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䊏 143 䊏 CHAPTER SIX Modernity, Contingency, Compensation I n Consequences of Enlightenment Anthony Cascardi reexamines the relationship of the work of art to the society that produces it under the aegis of contemporary theory’s indebtedness to notions inherited from the Enlightenment. In particular, he addresses the difficulties and challenges of modernity understood “in the manner of Baudelaire, as having a fundamentally aesthetic and non-transcendent basis. Modernity names the epoch of the ‘transitory’ and the ‘fugitive’ (Baudelaire), of ‘revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, and impatiences’ (Barthes). It is the space of the politics of antagonism, of the unsuturable whole, of a fundamental contingency” (220). He goes on to clarify that, in this sense, “the ‘modern’ does not stand opposed to ‘ancient’” (220), but instead signals a rupture in the perception of the temporal, what we have seen in Habermas as an “exaltation of the present” and a consciousness of nothing beyond or behind the surface (including any measure of the historical). One is tempted to conjure up Benjamin’s Angel of History as our witness to the pile of rubble gathering at that point where the debris of the transitory and the fugitive accumulates: the “unsuturable” present. This image of “unsuturability ” and rupture has pervaded our discussion so far, be it in the aesthetics of the textual body (Benjamin’s convolutions and fragments) or in the echoes of voices and stories intermingling among sirens, noises, and other disembodied sounds of alarm. In addition, when we find no “oppositional ” configuration between ancient and modern, we articulate yet another juxtaposition of remnants, neither break nor new beginning but an overwhelming consciousness of time (as Habermas has stated). The lengthy nature of his works of fiction attests to García Ponce’s measure of time as ‘accumulation,’ not a coherent narrative reflective of, say, a national story on the order of the traditional nineteenth-century novel. By focusing on his later essays in Camera Lucida, Cascardi places Roland Barthes in line with Baudelaire through a consideration of the photographic image as an emblematic site of the modern. For Barthes the photo is both object and loss, a piece of paper that ages and fades as does the scene it reproduces ; neither original nor copy remain but as remnants if at all. Not a transcendent “communion with the dead” (Cascardi 220), Barthes finds in photography the ruin as Benjamin encounters it in the mineral images of Marseilles and the stones of the city streets and alleys of the French capital. The seemingly fixed image, for Barthes, becomes enigmatic for it encompasses both moving and static notions of time. It flourishes a moment, then ages. . . . Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away. Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should be itself immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal ) photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of ‘what has been,’ modern society has renounced the Monument. A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically. (Camera 93–94) Barthes’s investment of the photograph with the loss of permanence, the absence of the past, the image to be discarded as it fades and decays, imbues it with all of the attributes of the ruin. If what has been officially proclaimed as “History” or the official story (of a person, of a nation, of a community ) becomes in modernity “revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions” (Barthes, Camera 94), then can the Monument exist? How might a State, proclaiming itself modern at all costs, erect Monuments to its own contingency? The gap between the perception of continuity (of History, of the nation ) and sheer singularity or particularity evokes the space in which Garc ía Ponce and his generation found themselves after 1968 and into the difficult political climate of the 1970s and 1980s. Theirs is the point of intersection of two losses: the original object and the one that has kept it alive (even though now materially ceased and deceased) for a fleeting moment. When both the portrayed and the portrayal—the event or scene or personage , and the photo itself (that...

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