Welcome to an Idea?
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 Mus�e 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isolated thinker becomes outdated that the greatest of them recreates the whole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) El�uthera, 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). "R�volution" 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.
