RE: Modernism and Its Endless Returns to the Source , was Re: ...

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

I don't want to get into a debate about the meaning of words, but the way I
see "modernism" is as follows. "Modernists" believe in "progress," where
things get better via the application of reason. "Traditionalists" or
"romantics" resist progress, often because they see the importance of the
"irrational" (i.e., tradition, religion, etc.) for social stability and the
like. (This is also known as Burkean conservatism.) "Postmodernists" on the
other hand, combine elements of modernism and traditionalism, while
rejecting notions of progress. Some postmodern views might be seen --
ironically -- as a form of modernism, if they purport to find or look for
the best combination of progress and tradition, reason and unreason.

To my mind, the most prevalent kind of "modernism" is just one kind of
ideology for capitalism (justifying the destructive creation inherent in
capitalism by reference to "progress" and "rationality") and traditionalism
is a function of those who benefit most from non-capitalist social
institutions (such as churches, patriarchy, ethnicities, nationalities,
rigid class hierarchies, etc.) that are threatened by capitalism's
destructive creation. In many cases, critiques of "modernism" are simply
superficial critiques of capitalism.

I'm not exactly sure what postmodern ideologies are a function of. Perhaps
they are products of academia. (The Taliban might be postmodern in terms of
its structure, but its ideology was clearly traditionalist. That they
harkened back to a tradition that hadn't existed before is standard with
traditionalists, since "tradition" has always been created and re-created.)

Confusing matters, there have been more than one kind of modernism. The old
Soviet Union preached the "better living through central planning and the
welfare state" version of progress. Social-democratic parties advocated
tempering capitalist progress, creating a better kind of capitalism and a
better kind of progress via technocratic expertise. Some working-class
movements also preached a more democratic kind of progress, from below,
rejecting the top-down bourgeois and technocratic modernisms.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

Carrol Cox wrote: >I'm not yet convinced that there is enough difference
between "modernism" (which in English Literature I date to the mid-17th
century) and "post-modernism" to justify the use in any sense of the latter
term. Fundamentalism is a modernist tendency -- one can see, for example,
close parallels between the manner of proceeding in Pound's _Cantos_ and
early 20th-century protestant fundamentalism. But as someone on the Milton
list pointed out to me off-list, ". . .did not the original Protestants use
this same process of "going back" to alleged ancient practices when they
broke from the Catholic Church?" The answer to that question is of course
yes; but Marx & Arendt both comment on how the 18th century revolutionaries
imagined themselves in classic Roman terms -- and Pound imitates that
imitation (e.g., in the title of his book from the '20s, _Jefferson and/or
Mussolinii_). Crudely put, modernism is a series of (illusory) returns to an
original purity of motive and of social relations.<