Late Modernism. Robert Genter

who delved into the deeper depths of the self. This, if anything, was the common theme running through diverse texts such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Late modernist practitioners offered a complex account of subject formation, one that dispensed with the overt essentialism of their counterparts and one that was willing to explore the liberating possibilities remaining in a world seemingly full of artifice, imitative practices, and social conformity.

      From Kenneth Burke to James Baldwin to Jasper Johns, late modernists saw a complexity to human identity—a subject that was formed in and through its relations to others, to institutional forms, and to the political landscape. Such late modernists argued that the self was neither fully whole nor autonomous but instead constituted through an endless parade of generalized and significant others—sometimes with overlapping agendas and sometimes with conflicting interests—that provided the context for self-identity. “What is our ‘reality,’” argued Kenneth Burke, “but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present?”²⁶ Like the postmodernist writers who came soon after them, late modernists saw the self as formed through a series of identificatory and linguistic practices. But unlike those postmodernists, Burke and others refused to believe that the self was reducible to the context in which it was situated. One can note the difficulty of this project by examining the odd terminology used by many late modernists—sociologist David Riesman referenced the autonomous other-directed personality, sociologist Erving Goffman spoke of the presentation of self in society, and Kenneth Burke described man as homo rhetorician. For all such writers, the self was not something given but something achieved through a delicate social, linguistic, and economic performance, a self that emerged from the landscape of everyday life and that tried to provide an account of its needs, desires, and possibilities. These late modernists provided a description of the self that included, however hesitant, language of the self as subject.

      In this sense, my book is both a work of tradition building, in which I carve out an overlooked moment in American intellectual history, and a work of cultural history, in which I map these debates over modernism onto the cultural terrain of the early Cold War. In so doing, I chart the contentious debate between these three forms of modernism—high, romantic, and late—over the nature of art and the nature of the subject. In Part I, I analyze the rise and fall of high modernism, examining how a range of critics such as Lionel Trilling, Theodor Adorno, and Clement Greenberg tried to promote high art as a rejoinder to an American landscape dominated by science and technology and threatened by the specter of totalitarianism from abroad. As the Cold War progressed, these high modernists eventually forfeited their prior aesthetic commitments and turned to more conservative assumptions about social transformation. Throughout, I detail the response by several late modernists who critiqued the failed project of high modernism, exposing its biases and limitations. In Part II, I trace the development of romantic modernism, exemplified by the action painting of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the spontaneous poetics of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, an avant-garde that similarly critiqued the conservative politics of high modernism. Offering endless metaphysical speculations on the true grounding of being, these romantic modernists tried to salvage the self from a supposedly decrepit, authoritarian culture. Such wild speculations were at times quite cartoonish, and throughout Part II, I examine the rejoinder offered by late modernists to these compatriots as well, exposing the reactionary, if not retrograde, assumptions about identity lurking behind their aesthetic project. Finally, in Part III I summarize the theoretical and aesthetic project of late modernism, demonstrating not only the contribution of writers such as Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison to the postmodern turn of the 1960s and 1970s but their own independent reworking of modernism overall. Readers of course will object to certain characterizations of particular works or the pigeonholing of certain thinkers. This is endemic to any attempt at classification. But the refusal to make categorical distinctions leads, borrowing from a famous phrase, to the night in which all cows are black. As we begin to answer difficult questions such as “who comes after the subject,” we might need to look backward to move forward.²⁷ Any post-postmodernist conceptualization of the self needs to recognize the social, political, and historical roots of this dilemma.

      PART I

      High Modernism in America

      Self and Society in the Early Cold War

      CHAPTER ONE

      Science, Postmodernity, and the Rise of High Modernism

      IN JULY 1945 Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, submitted a presidential report titled Science: The Endless Frontier in which he detailed a plan for federal support of scientific research in peacetime. With a certain utopian flourish, Bush argued that “advances in science, when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages past.”¹ Given the climate of a society transitioning to an uncertain peacetime order, Bush’s arguments for a permanent collaboration between universities, corporations, and the military to conduct basic and applied research found a receptive audience. The technological achievements made by civilian scientists working under the auspices of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the Manhattan Project had made federal officials very aware of the contributions to national strategic policy offered by scientific experts and generated considerable enthusiasm for extending large-scale, government-sponsored research into the postwar era, giving rise to what Alvin Weinberg, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, termed “big science.”² Indeed, by the end of hostilities with Japan, the “great science debate,” as Fortune magazine described, had begun.³ In obvious ways, the rise of Cold War tensions gave considerable urgency to the development of a working accommodation between scientists, military planners, and government officials, an accommodation that was formed through a series of protracted debates over the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950, over the shortage of scientific manpower that reached a crisis point during the Korean War, and over the challenges that Soviet advancements presented after the famous launching of a Russian satellite in 1957. James Conant, in his 1947 retirement speech as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, summed up conventional wisdom in claiming that “every industrialized nation is dependent on applied science for the continuing welfare of its economy and, alas, for the military security of its frontiers and cities.”⁴ This dependence, argued Conant, meant science “will play a determining role in the outcome of affairs.”

      With considerable speed, the scientific establishment was institutionalized nationally within the Department of Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.⁵ Various branches of the armed services, moreover, contributed funding for research into military equipment. For instance, the Office of Naval Research individually sponsored twelve hundred research projects at almost two hundred universities, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research supported university research into guided missiles and aviation devices.⁶ Programs across the country at places such as MIT and Stanford University were the beneficiaries of this funding, dramatically increasing research budgets. Besides their growing role as sites for scientific research, American universities also shouldered the burden of producing an adequate number of trained scientists and engineers, a responsibility that grew in importance as the Cold War lingered.⁷ Graduate fellowships in the physical sciences were funded by several federal agencies including the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Science Foundation as well as by many defense contractors including IBM, General Electric, DuPont, and Westinghouse. But the outbreak of the Korean War proved that the supply of scientific talent did not match demand. Both during and after hostilities, the Office