Studies, annual meetings have become tinged by pessimism as we increasingly turn our attention to the precarious nature of academic labor. While such anxieties are undeniably justified, they are dramatically amplified by the larger, ever-more dire rupture of the natural world. At a recent meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, I found myself imagining a future in which scholars of the field continued to meet on an annual basis, and could not shake the sense that such a future would be an incredibly bleak one. For what kind of future will we have in even twenty years if we deem face-to-face meetings sufficient justification to continue burning fossil fuels? Though nobody says this aloud, the intellectual practices we take for granted cannot endure. Our academic and professional formations have been made possible by the carbon economy that is killing us. Imagining a [End Page 209] future for these formations is as difficult as imagining a future in which the natural world has been reconciled with our modernity. As hard as it is to imagine this future, many scholars—myself included—find it equally difficult to damn the study of modernism as a mere byproduct of the carbon economy. Modernist writers were among the first to extensively experience the realities that would become familiar to us—from new gender expressions, mass warfare, and speed, to the lived experience of mass communication. If the modernist moment meant anything, it was characterized by a sense that crisis and opportunity are harmonious co-travelers, and that literature has a broad social function in helping us navigate a future unlike our present. The best new work in Modernist Studies is animated not by a blanket ecological imperative, per se, but rather by a sense that modernism might be useful as we navigate this ruptured future. In a special issue of Modernism/Modernity on "weak theory" published in 2018, Paul Saint-Amour described new and emerging methodologies in the field, especially those resistant to historicism and the hermeneutics of suspicion. My sense is that many of these emergent methodologies have gained traction because they offer ways of operationalizing the lessons of modernism for the political exigencies of right now, the third decade of the twenty-first century. The books under discussion here form part of this movement in recent scholarship. Much of this work shares a desire to move beyond long-dominant methodological imperatives, particularly those that would partition the past from the present (and thus from the future). These books are far less concerned with restoring lost historical contexts than they are with achieving fidelity to the political impulses that fired modernism, including its orientation toward the future. The collection Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, edited by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett, is one text engaging modernist literature in these ways. This ambitious collection seeks to answer critical lacunae in both ecocriticism and affect theory while also renewing how scholars have traditionally analyzed the work of bodies in modernist literature. As the editors understand it, ecocriticism, with its emphasis on environments, has failed to adequately theorize the role of bodies and affect in its objects of analysis, while affect theory has struggled with a paradox of seeing bodies as both materially limited and boundless. Modernist texts appear in this collection as objects of analysis that might allow a theoretical intervention in both fields. But this collection also...

Schwitters’s Ursonate and the Merz Barn Wall

This paper notes the importance of Kurt Schwitters’s Merz project to the modernist politics and poetics of exile of the 20th century. Placing the sound work of Schwitters within his full Merz project, the author assesses the relations between the Ursonate and the final Merzbau. He discusses three of these relations—collage, found objects and the structures of building materiality in language and sculpture—and presents Schwitters’s work as culminating in a vision of sound and building structures in what Brandon Taylor has called “intrusive new entities” of collage and assemblage that are themselves analogous to the “intrusive new entities” of human material itself.

Freeloading in Hobohemia: The Politics of Free Verse in American World War I Periodical Culture

Freeloading in Hobohemia:The Politics of Free Verse in American World War I Periodical Culture Mark Whalan (bio) What are the politics of free verse? Although the gamut of modernist politics revealed by hindsight makes it problematic to assign a particular politics to a particular aesthetic, this question was addressed with considerable urgency in the 1910s, the foundational decade of American modernist verse. In 1916, a combative discussion on the subject occurred in the New York Times magazine. The poet Josephine Preston Peabody began the exchange by critiquing free verse as undemocratic, claiming that it was “in the worst sense of the word … aristocratic”—exclusionary because its irregular rhythm and lack of rhyme made it impossible to memorize and therefore to share.1 In contrast, regularized poetic meter was “the most democratic thing” in mimicking “the rhythm of the heart-beat,” producing a form that was inherently collective because it ran through all “the great moments of life.” She predicted that World War I would “make poetry democratic again” and would discourage “mere experimenter[s] with words, making intricate verbal patterns for the entertainment of [their] friends.” A week later the poet James Oppenheim gave the modernist reply, decrying Peabody’s equation of democratic art with popular appeal and arguing instead that “democratic” art should not be understood as a formal quality. For Oppenheim, the vitality of art in a democratic society was conditional not on formal choices but on free speech, on tolerating a constellated set of practices and modes of expression that enables each man to “be pre-eminently himself, whether that means being a hod carrier or a philosopher.”2 [End Page 665] Oppenheim’s and Peabody’s argument may now struggle for footnote status, but it exemplifies a broader phenomenon, namely, how questions about literary modernism’s public and political instrumentality became especially acute during World War I and frequently revolved around the issue of free verse. The debate over the civic responsibilities of American modernism—and the formal choices that responsibility entailed—was highly public; not confined to little magazines, it spread to the New Republic, the New York Times, and even the Saturday Evening Post. Modernist “bohemians” were alternately dismissed as esoteric, insincere, pretentious, elitist, and hermetic, and by 1917 this shaded into charges of “slacking,” unpatriotically withholding labor (and money) from the state. In contrast, magazines like Poetry and the Little Review fostered a counterpublic sphere of debate on the war, one that frequently defended the relevance of modernism, as well as free verse, to a moment of collective emergency. This article seeks to recover the contours of that debate by focusing on three publications: the Saturday Evening Post, Poetry, and the Little Review. These periodicals took dramatically divergent positions on modernist instrumentality during wartime and did so in dialogue with one another. Of particular importance to them all was how experimental poetics could engage the rapid expansion of the state, along with the role of poetry in accommodating the new forms of sociability this expansion entailed. A few facts sketch out how fundamentally the American state changed in these years. By 1919 the annual U.S. federal budget was $19 billion, up from $0.75 billion in 1916. During the war the state assumed control of commodity prices, railroads, and labor relations as a way of rationalizing the war economy, thereby delighting Progressives, who had long argued for more dramatic state intervention in these areas; it also asserted control over radio transmission and political speech in unprecedented ways.3 The war transformed the organization of veterans’ health care and pensions; it paved the way for a national airmail system and a federally supported, nationally integrated road network.4 Yet much of this expansion occurred through governmental partnerships with preexisting corporate infrastructures, often reconfirming an already powerful discourse that aligned civic participation and political agency with consumer choice. In this circumstance of dramatic state expansion and the alteration of (or innovation in) how a variety of social services were provided and administered, citizens’ relationship to government and one another underwent substantial changes that both posed challenges to representation and transformed what modern citizenship entailed. As I explain here, in this rapidly transforming situation...

Further Considerations of Alienation

This essay will attempt to add to and expand upon a recent publication entitled and a Reconsideration of Alienation.' While this earlier essay lays out Merleau-Ponty's alternative to the modernist view of the subject as a rational interior in full possession of itself and a pre-formed rational world, as well as to the postmodernist view that the subject along with the subject's world is primarily a construction of language, it did not go far enough in emphasizing Merleau-Ponty's treatment of the abstract reasoning of modernism as a form of alienation (at the level of epistemology/ ontology, as well as at the level of self/subject and politics). Merleau-Ponty spent much of his professional career criticizing both empiricist and rationalist forms of modernism, primarily for treating the subject and the world as already conceptually and abstractly formed, and the later part of his professional life criticizing both capitalism and communism for their acceptance of a politics based on a pre-established rationality. All modernism as the abstract construction of reality, as well as all contemporary forms of instrumentalism or operationalism as the attempt to construct reality according to a few abstract indices, are alienated forms of experience, since they do not capture the richness of the world as it is originally lived through by embodied subjects engaged in the world together. They attempt to derive or construct experience from conceptual abstractions. Rather, we should begin with experience as it is really lived through by embodied experiences. Reason, then, comes out of this patterned and shared experience.Reason is, or should be, an agreement of perspectives/profiles, of mine within me as I actively open upon a stable world and of mine with those of others as we open upon the world together. Moreover, all modernist politics as isolated rational individuals in an already rationally determined ethical world or as the rational unfolding of history and the liberation of the proletariat are alienated forms of politics, since they do not account for the embodied subject's openness upon an imprecise public world and the uncertainty of human history. Moreover, history must be regarded as a structure in the making, establishing a probable, not certain, sequence of future events. In the sense that Merleau-Ponty is critical of modernism's use of an abstract, alienated reason he joins the company of Lukacs, Habermas, and Heidegger, as well as Marx-all of whom make similar claims. The present essay will briefly consider this line of argument in this company of authors and will then proceed to briefly consider Merleau-Ponty's contribution to it, especially in his later works. It will also briefly consider their implications for postmodernism.MarxLet us first turn to Karl Marx. Marx's theory of alienation can be summarized as follows: workers in capitalist societies are alienated from Self, i.e., from their own free will, since their labor is directed by the capitalist not by their own choice, thus negating any genuine experience of self-actualization; from the Product of their labor, since there is no personal identification with the object produced according to the plan and command of others; from Others, since the worker's labor is no longer organic, i.e., no longer consists of the workers collaborating among themselves to choose and design their product and the process by which it is produced; and from their very Human Nature, since human nature is the ability to direct one's own actions according to one's own will, in collaboration with others, within context, and under certain limiting conditions, of course.2LukacsGeorg Lukacs updates and refines Marx's theory of alienation in his History and Class Consciousness,3 most specifically in the chapter entitled Reification and Consciousness of the Proletariat. Extending Marx's characterization of alienation and Weber's notion of rationalization, Lukacs states the following: If we follow the path taken by labor in its development from the handicrafts via cooperation and manufacture to machine industry we can see a continuous trend towards greater rationalization, the progressive elimination of the qualitative, human and individual attributes of the worker (HCC 88; see also Habermas4). …

‘KHALISTAN IS DEAD! LONG LIVE KHALISTAN!’

The Khalistan issue is a dead-end campaign, yet the movement called ‘lehar’ is alive and well. This seemingly contradictory statement becomes evident when the two different concepts of Khalistan and their protagonists are considered. One is a modernist demand for a territorial Sikh State. The other is a resistance against enforced, sometimes violent and arguably unnecessary modernist political and cultural changes that challenge the Sikhs as a people who have a sophisticated concept of nationhood of their own. The territorial Khalistan is largely led by educated modernist Sikhs, diasporic Sikhs in the west and an imagined obsession of academics and journalists since 1984 peddling clichéd analysis. It is almost a defunct campaign reduced to slogans of Khalistan Zindabad and annual marches with diminishing attendees. However, the lehar, the real movement of ordinary Sikhs, has been around for at least a century, particularly since 1920, and continues to pose a relentless challenge to the modern Indian State and its search for identity and nationhood. Incoherent, unarticulated and without direction or even a clear end goal, the lehar reacts ferociously each time the State and its modernist tendencies infringe the internal coherence of the Sikhs as a people. It is a discomfort to India's adopted but failing secularity and the State's desperate efforts to construct a nation where none exists to justify its existence. It is a vibrant movement that continues to defy commentators and State predictions and at its core is the unique Sikh concept of Guru Granth–Guru Panth as a non-territorial entity or nation. It may well go on to precipitate the death of modernist post-colonial India gripped by an increasing number of conflicts since 1947, and pave the way for indigenous solutions as well as revival of the pluralism of Indian civilisation in the Indian State as the latter comes to terms with a simple fact: that India is a state of several nations, each with their own cultural and political outlooks.

“From Mosaic To Multiversality”: Repriming Multicultural Governance in a Postnational Canada

The modernist politics of multicultural governance no longer resonate with authority in a postmulticultural era. Mosaic models of state multiculturalism are being contested by the changing nature of global transmigration and the proliferation of immigrant-driven differences. This paper argues that the transnational politics of multiversality in a globalizing and diversifying Canada are exerting pressure to rethink the limits of a “mosaic” multiculturalism (Mawani 2008; also Shome 2012). A “multiversal” multiculturalism is proposed instead as an alternative governance model for living together with a diversity-of-diversities (“multiversality”) across shifting and intersecting contexts (Latham 2007/08; Vertovec 2010; Ramadan 2011). The paper concludes by exploring whether Canada can move beyond a mosaic multiculturalism whose tendency to conflate cultures into a singular commonality papers over transmigrant identities and intrasecting differences. Time will tell if Canada is ready for a multicultural 2.0 governance in advancing a framework that ensures differentiated differences are kept safe from—yet safe for—a postnational Canada (Sandercock 2003; also Parekh 2005). La politique moderniste de gouvernance multiculturelle n’est plus en harmonie avec l’autorité dans une période post-multiculturelle. La mosaïque du multiculturalisme d’état propose un modèle mis à mal par la nature changeante de la transmigration mondiale et la prolifération de différences due à l’immigration. Dans cet article, nous soutenons que la politique transnationale de multiversatilité dans un Canada qui se mondialise et se diversifie, exerce une pression pour repenser les limites d’un multiculturalisme de ‘mosaïque’ (Mawani 2008 et Shome 2012), ou ‘multiversel’. Ce qui est proposé à la place, c’est un modèle alternatif de gouvernance pour vivre ensemble dans une diversité-des-diversités (‘multiversalité’), qui englobe des contextes changeants et croisés (Latham (2007/2008, Vertovec 2010 et Ramadan 2011). En conclusion, nous examinons si le Canada peut dépasser un multiculturalisme de mosaïque dont la tendance à assembler des cultures dans une standardisation unique masque des identités trans-migrantes et des différences croisées. Le temps dira si le Canada est prêt à promouvoir une gouvernance multiculturelle 2.0 structurée pour assurer que la différenciation des différences soit protégée de – et néanmoins pour – un avenir post-national (Sandercock 2003; aussi Parekh 2005).

Empire and Counter-Empire in the Italian Far Right

What old Fascisms and new nationalisms circulate in the political spaces of Europe? Through an analysis of their split on immigration policy in 2003, this article examines the myths and ideologies of the two major far right parties in Italy, the Lega Nord and the Alleanza Nazionale. It argues that the anti-imperial mythology of the Lega, based on the defence of Lombardy against the Holy Roman Empire, has led it into a modernist politics of territoriality, borders and homogeneity. On the other hand, the Alleanza Nazionale has used its Fascist heritage, and in particular the mythologizing of the Roman empire, to open up a postmodern imperial politics, involving the expansion of borders, and the incorporation of new peoples and territories. Through the use of interviews with militants and deputies, it looks at how the Alleanza has re-articulated imperial Fascist mythologies within a new pro-European Union discourse, while the Lega has maintained its role of protest against deterritorialization despite the seeming inevitability of the territorial integration.

The two-ness of rural life and the ends of rural scholarship

I analyze the current return of academic rural doubt in the US in terms of an old intellectual quandary: what is the rural? I argue that scholars have two dominant epistemologies of the rural, what I term first rural and second rural, and correspondingly different political visions. By first rural I mean the material moment of the rural, to which we typically grant priority. By second rural I mean the ideal moment of the rural, which we typically regard as secondary, even when we argue that it is the only remaining rural. I analyze the origin of this priority of the rural in terms of the modernist/postmodernist divide, which I trace through the current American emphasis on first rural and the current European and Antipodean emphasis on second rural, noting how each emphasis often develops to the exclusion of the other. I trace as well the association of first rural with a modernist politics of defense of the rural boundary, and of second rural with a postmodernist politics of discourse that engages by deconstructing the rural. I argue for a rural plural vision that embraces first rural and second rural equally, stimulates a correspondingly more inclusive and practical politics of the rural, and keeps our understanding of the rural forever moving on.

Rhetoric meets reality: Northern Ireland’s equality agenda

In Northern Ireland the word ‘equality’ is frequently evoked, yet the society itself remains riven by social mistrust. It is not characterised by even a thin social solidarity, even though violence has mercifully diminished. This article teases out the very particular way in which equality has come to be defined in Northern Ireland – indeed, how battles over its definition have become part of continuing, even intensifying, sectarian political antagonism. This helps to explain why it has proved so difficult to secure stable devolution in the region, and why the serious challenges of social injustice seem always to be displaced by constitutional wrangling. There are echoes here of wider warnings about the consequences of a drift from a modernist politics of redistribution to a postmodern politics of recognition. An alternative policy agenda is outlined, which would see sectarianism and social exclusion in Northern Ireland subjected to combined political assault.

Colonizing currencies. Beasts, banknotes and the colour of money in South Africa Taking stock. A response to Turgeon and Creighton

In Archaeological dialogues 12.2 Jean and John Comaroff explored the role of commensuration – the mechanisms that render equitable and negotiable different orders of value – in the production of society and history. While equilibration, standardization and conversion are implicated in most theories of money and commodification, their nature as social processes has not been adequately specified, above all in the construction of universalizing ideologies and modernist political and economic regimes. They pursue these processes in relation to one African theatre, examining the ways in which different regimes of value, brought up against one another in the encounter between the southern Tswana peoples and European colonizers, became the subject of both conflict and complex mediation. Cows, coin and contracts – which had the capacity to construct and negate difference – soon were invested here with magical qualities. But colonized peoples were also sensitive to the capacity of such currencies to enable or impede convertibility, and to the forms of abstraction and incorporation they permit. Which is why, in South Africa and elsewhere, those currencies often became metonymic of the contestations of value on which colonial struggles, tout court, were played out.In this short essay they respond to the comments on their article by John Creighton and Laurier Turgeon.

Beasts, banknotes and the colour of money in colonial South Africa

This essay explores the role of commensuration – the mechanisms that render equitable and negotiable different orders of value – in the production of society and history. While equilibration, standardization and conversion are implicated in most theories of money and commodification, their nature as social processes has not been adequately specified, above all in the construction of universalizing ideologies and modernist political and economic regimes. We pursue these processes in relation to one African theatre, examining the ways in which different regimes of value, brought up against one another in the encounter between the southern Tswana peoples and European colonizers, became the subject of both conflict and complex mediation. Cows, coin and contracts – which had the capacity to construct and negate difference – soon were invested here with magical qualities. But colonized peoples were also sensitive to the capacity of such currencies to enable or impede convertibility and the forms of abstraction and incorporation they permit. Which is why, in South Africa and elsewhere, those currencies often became metonymic of the contestations of value on which colonial struggles, tout court, were played out.

Louis Kahn's situated modernism

Louis Kahn is perhaps the most important architect to emerge in the decades following World War II. In this book Sarah Williams Goldhagen dismantles the myths that have cast Kahn variously as a mystical neo-Platonist, a structural rationalist, a visionary champion of Beaux-Arts principles, a rebel against modernism. She demonstrates instead that the essence of Kahn's architecture lies in his deeply held modernist political, social, and artistic ideals. Throughout his life, Goldhagen shows, Kahn sought to rework modernism into a socially transformative architecture appropriate for the postwar world. Goldhagen presents much new archival evidence about Kahn's buildings, his ideas, and his indebtedness to contemporary art and to the many socio-critical and architectural discourses of the postwar years. She offers fresh interpretations of many of his important buildings, including the Yale University Art Gallery and the National Assembly complex in Bangladesh, as well as of such previously understudied or misunderstood works as his essay on monumentality and his AFL Medical Services building in Philadelphia. Goldhagen theorises Kahn's architectural principles to show that he struggled with modernism rather than against it, reconceptualising it into a singular and powerful new vocabulary that retains architectural and social relevance today.

Adorno, Greenberg and Modernist Politics

Abstract Despite widespread pessimism about the radical thrust of Adorno's modernism and Adorno's own reservations, his work has been held up as prefiguring the rebirth of a more engaged politics. This argument has taken several forms. Russell A. Berman maintains that if Adorno's modernism was bound to exhaust itself (as Adorno himself anticipated), the end of modernism would inevitably result in a return to everyday life. Yet this union of art and life would simply relocate political struggle and change within the cultural arena: “After the completion of the avantgarde project, works of art have lost their privileged status and are no longer a safe harbor for the utopian image of a successful civilization, but the principle of aestheticization expands throughout society as a crucial medium of manipulation….

Modernisms: A Literary Guide (review)

Reviewed by: Modernisms: A Literary Guide Tyrus Miller Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Peter Nicholls. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. 368 pp. $16. As he states in his preface, Peter Nicholls’s recent study seeks to provide a “conceptual map of the different modernist tendencies.” Metaphors of mapping, usually connected with adjectives like “cultural,” “conceptual,” or “cognitive” have, of course, become rife in recent literary studies, and one might legitimately ask whether they merely dress up a traditional literary or cultural history in the garb of a new jargon. In Nicholls’s case, however, he delivers on the promise of the term. For his book does two major things, which together make Modernisms: A Literary Guide a notably innovative study in the literary history of modernism. First, in keeping with the figure of mapping, he seeks to define a literary “terrain”: a bounded space of coherently related differences between modernist tendencies, a field of possibilities allowing modernist writers to respond variously to shared aspects of their context. Second, he surveys this field “conceptually,” that is, in a theoretically informed way, employing a delimited and consistently applied set of concepts. He establishes the conceptual parameters of the modernist field around four major nodal points, which shift and redistribute throughout the book. These are: the defensive nature of the modernist writing subject, which takes shape in opposition to threatening social differences; the seemingly paradoxical countertendency of the modernist writer to identify with social “others”; the central role of desire in the language and form of modernist texts; and the pivotal role of sexual difference for modernist writers. The scope and integrity of Nicholls’s study on the one hand, and the high conceptual level on the other, makes this book stand out among recent modernist studies. While Nicholls’s theoretical sources are eclectic—embracing Frankfurt School theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, René Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry, and recent gender theories—they converge upon the question of how subjectivity is formed in language and society. Specifically, with respect to modernism, Nicholls is concerned to [End Page 175] trace how modernist writers dislocated the primary site of subjectivity from the realms of politics and everyday life to that of highly stylized literary works. In modernist works, style is the trace of the subject, and even the abolition of style by some avant-gardes recalls this subject as precisely that which must be cancelled by and within the art work. The political engagements of the modernist subject migrate, Nicholls argues, into the polemical space of stylistic conflict, but in the process, they change the nature of both politics and artistic style. Each becomes charged with the other, so that modernist politics are stylized and aestheticized, while questions of style become infused with the passions and even violence of the political sphere. The modernist subject subsists in an uneasy tension between politics and style and forms a kind of switching post between them. Thus, Nicholls concludes, subjectivity is the point at which the social meaning of literary texts can be grasped by criticism and literary history. While he usually employs theoretical texts to inform his readings of the literary text, at certain key points, particularly with respect to psychoanalysis, Nicholls also works the other way around. Comparing expressionist, dadaist, and surrealist views of the unconscious and the Oedipal drama to those of Freud, for example, he implies that contemporary theories of the subject, such as those that guide his own investigations, emerge from the common cultural matrix that also gave rise to the modernisms which are the object of his study. This level of self-reflexiveness is not maintained throughout of the book, but hints of a more profound modernist “episteme” embracing several overlapping disciplines and types of practices appear in several of the local discussions of individual movements, figures, and texts. The construction of such a comprehensive theory of modernism lies at the outer reaches of Nicholls’s already ambitious project, which in many cases can only gesture towards new areas of research and criticism which might contribute to such a synthetic view. The other side of the map metaphor is the claim of Nicholls’s title to provide a “literary guide...

Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman” and a Chinese Modernism

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