A "Tangled History": Modernism in Europe and the United States

Dorothy Ross and her companions in this volume question the conventional separation of modernism into scientistic and artistic enterprises. They join contemporary efforts to reconnect European and American history by looking for links between cognitive modernism in the emerging disciplines called by Michel Foucault the “human sciences” — here physics, history, sociology, economics, psychology, biology — and aesthetic modernism in the arts, including literary criticism. Within the dynamic transatlantic culture of modernism, Ross notes, all participants moved toward greater subjectivity, but that move “was modulated in the human sciences committed to scientific rationality and progress, more thoroughgoing in the realm of aesthetic creation and criticism” (pp. 8–9).

But postmodernism casts the shadow which motivates writers in this stimulating collection. Reminding us that, while some postmodernists “define themselves against modernism,... others see themselves as bringing central modernist impulses to fruition” (p. 9), Ross’s introduction focuses, like Alan Megill’s Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (1985), on the tendency among postmodernists to make language the only possibility for creating self and culture. Postmodern linguistic theory melts the fence between science and art and makes them both into “interpretative languages.” Whereas modernists attempted to achieve “a tense balance between order and fragmentation,” postmodernists have embraced uncertainty, tolerating and sometimes welcoming “‘a world seen as random and multiple, even at times absurd”’ (Megill, cited by Ross, p. 11). Presenting a “tangled history,” the authors of these essays seek “to uncover the ground on which the competing discourses of modern culture continue to struggle” (p. 25).

David Hollinger offers for the third time his witty and engaging piece, “The Knower and the Artificer,” and addresses postmodernism in a lengthy postscript written in 1993. ¹ Musing on imprecise use of the terms, “modernism,” “modern themes,” “modernist impulse,” Hollinger suggested in 1986 that we might designate as “modernists” all, including scientists, social scientists and artists, “who have seen through an innocent Victorian world to confront by one strategy or another the more complicated and recalcitrant world we call modern” (p. 27). Hollinger invited intellectual historians to join him in “debohemianizing modernism” by focusing on the ways that seemingly incompatible scientists and artists faced the same issues and, in different modes, created meaning out of modernity. He presented us with two “ideal types.” Heroic artists, building on romantic traditions of the nineteenth century and employing “strategies of artifice,” became Artificers, as they sought to “make meanings anew out of the resources of the self.” The other sort of modernist, Knowers, continued to try “to organize culture around science” by using “strategies of reference.” Knowers, Hollinger argued, strove “to assign meanings cognitively, by finding out what is the case,” while Artificers performed this feat “through the creation of myths” (pp. 28–29). Ten years ago, Hollinger hoped that intellectual historians might agree to view “‘modernism’ as a persuasion embracing both [strategies], rent by a tension between the Knower and the Artificer, yet defined by something else” (p. 40).

Hollinger’s postscript addresses the fate of his attempt to reform the language of scholarly discourse as that world has filled with postmodernist super-Artificers. Appropriating modernist unorthodoxy for themselves, these critics now blame canonical, aesthetic modernists for the creation of a corrupt, elitist, repressive orthodoxy. Meanwhile, cognitive modernism has been overwhelmingly identified with “the scientific enthusiasms of Descartes, Kant, and the multitude of rationalists, realists, positivists, objectivists, and social engineers of the nineteenth century” (p. 46). ² Hollinger regrets that his Knowers and Artificers, many of them balanced between hope for certainty and certain irrationality, have been replaced in current debates by a “protohistoriography” of modernism, a “hermeneutic imperialism” (p. 50) that blots out the period under discussion in this anthology in favor of “a stark confrontation between a more radical aestheticism — postmodernism — and a more rigidly rationalist and objectivist Enlightenment” (p. 49). He reasserts the usefulness of “the concept of cognitivism” within present discourse. Unlike “modernism” and “postmodernism,” “cognitivism” carries no...