Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde (review)

This is a consistently, often astonishingly, interesting book, albeit one somewhat obscured in its title. Without question Comentale analyzes the aesthetics and politics of cultural production as therein framed, but then so do Bill Brown, Douglas Mao, Jennifer Wicke, Andrew Hewitt, Miriam Hansen, John Frow, right down to Peter Bürger and Renato Poggioli. For all the shared cloth, its particular payoff is far more sartorially drawn than the title seems to suggest. One of its most engaging qualities in fact is a glimpse of modernist studies written as if critical intercessions arrived not prêt-a-porter—the form of criticism by turns indifferent, incidental, and self-indulgent—but properly tailored to matter at hand. At his best—discussing F. T. Marinetti's separate peace with Bloomsbury and a useless English liberalism, reappraising the centrality of an "integral and progressive" T. E. Hulme, analyzing the production of modern affect during World War I by way of Wilfred Owen, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and "the bone and fat bucket" civilians were enjoined to keep filled on the home front, and recovering the modernist dimensions of suffragette classicist Jane Ellen Harrison placed ply-on-ply with the more familiar classicism of H. D.—Comentale models a kind of risk-taking thinking and writing about challenging textual, historical, and theoretical materials that is reliably lucid and helpful (117). He could well have found other ways to some of his concerns (like the communally coherent death or the appearance of the one against the multiple via the likes of such timely thinkers as Giorgio Agamben or Alain Badiou), but that the scenery-chomping transit to these and other destinations comes through hefty, slightly unorthodox, readings of Freud and Marx, paired with Adorno and Merleau-Ponty, I find thoroughly agreeable.

If five-term titles were de rigueur, the following two could be helpfully appended here: the classical and the economic. Not the modernist classic (see Frank Kermode and others), nor modernism and classical economics (for which a comprehensive book remains to be written), Comentale's book concerns instead the role of the classical—against the romantic—as a descriptive modality in modernist idiom and as a prescriptive, potentially recuperative avant-garde practice (22). He defines this term, borrowing a phrase from Eileen Gregory, as "an energized discursive field," and the containment of productive energy—potential, as it were, not kinetic—is the order of the day. The classical, he writes

bears the traces of its creation, the artistic struggle or agon, and thus regrounds idealism within its particular socio-historical context. The work, in fact, expresses as it reinforces these worldly tensions; its static presence serves to halt, clarify, and possibly redirect the violent production (and reproduction) of the modern world. It serves to expose the human presence behind the alienated object or the reified relation, and thus to reopen the latter back into history. Ultimately, the work figures as both the culmination and antithesis of its productive moment, as both a rigid monument and ultimate negation of modernity's terrifying order.

(8)

A table provided illustrates that the classical almost always offers the possibility of a shared singular (a "compossible," to use a Badiouian word Comentale does not) against the romantic's multiples: "if romantic modernism privileges the symbolic over and against the material world, classical modernism confounds that binary as it depicts the body as the site of both signification and labor" (20). For the romantic, force and form; for the classical, tension. The former, idea and thing; the latter, embodied consciousness. The former, nature and technology; the latter, second nature. The former, masculine and feminine; the latter, hermaphroditic intercourse. And, fifteen more. It should be clear by now that gender and sexual difference—and feminism, more to the point—have a somewhat vexed relation in and through the schematic, but it is to be also noted that Comentale does not make a blind-spot of these issues, engaging as he does in a careful and...