Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (review)

As Nieland presents the case, we have been told one of two stories about modernism: either heroic—turning on modernism's grand antagonism to reified public culture; or else disappointed and undeceived—bent on exposing the movement's seeming talent for self-promotion through the "manipulation of mass media" and "savvy management" techniques. Recent work with a bent toward cultural studies has for the most part aimed at the latter, wishing to prove, if not modernism's bad faith, at least its reliance on the very system it seeks to contest. Nieland concedes this much to the ironists and critics of modernism: members of the movement were driven by self-interest, often by a passion for self-legitimization, and they employed sometimes sensational stratagems to gain publicity, all of which embed them in the culture of which they were a part. But, says Nieland, in the first place, modernist attitudes to the public world were not uniform or monolithic. And in the second place, materialist accounts of modernism offer a limited framework for understanding "the experiential and affective registers of modern pub licness" (7)—meaning by this term both the expressions of fealty to public life, and the kind of public experience conjured and performed in the work itself. Indeed Nieland's preference for the term "publicness," which he offers over the more accepted but limited concepts of public sphere or publicity business, conveys something of the book's sweeping direction. He does not want to limit talk to the "defrocked Habermasian ideal of a universal political subject" (6) or the glib, instrumental campaign gimmicks for acquiring notoriety in industrial-commercial culture. Feeling Modern is about something larger. He calls it a tentative phenomenology of the public world—though he doesn't presume that this world can ever be entirely established or settled. His book, quite wonderfully, is about the eccentric feelings and passions brought into play in the movement's "public work," and the means of discovering and creating new publics.

Nieland's book stands as one of the best recent efforts to explore in detail modernism's encounters with public life in the early half of the twentieth century. He captures the nuance and complexity of attitudes too often read as hectoring dismissals of public feeling or strident expressions of contempt. The figures he chooses to focus on are variously located in commercial and avant-garde culture. Charlie Chaplin, one of the most famous celebrity successes of the period—and a prototypical public personality—shares page space with Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet innovator of montage, and impoverished recluse Joseph Cornell, a New York filmmaker and visual artist best known for his assemblages. The book spans a range of media, including painter Marsden Hartley, and a slew of writers: Wyndham Lewis, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, and even the largely ignored E. E. Cummings. What unites each of these figures, besides an intricate and ambivalent relationship to public culture, is their fascination with "variety" entertainment—the clowns, vaudes, burlesque performers, mimes, circus freaks, acrobats, comedians, and music-hall singers who, one way or the other, traffic in absorbing dreams of public intimacy and personal self-possession. He chooses outlying modernists, not, I think, because any number of other notables of the period wouldn't do for his argument. The figures he selects, however, offer a more arresting case precisely because their work and their temperaments made it comparatively harder for them to find a natural audience or resolved public of devotees (Chaplin being the exception that proves the rule).

Interest in popular theatrical spaces, Nieland thinks, affords an opportunity for gauging modernist sentiment about public life. What emerges in the course of his argument is that these somewhat anachronistic amusements enable contrary fantasies about modern life. They flaunt the possibility of unpredictable emotional responses and unconventional forms of sympathy with popular, or "mass," culture. But they also give rise to suspicions about the mechanical or staged nature of the responses they...