Modernity Must Advertise: Aura, Desire, and Decolonization in Joyce

This essay’s largest claim is for the complex integration of mass culture with modernism, where neither partner in the dialectical relationship is reduced to a monolithic opposite or “other.” Arguing that mass culture and media across disparate forms intertwine with modernist literature as with all the cultural practices and modes of modernity, it advances the notion that the “great divide” posited between a supposedly “high” or autonomous literature and its shadow partner, mass culture, breaks down when the dynamic of modernity is recognized as an immanently mass-cultural one. The essay’s title, “modernity must advertise,” signals in its play on words just how intimate and how inevitable the pairing must be. Advertising stands in for mass culture as its synecdoche and calling card; a symbolic currency circulated through culture by all the means available to mass media, advertising’s circuit announces itself—the word “advertisement” originates in “avertissement” or “announcement”—through aesthetic forms shared with literature and visual art. James Joyce’s Ulysses is not only the specimen case of this dialectic informing modernism, but also its singular messenger: the book’s revolutionary aesthetic emerges from that nexus. While Joyce laces his book with mass-cultural references from Tit Bits to popular songs and posters, just as he installs Leopold Bloom in a career as an advertising middleman, mass culture inscribes Ulysses far beyond surface references or mere context. Instead, mass culture and its modes of consumption are enlisted as the engines of transformation in a revolutionary transubstantiation of modern language, thought, and life, the active manifestation of a modernist commons. Ulysses allows us to see the politics of its novel aesthetic form as a luminous advertisement for an alternative modernity performed by its words, one with the power to posit a new world as it unmakes the present world. Joyce’s epic novel makes manifest, or announces, what its literary work or labor performs through the ineluctable dynamic of social reading it borrows from mass culture in all its myriad forms: the advertisement of a modernity that inheres in and is inseparable from the act, and the agency, of reading—an advertisement for a future brought into being by its readers.