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29 CHAPTER THREE Strangerhood In my call for existential learning, I broached the possibility of moving from an experience of a problematic situation to that of questionable existence. Instead of immediately trying to solve the problem, one would pause to see in it a reflection of the questionable nature of everything that is. The problem would thus serve as an occasion to return to an experience in which, I suggest, one is most authentically oneself: a being aware of its existence. Now such awareness is apt to sound laughably trivial—when one forgets how deeply in question this awareness leaves one. It also sounds like a contemplative indulgence next to the pressure to come up with solutions. To help someone engage in existential learning, then, we would need to draw that person back to this experience of existence in a way that overcomes resistance to its vertiginous skepticism and patent impracticality. Modernist works are tailor-made to do just this. In this chapter, I want to focus on how such works suspend practical concerns, to a degree, by compelling us with the force of a kind of necessity. (Chapter 4 will take up the issue of skepticism.) They insist on the priority of existence. How? The answer lies in Greenberg’s account of the modernist medium, and particularly in Clark’s revision of that account. Clark argues that modernist works expose the medium to scrutiny by negating certain of its traditional features; this action reflects the absence of an audience for the work. I agree with this interpretation as far as it goes, but I want to claim that something else gets represented by this act of negation as well, as if in setting out to register a cultural predicament these artists stumbled on our existential one. To explain this, I shall develop an analogy between Clark’s theory of the medium and Sartre’s of consciousness . The modernist medium, marked by negation, like our consciousness in general, generated by “nihilation,” discloses the inescapably questionable scene of existential learning. The medium is thus no longer an object of simply formalist interest, marveling at the composition of its elements. It conveys a philosophical anthropology, an understanding of what sort of beings we fundamentally are. From whatever world may be positively represented as the 30 Mediumism subject matter of modernist works of art and literature, the medium brings us home to our strangerhood. MEDIUM AND NEGATION Clark’s history of the origins of modernism, which I summarized in chapter 1, recounts how the traditional high culture of the West was increasingly abandoned by the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. In consequence, this meant that although the former’s artworks and literary works endured, and like ones continued to be created, they were no longer so distinguishable from works of decoration, propaganda, or entertainment. Ancient and medieval styles of kitsch made a killing, as academic formulas lent themselves to mechanical reproduction. Reacting to this, modernists put forward an art that would renounce commercially and ideologically exploitable effects. They wanted to preserve traditional, challenging, aesthetic value in forms that would stay at least a step ahead of their flattering simulations. We left the story at the point, as Clark indicated, where the most promising strategy for accomplishing this, according to Greenberg, appeared to be that of stressing the artwork’s medium. “In turning his attention away from subject-matter or common experience, the [modernist] poet or artist turns it upon the medium of his own craft.”1 The foregoing starts to account for why this takes place, but what exactly does this turn entail? Clearly, Greenberg in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” has in mind a particular kind of artistic and literary approach. The non-representational or “abstract,” if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once the world of common, extraverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject matter of art and literature. If, to continue with Aristotle, all art and literature are imitation, then what we have here is the imitation of imitating.2 Previously, the features of Western art were evidently necessitated, ruled, by the project of representing and communicating familiar subject matter. We all know what it means to call a sculpture “lifelike” or a novel “naturalistic.” Abstraction, in contrast...

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