Late Modernism. Robert Genter

further from fulfillment today than they were even in the groping epochs when they were first formulated by humanists.”²² Reason, once seen as “a spiritual power living in each man,” had morphed into merely an instrument to calculate the production and distribution of goods, bereft of the power to reflect upon the human condition as such. Horkheimer presented both pragmatism and positivism, which he considered to be the foundations of American thought, as successors to eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy, which had jettisoned its speculative promises by redefining technological progress as progress as a whole. According to Horkheimer, science had become the new theology. Although priding themselves on their open-mindedness, pragmatists and positivists were unwilling to interrogate the foundations—logic, intuition, experimentation—upon which their scientific methods were based. Consequently, according to Horkheimer, the nation’s “official body of scientists” was “more independent of reason than the college of cardinals, since the latter must at least refer to the Gospels” (79). Monopolistic, dogmatic, and paradoxically uncritical, the modern scientist had paved the way for “an ever more rigid control in the institutions of an irrational world” (72), whether those institutions were part of a liberal society or a more authoritarian one.

      Dwight Macdonald, the native-born high modernist whose theoretical position most closely paralleled that of the Frankfurt school, offered a similar critique in his 1946 manifesto The Root Is Man. In fact, Macdonald himself admitted that his work had much in common with “that remarkable group of historians of culture centering around Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research.”²³ Macdonald’s goal in that work was twofold. First, in the wake of American atrocities committed during the war, he leveled a vicious critique of scientific rationality and its cultist adherents, blaming them for the recent barbarism. In language comparable to that of Horkheimer and Adorno, Macdonald argued that the scientific method lacked the capacity to make “a qualitative discrimination about something which is by its very nature not reducible to uniform and hence measurable units.”²⁴ Science was thus antithetical to morality. Second, he chastised contemporary radicals for failing to develop a political critique that did not partake of the language of historical progress or human engineering. Tying together the pragmatism of John Dewey, the scientific materialism of Marxism, and the reformist politics of the New Deal under the rubric of scientific optimism, Macdonald chastised supposed radicals for their faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class and for their naïve belief in the supposed laws of historical progress. He also criticized contemporary radicals—from Communists to New Dealers to Progressives—for believing that centralized state power and applied scientific rationality were tools of social change. After the destruction in Japan, Macdonald wrote in the pages of Politics that “it seems fitting that The Bomb was not developed by any of the totalitarian powers … but by the two ‘democracies,’” who continue to express “at least ideological respect to the humanitarian-democratic tradition.”²⁵ The way forward seemed no way at all.

      Macdonald was not the only American modernist to reach such conclusions. In many ways, his arguments in The Root Is Man were prefigured by the cultural criticism of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate (two of the early proponents of the form of textual analysis that became known as the New Criticism). Although both Ransom and Tate became influential literary critics, they began their careers through their association with the Fugitive group—a community of southern intellectuals who issued a series of proclamations throughout the 1930s lambasting industrialization, large-scale property holdings, and corporate control of the economy.²⁶ In particular, the Fugitive group, beginning with John Crowe Ransom’s The World’s Body (1938), criticized the growing dominance of scientific discourse in American life. According to Ransom and others, modern science had transformed curiosity into control, seeing the world as merely a collection of objects to be used and discarded and as reducible to a series of laws and measurements. Devoid of compassion, scientific rationality, as Ransom explained, had produced a “totalitarian state” in which its occupants were “not regarded as citizens,” were deprived of their “inalienable rights to activities of their own,” and were considered mere “functions” to the “effectiveness” of the state.²⁷ The goal of the New Criticism, as it developed as a form of literary practice, was to demonstrate that scientific discourse was not comprehensive of the whole range of cognitive possibilities. The language of science, according to Ransom, existed only on the level of symbols—words that operated in discourse as references to semantical objects. Such a use of language deprived “the world of actual objects” of any “qualitative density.” Such a language also became a technique for control, as instrumental engagement with the world and with others became the only mode of apprehension.

      The realization that scientific rationality had inexorably led to the gas chambers of Europe meant for many high modernists that the Enlightenment project, with its visions of inevitable progress, had been pregnant with barbarism from the start. The original project of modernity, as outlined in the late eighteenth century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, developed under the belief that the autonomous development of the separate fields of science, moral law, and aesthetics according to their individual logic was the key to the rational development and enrichment of everyday life.²⁸ Beginning with Immanuel Kant’s three critiques, in which the German thinker differentiated theoretical knowledge, practical reason, and aesthetic judgment, Enlightenment philosophers had gone to great lengths to liberate the critical rationality at play within each sphere from historical tradition and external authority. But as instrumental rationality gained primacy under the scientific-military alliance, high modernists argued that Enlightenment progress had turned into a nightmare. Vanquished from the public sphere, moral law and aesthetics seemed to have no place in a world run by scientists. Consequently, the characterization of the current situation as “post-modern” became commonplace.²⁹ Across academic disciplines, many intellectuals, even those uninterested in the project of high modernism, sensed that the project of modernity was over. In his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination, sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that Western society was “at the ending of what is called The Modern Age,” soon to be “succeeded by a post-modern period.”³⁰ According to Mills, “the ideological mark of The Fourth Epoch—that which sets it off from The Modern Age—is that the ideas of freedom and of reason have become moot; that increased rationality may not be assumed to make for increased freedom” (167). Management theorist Peter Drucker, in his own study of the early Cold War landscape, Landmarks of Tomorrow, also sensed a moment of passage. As Drucker explained, “we live in an age of transition, an age of overlap, in which the old ‘modern’ of yesterday no longer acts effectively but still provides means of expression, standards of expectations and tools of ordering, while the new, the ‘post-modern,’ still lacks definition, expression and tools but effectively controls our actions and their impact.”³¹ Similarly, in his 1957 introduction to Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, a collection of essays by a number of prominent postwar intellectuals, Bernard Rosenberg, too, invoked a sense of historical transformation: “In short, the postmodern world offers man everything or nothing. Any rational consideration of the probabilities leads to a fear that he will be overtaken by the social furies that already beset him.”³² For many, the promise of modernity appeared shattered.

      The only solution for high modernists was to accept the splintering of art from its entanglement with political, economic, and scientific fields. If the separate movements of high modernism in the 1940s and 1950s amounted to anything, it was the defense of the humanities as a corrective to modern science. Dwight Macdonald’s project, for instance, in The Root Is Man was to “define a sphere which is outside the reach of scientific investigation, and whose value judgments cannot be proved (though they can be demonstrated in appropriate and complete unscientific terms).”³³ For Macdonald, such a realm was “the traditional sphere of art and morality.” He was echoed by Theodor Adorno who noted that “with the objectification of the world in the course of progressive demythologization, art and science have separated.”³⁴ As such, aesthetics became for high modernists the only imaginable field through which the particular, the sensuous, and the contingent might be saved from the desiccated and desiccating methods of science and the only remaining habitat for intellectual engagement in which intuitions were not brutalized by concepts. The project of high modernism,