Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (review)

Modernism and the Culture of Market Society begins by laying out its major premises. John Xiros Cooper has been deeply influenced by the social theorist Anthony Giddens, in particular his two books that came out in 1991, The Social Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-Identity : Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. In general, scholars of literary modernism have been slow to see the urgency of Giddens's work for rethinking the character of modernity, still enthralled by the Marxist tradition and especially by analyses of modernity that derive from the Frankfurt School, such as those of Benjamin and Kracauer. In that sense, Cooper's book marks a welcome step forward in current debate about modernism, though his approach to Giddens is not without problems:

Many people in developed societies now live their personal lives within paradigms first explored by early twentieth-century avant-garde artistic bohemias. This is not just a feeling on my part or a hunch; it is sociological fact. In Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), Anthony Giddens very clearly sets out the new patterns of interpersonal relations, constructions of the self, and other microstructures of every day life that characterize what he calls "the late modern age."

The claim "it is sociological fact" conceals several important difficulties, for it fails to acknowledge that Giddens is a theorist, not an empiricist, and that his accounts of late-modern social life are offered as theoretical speculations rather than straightforward descriptions. Moreover, Giddens doesn't say anything at all about "early twentieth-century avant-garde artistic bohemias." That is really Cooper's concern, which is being uneasily superimposed on, or fused with, Giddens's interests. It also fails to acknowledge that although Consequences of Modernity has been uniformly well received, Modernity and Self-Identity has had a more troubled reception for reasons which it would have been useful for Cooper to explore. Cooper, in short, is trying to adopt a somewhat cursory familiarity with recent social theory about late modernity and drape it over the much earlier phenomenon of literary modernism. Other contemporary thinkers with whom Giddens has been aligned in significant ways, such as the German sociologist Ulrich Beck and the British sociologist Scott Lash, never get mentioned. Instead Cooper turns to Lawrence Friedman's book, The Horizontal Society (1999), which argued that late twentieth-century modernity is best characterized by the metaphor of a horizontal society, a social structure in which relationships today are linked largely to persons similarly situated and identified through categories such as gender, ethnicity, or nationality, rather than the vertical structures built around family, extended kinship, and authority relationships that characterized earlier society.

In Cooper's view, the kinds of interpersonal and social structures outlined by Giddens, though ostensibly characteristic of the late modern age, are already "explored by" the modernists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Cooper remains perennially uncertain whether these structures are to be discerned in the actual doings of modernist communities (their modes of cultural production, their lifestyles?), in the texts that they produce (in their style and language?), or in the objects that they choose to depict (the cityscape, the psyche, etc.). Throughout the book he shifts from one to the other with disconcerting ease, and just as the finer distinctions of Giddens's theorizing are lost to view in a broad-brush treatment of "market culture," so the precise object of scrutiny within modernism becomes very hazy.

Cooper is not coy about his central thesis: "The modernist bohemias were the social places where an unrestrained market society first began to reveal itself in its most concrete social forms" (4). Or as he reformulates it a bit later in his introduction: "Capitalism, as it is embodied in market society, emerges from the same gene pool as modernism; they are, to repeat, one and the same" (23). This last comment leads into an odd, yet touching confession:

This has been a difficult idea for me personally to accept because of my own previous...