Late Modernism. Robert Genter

might mitigate the overbearing tendencies of modern life.

      The Autonomy of the Aesthetic

      To begin, high modernists charted the historical progression of art from its ritualistic uses to its isolation within a separate sphere of development at the end of modernity. Following in the footsteps of his friend Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, for instance, noted the historical disintegration of the cultic function of art, which had once linked artistic production to the needs of religious and cultural institutions.³⁵ But after the subsequent revolutions in nineteenth-century Europe had severed the connection between artists and their courtly patrons and with “the authority of everything traditional irretrievably lost,” artistic production became implicated with the rising bourgeois market society.³⁶ Freed from the bondage of church and state patrons but lacking monetary support, artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were forced to align with the bourgeoisie and produce artworks for commodity circulation. Whereas premodern art had participated in religious and political life, modern art, in contrast, was a product of capitalist relations, which, having reduced all production to utility and exchange, had allowed aesthetics to develop autonomously. As Adorno explained, even though it railed against capitalist expansion, modern art “[owed] the historical unfolding of its productive forces” to “the advances of a civilizing rationality” (147). For the first time, artists were free to experiment with the formal properties of their respective mediums, a move evident in the litany of artistic styles in literature and painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the problem for modern artists was to defend their newly won autonomy from their bourgeois consumers who often appropriated modern art for their own ideological commitments. Having experienced the power of the New York art market to determine not only the success of particular artists but also the development of specific artistic movements, Clement Greenberg, for instance, was very cognizant of the “umbilical cord of gold” that attached the avant-garde to the financial support of the “elite.”³⁷ This defense of art as a singular discipline was a daunting proposition under such conditions.

      Paradoxically, then, aesthetics became an autonomous discipline only when artworks became commodities, that is, only when market forces freed cultural production from serving any other purpose except exchange value. Socially, an artwork became autonomous by remaining “derivative, a mere agent of the law of value,” forever tied in bad faith with “economic considerations.”³⁸ Equally problematic was the recognition that the materials, designs, and schemas used by modern artists were contaminated by the historical context from which they were appropriated. Clement Greenberg, for example, connected the origins of Cubism not merely to the unresolved problems in Cezanne’s picture planes but also to the “scientific outlook” of “the highest stage of industrial capitalism.”³⁹ Consequently, “art’s shame,” as Adorno stated, was its closeness to “the existing pattern of material production” from which it tried to distinguish itself.⁴⁰ But since artworks now received their importance in relation to their exchange value because they had been freed from any overarching political, moral, or epistemic purpose, aesthetics was now ironically provided with a ready-made defense against any utilitarian subsumption. Modern artists did not have to provide any justification for the character of their works except through reference to the formal properties of their respective mediums. As pure, self-referential objects deprived of any standardized purpose, artworks retained an intrinsic autonomy through the unique organization of their materials and elements. “The more heavily the situation weighs upon it,” Adorno explained, “the more firmly the work resists it by refusing to submit to anything heteronomous and constituting itself solely in accordance with its own laws.”⁴¹ This notion of form as the key marker of high modernist aesthetics was most fully developed in the literary practices of the New Critics. Reacting to the trends prevalent in American criticism throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, New Critics such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Cleanth Brooks went to great lengths to defend the aesthetic work as a unique source of meaning that was irreducible to historical, biographical, moral, or psychological explanations.⁴² Calling for close readings and textual analysis to protect art from both propagandists and complacent readers, the New Critics argued that the modernist poem had no meaning or purpose extrinsic to its formal structure or to the poetic techniques with which it was constructed. In this way, aesthetics was safeguarded within its own space of development.

      Officially announcing this new school of analysis in his 1941 book The New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom defined the poetic object as a unified structure of various elements, often contradictory and conflicting, held together by certain literary devices. Weaving together words, images, symbols, feelings, and rhythms into the “complex of meaning” that constituted the poem as a whole, the modernist poet attended to the “heterogeneity” of his elements while maintaining an overall “principle of assembly.”⁴³ The New Critic who most thoroughly outlined the formal properties of modernist poetry was Cleanth Brooks, whose Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn (1947) marked the theoretical culmination of the project begun by Tate and Ransom. Envisioning the modern poem as an unforced balancing of discordant attitudes and feelings such as pity and laughter, tenderness and frustration, and love and intellect, Brooks examined the use of four essential elements—paradox, wit, irony, and metaphor—that constituted the modernist poem. Paradox, for Brooks, was the juxtaposition of incongruous views in a given situation, such as the modernist refusal to suppress poetic references to the Christian in the celebration of the pagan. Similarly, wit was the ability to attend to the nuances of language, in particular, the refusal to privilege the denotative or dictionary meaning of words over the countless connotative meanings that might arise within the context of the poem itself. Irony was used, like wit, to temper or qualify a particular statement by offering a “reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities.”⁴⁴ The form most appropriate for these expressions of wit, paradox, and irony was of course metaphor, arguably the most important term for the New Critics. Given the poet’s unwillingness to sacrifice the complexity of experience in the name of direct expression, metaphorical comparisons allowed for subtle shifts in tone, paradoxical attitudes, and pointed suggestions. As a structural component, metaphor also provided the context within which divergent images, words, and ideas gained meaning. Consequently, as Brooks argued, “comparison is the poem in a structural sense” (15). In this way, the form of the poem was not something that merely contained the poem’s content; form was inseparable from the content by virtue of the subtle unity achieved. Therefore, since its meaning was not dependent upon any mimetic relation to the external world, the poem was the site of a distinct experience, wholly determined by the inner dialectic of its elements. Poetry, then, was similar to painting as “a pattern of resolved stresses,” that is, as an ever-evolving matrix of “resolutions and balances and harmonizations” that submitted to no extrinsic standard or preconceived system (203).

      Cleanth Brooks’s reference to modernist painting marked the similarity between the formalism of the New Critics and the defense of abstract art offered by high modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg.⁴⁵ Modernism, for both Greenberg and Brooks, meant purity, self-definition, and self-criticism, that is, the willingness “to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art.”⁴⁶ In an endless series of reviews throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the famed New York art critic famously outlined the basics of abstract painting—its all-over composition, its flatness, and its optical effect—that marked its autonomy. Equally worried about the gross assimilation of art for political or entertainment purposes, Greenberg outlined the means by which modern artists assured “that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.” This involved a “radical reduction” of the medium itself.⁴⁷ Most important, abstract artists, according to Greenberg, had correctly jettisoned the imperative to represent external reality, an imperative that had once forced them to create “the illusion of a boxlike cavity” on their canvas to maintain the sense of three-dimensional space. But by preserving the “integrity of the picture plane,” modern painters gradually sacrificed “verisimilitude” for the relentless experimentation with the effects of paint on the canvas. By abandoning representation and turning to abstraction as a guiding principle,