1.1. The Idea of Modernism

 

According to Raymond Williams, before the Renaissance, the ‘modern’ began to be clarified when it was compared with the historical tradition, and this concept has become more prevalent since the Sixteenth Century. After that, in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, the ideas of modernism, modernist and modernity become more common. Meanwhile, the word ‘modernize’ was initially used in criticisms of architecture, language and fashions in the Eighteenth Century. He points out that ‘through C19 and very markedly in C20 there was a strong movement the other way, until modern became virtually equivalent to IMPROVED or satisfactory or efficient’ (Keywords 208) .

 

That is really a detailed explanation in history. However, according to Charles Jencks, modern time is normally considered to run from the middle of the Fifteenth Century to the middle of the Twentieth Century, and the conditions of modernity, modernization and cultural Modernism are three ‘forces’ of this innovation (11) . It is necessary to distinguish the three derivative ‘forces’ first. In Madan Sarup’s words, then, modernity started with the Renaissance and the woed is a ‘summary term’ which refers to the group of ‘social, economic and political systems brought into being in the West’ (130) ; ‘modernization’ is the term of social development which is ‘based upon industrialization’; and ‘modernism’ is a cultural form, which is mainly shown by artistic movements such as Joyce, Kafka, Eliot and Pound in literature, Cezanne, Picasso, the Expressionist and Surrealist movements in painting, and Schoenberg in music (131).

 

Just as the notions of modernity, modernism and modernization are interrelated and indivisible, all of them are linked and derived from the concept of modern. Therefore it is inconceivable to discuss each of them separately, and that is the reason all of them will be referred to collectively later. In fact, in theory, all those notions have already been bound together under the term modernism, and I understand ‘modern’ to be the basic foundation of it, ‘modernization’ as the social procession of it, and ‘modernity’ as its essential feature.

 

Though Jencks believes that the modern era started from the Fifteenth Century, most theorists think it started in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Jurgen Habermas, however, comments that these people are only focusing on avant-grade art. Habermas points out that the word modern originates from the Latin word ‘modernus’ , and by quoting from Hans Robert Jauss, he noted that it was first used in the late 1750s ‘to distinguish the present, which had become officially Christian, from the Roman and pagan past’ (98) . Habermas therefore argues that the modern system has continually represented the consciousness of each age to delimit itself from the past, so that it could be the consequence of an innovation ‘from the OLD to the NEW’ (98).

 

From this point of view, modernity is an idea which can potentially apply to any period, any historic or social transitions. For instance, Habermas points out that people always consider themselves being in a ‘modern’ age regardless of whether it was the ‘Charlemagne’ age or the ‘Enlightenment’, when Europe was moving into a rising epoch to renew or replace classical antiquity. That is to say, the word modern concerned here is not the modern in the ‘Nietzschean sense’ (Eagleton, Capitalism 388) , but a comprehensive renewable and open-ended conception, whereas Habermas believes modernity is an ongoing process, or in his words, ‘an unfinished project’. Therefore, the meaning of modern is not only something fashionable, advanced or neoteric (in some sense), but also progressive, refreshing, developmental, and even embracing every innovation of society.

 

This is the modernism and modernity of Habermas, and it is perhaps the general understanding that people used to hold. In this sense, ‘modern’ is probably not an idea, but an ideal. However, Eagleton represents another side of this view. ‘Modern,’ he sarcastically states, ‘is less a particular cultural practice or historical period…(or) an essentially timeless gesture…because it is no more than an atemporal force which gives the lie to all such linear categorization.’ (Capitalism 388) Eagleton’s idea was to disprove the concept of postmodernism put forward by Jameson, but it can also be used to analyze the limitations of Habermas to some extent. In the event that modernism means both modern and progressive as discussed before, then such ‘modernism can thus never really die’ because it always changes its appearance in the current era as ‘paralogical science’. Eagleton acutely points out that this idea is specious. That sort of modernism ‘can never be worsted’, he presses, because it never takes the contemporary position of its adversary, and so can never overcome this form. Moreover, Eagleton claims that ‘under the guise of a debate about history and modernity’, there ‘is nothing less than the dialectical relation of theory and practice’ (Capitalism 390).

 

Whereas the meanings of modern seem plural, Matei Calinescu discussed its different aspects in Five Faces of Modernity. He proposes modernity to have ‘five faces’, which are: modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch and postmodernism. Moreover, he precisely points out there are two significations of modernity: it is first the one which refers to the entire movement of Western civilization, and at the same time modernity is an absolute aesthetic concept beginning from the late Nineteenth Century. However, he emphasizes that the first modernity is the ‘bourgeois’ modernity, and the later one, which is the avant-grade modernity, is set against the bourgeois one (42) . That is to say, Calinescu considers two such ‘faces’ of modernity to be completely incompatible. This view seems more complex and will be discussed later.

 

Similarly, modernism has two senses. On the one hand, it means improvement, which relates to all recent social movements including those in political, economic and cultural areas. On the other hand, modern is principally an art style in the aesthetic sense, and this kind of modernism does only point to the avant-grade art, as Habermas said, at the beginning; but it has been developing and becoming the ‘daily life’ which exists everywhere.  Thus modernism has possibly become a magic idea meaning everything known and unknown, and ‘modern’ is perhaps becoming a current ‘myth’ in Barthes’ words. Consequently, after clarifying the meaning of modernism, it becomes possible to distinguish the ‘post’modernism from the modernism. Hence, let us step into the next section and explore the procession from modernism to postmodernism.