Bad Modernisms (review)

There are many kinds of badness in the world, and they run from genuine wickedness to indeliberate stupidity, from hypocrisy to the secret goodness of the radical misbehaver (everyone's favorite mode: Jesse James, James Dean, James Joyce, Storm Jameson). At various moments modernism and its avatars have been accused of each of these, and of course, modernism being a complex and capacious object (more than ever these days), each of these accusations has rung the tinny bell of truth. You could tell a story about modernism's critical fortunes that begins with the perception of a profoundly "good" badness (the disobedient laughter of dada, the formal disintegrations of the avant-garde) and ends, after the critical revisions of the 1980s that tied modernism to advertising, to empire, and to patriarchy, with a more ordinary, disappointing one. By story's end, editors Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz write in the introduction to Bad Modernisms, modernism was seen as something "not at war against but rather continuous with tradition," "bad" in ways that rather precisely reversed the previous impressions of its goodness (6). For some people, being "continuous with tradition" is "good," but of course this is one of the problems with the words "bad" and "good" in the first place, and why they appear so often in scare quotes. From a serious perspective (that is, a "good" one) the words are too fuzzy to do much work with: their syllabic simplicity feels childish. It is possible that the "bad" in the collection's title, then, implicitly criticizes the binary, moralistic habits that corset our thinking. As we shall see, the essays in the book bear that feeling out.

This collection of essays comes not to praise modernism's badness, thereby giving the dialectical piñata of the political aesthetic another desultory whack (in Christopher Bush's immortal phrase), but to suggest, in a variety of contexts ranging from the hypercanonical to the obscure, that a variety of modernism's "bad" habits or positions—either ones modernism itself denigrated, or ones denigrated in modernism—are absolutely caught up in what was "good" about it. Thus we learn from Sianne Ngai's essay on Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich that a mode of critical reading that attends mostly to plot elements in the film Blonde Venus—a mode, therefore, of total aformalistic "badness" whose lesson it was modernism's task to unteach—nonetheless opens up "unnoticed dimensions of the aesthetic object that suddenly rise to the foreground." This rising allows us to see old objects with fresh eyes and to recognize there, Ngai argues, "previously unsuspected examples of [modernist] making" that might return some of the lost suppleness of modernism's preferred aesthetic forms (173). Reading "badly," that is, makes visible aesthetic complexities that might otherwise have been missed. What results is an extension of modernism's very possibilities, one that depends on our ability to read more cleverly than we have until now those neglected "other" forms of literary and artistic production (including plot!) appearing alongside or even inside the modernist classics.

Ngai's project is the model of the collection more generally: each essay leaves its reader with new objects or new tools for the field. If a singular "modernism" can be said to emerge from the book, it is one that exists more in the form of an imaginative challenge and less as a list of authors or set of formal features defining the limits of a special class. It is unfinished, and it invites interpretive labor.

Hence Jesse Matz's essay, which begins by noting that no modernism "has gone bad worse than Impressionism" (300). The latter's beginnings in "subversive energy, all color and light" promised a revolution in critical vision. But by the end of the twentieth century, the story goes, impressionism was a desiccated, commercialized epitome of bourgeois culture, too busy authorizing "the total triumph of superficial form" and a "culture of distraction and fakery" to bother with afternoon sunlight or...