Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (review)

It seems to be a while now since anyone took at face value Theodor Adorno's claim that the difficulties of modernist style were a mode of defense against the insidious "culinary" forces of commodification. We have increasingly come to believe that the "great divide" between modernism and mass culture was really more like the gap between two different shelves in a niche market. In Modernism and the Culture of Market Society John Xiros Cooper inflicts further damage on the already battered halo of modernism by arguing that the enclaves of modernism were the places in which the "culture peculiar to market society" (4) first took root. While the bohemian circles in which the modernist avant garde developed may have genuinely believed in their hostility to the values of the market, Cooper argues that by a nice historical irony they turned out to be the trail-blazers of those values, the early adopters. Thus the interest in self-fashioning, the relentless focus on the inter-personal, the belief in the fluidity of gender, and even that idea of the community of the like-minded that sustained the avant-garde, all return—after shedding some unsightly intellectual weight—as the popular values of late capitalism; if you like, as postmodernism. To use some of his own examples, not only can we trace a direct line of descent from the sociality of the Bloomsbury group to the group domesticity of Friends, but the modernist catch-cry of "make it new" also returns in such management-handbook imperatives as "think outside the box." But Cooper is not arguing that modernism was simply swallowed up by a consumer capitalism that is always on the look-out for new material; on the contrary, "capitalism, as it is embodied in market society, emerges from the same gene pool as modernism" (23). The avant-garde, then, were among the first to register that the values of the past had been rendered obsolete by industrial capitalism, and were quick to grasp at the personal and aesthetic freedom that this process offered. Their oppositional practices, though, would come to provide the basis of our own consumer lifestyle-driven culture, and even our business models.

As a book, this is much more focused on the modernist past than on the postmodern present, apart from a few anecdotal asides about TV—the reference to Sex in the City (22), rather than Sex and the City, is perhaps telling—and after a few short introductory chapters Modernism and the Culture of Market Society examines some fairly familiar texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapters 5 to 8 thus look at a range of modernist "precursors," including Marx, Flaubert, Emily Brontë, and Lewis Carroll. Readers will be reminded of the nineteenth-century modernists singled out in Marshall Berman's rather different account of modernism and modernization, All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982), a book that Cooper cites with approval, while warning us of Berman's "credulous optimism" (39). The readings here are impressive, particularly those of Flaubert and Brontë. Sentimental Education (1869) emerges as a sort of anti-Bildungsroman, one which shows realism's incapacity to capture the kaleidoscopic aspect of identity in Paris as capital of the nineteenth century. The isolated setting of Wuthering Heights (1847), by contrast, is seen as the laboratory in which Brontë cooks up a new kind of autonomous inter-personal intimacy, the highly-charged "pure relationship" (a term Cooper borrows from the sociology of Anthony Giddens) between Catherine and Heathcliff.

The final cluster of chapters (9–12) turns to the full-blown twentieth-century modernism of Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, Stein, Barnes, and the Bloomsbury circle. There are some tour-de-force readings here too that show Cooper at more pains than Berman to pinpoint the stylistic changes between the nineteenth-century precursors and the high modernists. There is an exemplary comparison of Dickens' account of the train in Dombey and Son and Joyce's Proteus chapter that builds...