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Bruno
Latour, credits
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In his somewhat gloomy masterpiece on the history of modernist painting,
FAREWELL TO AN IDEA, T.J. Clark explains that the Modern is our
Antiquity: an epoch already so far away that it's difficult to recapture
how we felt when we were modern, when we were breaking courageously
with the past, when we were following avant-gardes, when we were
fighting against hordes of philistines and other reactionaries.
The adjective 'modern' — as in modern art, modern architecture
— has become so dated, that museums dedicated to contemporary
movements have slowly been overtaken by history and have now been
turned into repositories of the past. For instance, the Museum of
Modern Art in the Pompidou Centre in Paris is viewed more and more
as fulfilling the same duties for the 20th century as the Musée
d'Orsay does for the 19th, that is reminding visitors of a glory
long gone.
It is strange for people of my generation to feel the cold breeze
of history on our necks. Has history accelerated so much that we
should start building museums for the first decade of the 21st century?
Has the cult of the past degenerated to the point of entering the
moment of "instant antiquity"? Or is it still the modernist
obsession with the quick passage of time that is forcing us through
this planned obsolescence of styles and movements?
The perspective might change slightly if we accept the hypothesis,
that I made a few years ago, that “we have never been modern”.
Although modernism has been a powerful and efficacious interpretation
of the last three centuries, it cannot be taken at face value as
a description of what happened. If I am right, then there has always
been an official version of modernism and a more hidden one. For
instance, just at the time when Descartes devised the famous ‘ego
cogito’ (‘I think’), scientists invented the first
large-scale collaborative network consisting of laboratories, academies
and scholarly magazines. It’s just when the idea of an isolated
thinker becomes outdated that the greatest of them recreates the
whole world while isolated inside his Dutch stove. Similarly, just
when Kant imagined the Copernican Revolution through a world made
out of the categories of the Transcendental Ego, another Revolution,
the Industrial one, was subverting any clear distinction between
objects and subjects forever. Which layer of modernity should one
believe in then? The one that defines the isolated thinker or the
one that brings into existence the first European wide ‘collaboratory’?
Which track should we follow, the one that draws the categories
of the human mind or the one that traces the worldwide expansion
of Europe to the whole Earth? Between the two movements there exists
no obvious relation except that the first is a clear negation of
the second.
This uncertainty about two entirely opposite traits of modernism
can be seen at every point of the rather short modernist parenthesis.
As Adolf Max Vogt has shown in his fascinating book on the psychogenesis
of Le Corbusier, this arch modernist, this icon of modern architecture
was dreaming only of primitive huts built on wooden stakes like
those inhabited by the prehistoric people of Lake Neuchatel where
he had spent his youth. Primitivism, the obsession of breaking with
the past, the nostalgic appeal to historicisation are as much features
of modernism as its declared obsession for reason, calculation,
efficacy and factuality. As for Futurism, we know all too well how
much it was linked to the archaic return of the past.
It's probably because of this ambivalence that modernists were never
able to be, so to speak, contemporaries of themselves. They were
never quite sure what it meant to be ‘of their time’.
While Baudelaire invented the role of the modernist artist, he carefully
excised out of his translation of Edgar Allan Poe everything that
made Poe a true contemporary of science and technology. To be modern
is always to be out of place.
This is never clearer than in the theme of the revolution in science,
in politics, in technology and in art. The ambiguity is built into
the very etymology of the word ‘revolution’ that means
simultaneously more of the same and what should never be the same.
For centuries the word had designated the cyclical return of seasons
and political regimes or the circular movement of planetary bodies.
Only later, after scientists had used the word for their own scientific
revolution, did the word take the opposite meaning of a fresh break
with the past, the radical beginning from a clean tabula rasa. But
as Bernard Yack has so forcefully demonstrated, the word revolution
takes its most deadly meaning early in the 19th-century when thinkers,
disappointed by the French revolution, began to merge the religious
theme of conversion, apocalyptic dreams of regeneration, artistic
metaphors of recreation, and started talking about a new figure
of man. The question was no longer to just change political institutions,
it was now humanity itself in its basic components that had to be
recreated anew: from now on, no one should be content with less.
As Yack shows, this desperate hope for total regeneration led not
only to disappointment —humanity, not very surprisingly, kept
coming back to its usual self — but also to a debilitating
obsession for the attachments of the past that has become so typical
of modernism. The passion for being in the avant-garde is only the
flip side of another passion for not being contaminated by the stains
of a disgusting antiquity.
Once it’s recognised that we have never been modern, it may
become possible to imagine a solution to modernism and to take positively
the demise of the revolutionary theme. Instead of artificially prolonging
modernism by turning it into a topic for museums, instead of complaining
that young generations have abandoned the revolutionary urge of
their elders, it might be more rewarding to recognise modernism
for what it has always been: a juvenile and pathetic effort to deny
what it had been doing all over the world. Its dream of emancipation
has always been counteracted by an opposite movement of attachment.
Because it was turned so thoroughly toward the past with which it
wanted to break, it has run blindly through history, producing in
its wake very strange hybrids, mixing up all periods, confusing
all sort of epochs.
In writing FAREWELL TO AN IDEA, Clark has shown a great nostalgia
for the grandiose ideas of modernism. But another task remains possible:
artists, scientists, politicians and citizens could turn not towards
the past but towards the future, so that they become, at long last,
contemporaries of themselves and commit the sins of history with
their eyes wide open. Welcome to a new Idea: the future?
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Footnotes:
Clark, T. J. (1999). Farewell to
an Idea : Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven, Yale
University Press.
Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard
University Press. (Italian translation: Non Siamo Mai Stati Moderni,
Saggio du antropologia simmetrica, (traduit par Guido Lagormarsino)
Elèuthera, Milan)
Vogt, A. M. (1998). Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage. Toward an Archaeology
of Modernism. Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press.
Tresch, J. (2001). Mechanical Romanticism: Engineers of the Artificial
Paradise. PhD Thesis, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
University of Cambridge. Cambridge.
Rey, A. (1989). "Révolution" histoire d'un mot.
Paris, Gallimard.
Yack, B. (1992). The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources
of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche. Berkeley,
University of California Press.
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