But I want to guard against the assumption, despite what my terminology might suggest, that I am arguing that there was some sort of strict progression to modernist developments or that the eclipse of prior forms of modernism was inevitable. My category of late modernism instead is designed to open up our understanding of the possibilities inherent to the modernist movement overall, possibilities that often were grossly simplified or quickly brushed aside by postmodernist critics who have sometimes offered a less than nuanced account of their predecessors.23 Indeed, the seeming shift from Jackson Pollock to Andy Warhol, from Jack Kerouac to Thomas Pynchon, and from Allen Tate to Paul de Man was anything but inevitable or absolute. Now that we have begun to rethink the nature of postmodernism after its heyday in the 1980s, absorbing its lessons and thinking through its implications, we can begin the task of forging new aesthetic practices that take into account the range of possibilities offered by the various forms of modernism and postmodernism available to us. In other words, I treat the development of modernism as a contested and continuous one that offers no easy solutions and no simple formulations. Thus, my book traces a combative debate between these three schools of modernist practice—high, romantic, and late modernism—and the divergent paths that such practices took throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In so doing, I suggest that the rethinking of the aesthetic form offered by Kenneth Burke, Jasper Johns, Ralph Ellison, and others might help us think through our own current impasse.
Modernism and the Cultural Politics of the Cold War
Of course these debates about modernist practices were not conducted in a vacuum. A cultural tradition predicated upon disrupting staid patterns of thought has always, despite claims from its formalist practitioners, maintained a close watch on political and economic developments. In this sense, the path of modernism in America after World War II was intimately connected to the larger political and cultural debates of the early Cold War. Whether it was Lionel Trilling fretting over the sexualization of American culture in the 1950s or Jack Kerouac lamenting the perceived decline in paternal authority in the wake of the feminist movement or Ralph Ellison reconsidering racial politics in the midst of the civil rights movement, modernists of all persuasions developed their particular aesthetic practices in relationship to the fluctuations of postwar society. But if anything drove modernism in the 1950s it was the larger fear over the threat of totalitarianism. No modernist—from Dwight Macdonald to William Burroughs to Kenneth Burke—wrote about the nature of society without explicitly referencing the threat from right-wing and left-wing authoritarian movements. Of course each group confronted totalitarian politics in different ways. High modernists such as Theodor Adorno, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, and others saw totalitarianism as an endemic part of the larger collapse of Western civilization and as a desperate psychological response to a world with no focus or direction. Unlike the originators of high modernism in the 1920s, those who wrote after the experience of World War II jettisoned the connection between aesthetic hierarchies and political ones that had led many modernists in the 1930s to turn to Fascism to realize their social visions. High modernism in the Cold War was almost by definition antiauthoritarian, exemplified by the litany of nonaesthetic concerns that appeared in works such as Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality and Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination. High modernism had become a chastened form of modernism. But such practitioners held onto the belief that aesthetics as such, fundamentally disconnected from the contaminating hands of mass society, could disrupt the overtly rational norms of modern society.
I outline how this varied group of high modernists—Theodor Adorno, Allen Tate, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, and others—confronted the problem of authoritarianism after World War II. The explicit goal of high modernism in America, besides institutionally defending the humanities in the face of the militarization of society in the early Cold War, was to carve out an image of man uncontaminated by the corrupting appeals of mass society. Promoting a political realism removed from the trappings of ideology, high modernists turned to Freudian psychology to rethink the grounding of the self, offering a new vision of man’s personal autonomy and providing an almost antinomian defense of the individual. In so doing, high modernists like Adorno and Trilling echoed the anti-Communist sentiments of many Cold War liberals, presenting a chastened image of man in the modern age and oftentimes defending the excesses of the rising national security state in the 1950s as protection against the allure of group psychology. In many ways, then, high modernists became domesticated, forfeiting, as numerous challenging practitioners such as Kenneth Burke and Norman Mailer pointed out, the original antistatist, anticapitalist, and anarchic principles inherent to most forms of modernism. Thus, I trace the ever-increasing link between high modernists and the conservative politics of the early Cold War, a link that helps to explain the myriad challenges within modernist circles to their hegemony.
But of course the threat of totalitarianism drove most political discussions in the 1950s, even within other modernist circles. In contrast to their more austere counterparts, romantic modernists like painter Barnett Newman and novelists William Burroughs and Norman Mailer saw totalitarianism instead as a creeping social disease, one emanating from a decrepit American culture controlled by corporations, indistinguishable political parties, and government agencies. For romantic modernists, totalitarianism was, literally and metaphorically, a form of cancer infecting the body politic, a cancer that entered the individual’s system in discrete psychological ways. By presenting such an encompassing definition of totalitarianism, these romantic modernists fretted over almost all of the socioeconomic changes in American life after 1945, lambasting everything from the decline of more rugged forms of masculinity in the wake of postindustrialism to the rise of modern advertising, the expansion of the federal government, and so on. In so doing, they offered a reactionary, libertarian form of politics, one that reflected their obsessive concern with the autonomy of self. They even saw totalitarian practices within the politics of high modernism itself; as William Burroughs once explained to Allen Ginsberg: “It’s about time you wised up to Trilling…. He’s got no orgones, no mana, no charge to him. Just soaks up your charge to keep the battery of his brain turning out crap for the Partisan Review.”24 All of the practices of romantic modernism—the action painting of New York art circles, the spontaneous poetics of Beat writers, and the philosophy of hip in the work of Norman Mailer—were part of a common effort to offer an image of man freed from the creeping disease of psychological control. Romantic modernists searched for an anchor point for individual identity in a world that had apparently reduced subjectivity to mere appearance. Such speculations on the metaphysical ranged from appropriations of Buddhist transcendentalism to discourses on a foundational élan vital or energy underlying artistic production. Through references to either mythology or metaphysics, the immediate was translated into the eternal, all in a desperate attempt to respiritualize the world by making the ordinary extraordinary.
However, not all modernists exhibited the paranoia found in disparate works such as William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch or Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality. Although equally concerned with the problem of mass politics, late modernists were more willing to accept the disorder of the modern world without lapsing into the nostalgic visions of a prelapsarian moment that emerged from high modernist writings or without accepting the more mystical visions of romantic modernists. While most modernist practitioners such as Trilling, Adorno, and Burroughs fretted that the autonomous self was under siege from the contaminating influences of mass society and tried, albeit in different ways, to shore up individual subjectivity from noxious influences, late modernists such as C. Wright Mills and Kenneth Burke outlined the social, historical, and linguistic constitution of the self. In so doing, they promoted those more open and intersubjective forms of identity later associated with postmodernism.25 These modernists were willing to view the self in a much more