Modernity, Now What? (part three)
Dialectics - Modern Progress, Revolutionary Critique, & Pop - have we always been Postmodern?
Part Three — Dialectics: Modern Progress, Revolutionary Critique, & Pop - have we always been Postmodern?
The question of Modernity and our place in Modernity becomes confused by way of history, our disconnection from our own history in the “West,” and our lack of knowing (let alone even understanding) the history of the “East,” or the Global South. Regarding “modernity” we are faced with an inability to properly relate to the world of the 18th and 19th centuries, when the Modern world became codified and the reaction against Enlightenment thinking, Urbanization, Industrialization, and vast income inequality which only become worse during the years prior to WWI, “La Belle Époque” and the “Guilded Age” in the US. Questions as to whether we are Postmodern come about by way of the linear fragmentation of history, and generational posturing; seeking to see ones own time as somehow more evolved than, or not connected to, the past which is seen as abhorrent. In the end we are not just still Modern we are Hypermodern, and notions of a Post-Modernity fail to see the Dialectical relationship between the Modernity of Progress, and the Critique of that position (postmodernism); or failing to see the Modern as Imperial High Culture of Progress and an endless stream of “the New” which comes with that; there is no one Modernity, just as there is no one Critique of it.
So, how did we get here?
Imperial Modernity in the East and West had similarities but they also had different time lines. The fall of the Roman Empire would throw Europe into a 1000 years of turmoil and the loss of much of the Roman infrastructure and technological advances that had developed while China would continue developing an advanced society during the Song Dynasty. With India, while it had a long history it also was split into many warring kingdoms like Europe and Japan. For the Muslim world and eventually the Ottoman Empire, the post Roman world was one of expansion and development. The largest difference for these Empires would be the staggering success and development of the Song Dynasty, of the 10th to 13th centuries, who’s 4 Great Inventions would transform the world. This era in China was pre or proto Modern 500 years before the European Enlightenment.
Despite their regional and cultural differences all of these Imperial powers had to contend with: plagues, famines, religious strife, industrialization, urbanization and urban squalor, territorial expansion, trade, pirating, taxation, and an increasing disquiet in the growing Middle Class with intransigent Bureaucracies and over spending of the Aristocracies. In the centuries leading up to 1789, the world would face multiple major transformations and trauma do to these various issues.
From 1347 to 1351 the Black Death (bubonic plague) killed 30 to 60% of the population of Europe, with similar numbers across Asia and North Africa. It would not be until 1500 that Europe’s population would return to its previous levels. And between 1300 and 1850 the Little Ice Age reduced crops around the world with many famines occurring.
From 1206 to 1368 the Mongol Empire would be another great destructive force across Eurasia invading the Kieven Rus in 1240 and conquering the Song Empire of China by 1279. Imperial Russia grew out of the Grand Duchey of Moscow following the decline of the Golden Horde in 1502, fully colonizing the vast expanse between Europe and Mongolia, China, and the Pacific ocean by 1689.
The colonization of the Americas would transform both continents through the spread of Smallpox, killing possibly 95% of the population. This would culminate in the rise of the United States of America, in 1776, and the Genocide of the Indian tribes in the 19th century (American Indian Wars).
Islamic North Africa would see the African slave trade develop beginning in the 8th century (and include the enslaving of entire Mediterranean islands). Up to 7.2 million slaves were transported in the (Muslim) Trans-Saharan slave trade, 12.8 million in the (Christian) Atlantic slave trade, and up to 8 million in the Indian Ocean slave trade.
Both Islam and Christian dogma of Universalism and Divine mandate would lead to religious wars of conquest. Muslims spreading across Africa and South Asia, and Christians spreading West across the Americas and the Pacific.
At the beginning of the Modern Era the Ottoman Empire would be at its height, in power, cultural, and scientific development. Between 1366 and 1718 the Ottoman wars in Europe would see the capture of Macedonia, Bulgaria, the Balkans, Moldavia, in 1453 the Byzantine Empire would fall, and in 1526 Suleiman the Magnificent would defeat the Hungarian armies and capturing the city of Buda. The Ottoman push into Europe would reach its greatest extent with the capture of Cyprus (1573), parts of Ukraine, and Crimea until its final defeat in the siege of Vienna of 1683, and the eventual loss of Hungary in 1699 with the Treaty of Karlowitz. Wars with Venice would continue until 1717, and with Russia until 1792 after which the 19th century would see wars of independence leading up to WWI and the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
The rise of these institutions and the Enlightenment would be powered by the Gentry and Middle Class whose riches and power were increasing as stability and commerce increased. In 1642 it would be the Gentry of the English Parliament who would rise up against the out of control spending, and disregard for Parliament (first by King James I and later his son) by Charles I, leading to the English Civil War and from this the strengthening of the power of Parlaiment.
The fall of the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty of China would see the 2nd Golden Age of China with the Ming Dynasty and see the spread of the Four Great Inventions of China (gun powder, the compass, paper, and movable type printing) to Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. It would not be until 1600 that Europe would surpass China in scholarship and technology. The limited maritime capacity of European nations China, Japan, and India would remain largely isolated from any military threat from the West until the late 18th century. While Japan would isolate itself following an initial incursion of Christianity and traders, both China and India (under Mughal rule) would be the dominant economic powers until the 19th century.
In Asia the beginning of European rule and colonization would commence with the de-industrialized of Dhaka and West Bengal, following their defeat by the British East India Company at the battle of Plassey in 1757. The 19th century would see the fall of India to Britain, the economic hegemony of China, and the forced opening of Japan in 1854 leading to its military development and the rise of Japan as a Colonial Empire challenging China, its neighbors, and the West. But it would be 100 years of British Hegemony and the transfer of vast amounts of wealth from Asia to Europe.
(The Empire of the Great Qing, Imperial Japan, the Sublime State of Persia, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Austria Empire, the Kingdom of France, the British Commonwealth, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire, and the United States of America.)
The Imperial World Order of 1789, (East and the West), had experienced several hundred years of increased prosperity, urbanization, technological development - what might be called Progress - and the development of Imperial culture and the arts; it was very different for the peasants and poor everywhere. For the poor it was a world of an endless series of wars, disease, genocide, racism, slavery, sexism, raping and pillaging, industrialization, the deprivations of urban squalor, the hierarchies of domination, the police state, capital punishment, prisons, inequality and hunger while the Gilded Elite live in luxury. The Rich were living on the backs of the Poor.
In short, it was everything an outsider to power and prosperity might think to Revolt against, and they did. The next 200 years would be filled with revolt against Imperial and Colonial rule, as well as against the industrial system, police state, and the cultural practices of white European Patriarchy.
Revolution and the fall of the Ancient Regime & Imperialism
— Third, the order of (Classical) Modernity (19th to mid 20th c.) with expanded colonization by Europe into Asia and Africa, the urbanization of the Americas and other former Colonies, the rise of Colonial Japan, the rise of the United States of America and Manifest Destiny, and increasing technology development - commercialization, programming, electricity, photography, communication systems, machinery, and air travel.
The (Colonial) American Revolution - Following the passage of the Stamp Act of 1765 would see the protest of the Colonial Assemblies against the British Parliaments attempt to bring the colonies under more direct control, and the levying of taxes without Colonial representation. This would lead to formation of the Continental Congress in 1774, and the outbreak of war in 1775. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence would be unanimously signed by Congress, with the War being ended with the Treaty of Paris (1783).
The French Revolution - In France, 147 years after the English Civil War, it would be this same out of control spending by the Crown that would see the Estates General called up in 1787 to ratify reforms so as to account for the deficit incurred by the Crown. The Third Estate (the Commoners) after being unable to reconcile the differences with the two other Estates (the Clergy and the Nobles) would announce their reformation as the National Assembly calling the other two to join them. These two Estates would refuse and the King would order the closing to the National Assemblies hall, the Commoners would resist and on 9 July, 1789, the National Constituent Assembly would be formed. Following this would be the Storming of the Bastille, the arrest and later beheading of the King and Queen, and the end of the Ancient Regime.
The Haitian Revolution began in 1791, lead by the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture and ended with the former French colony's independence in 1804. In 1789 the French First Republic having published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen left the Haitian slaves to ask for the right to vote as “all men free and equal” according to the new French Republic. The Colonial powers wanting power for themselves refused and a revolt ensued. Napoleon attempted to reassert control and slavery but its war with Britain led to its withdraw and the Haitian Declaration of Independence on 1 January 1804.
Following the American, French, and Haitian revolutions and the fall of the First French Republic (to Napoleon), and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars, numerous revolts would ensue in Europe and the Americas in the first half of the 19th century. This would explode in the Revolutions of 1848, a series of revolts against Imperial rule beginning with France and spreading to over 50 countries throughout Europe, as well as the Americas. Multiple reasons for unrest came about throughout Europe with the advent of Urbanization and the Industrial Revolution. Among them were Imperial absolutism, mismanagement of government, crop failures, urban squalor, and a growing divide between the rich and poor. While the revolutions and revolutionary governments of Europe would quickly fall in Latin America things would be different with Colombia, Chile, Brazil, and Mexico all overthrowing the colonial regimes and establishing constitutional and democratic nation-states.
The European states of the Ottoman Empire revolted between 1875–78, called the Great Eastern Crisis. In China following the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, the Boxer Rebellion would occur, as the people would rise against foreign influence between 1899 and 1901. The Mexican Revolution would go on between 1910–1920, and between 1911-1912 The Xinhai Revolution would overthrow the Qing dynasty establishing the Republic of China.
Following World War I (1914 – 1918), the aftermath would be the fall of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and the Revolutions of 1917–1923. The largest being in Russia, where the Tsar was overthrown during the February Revolution followed by the Russian Civil War. The collapse of the German Empire and the formation of the Weimar Republic. And then in 1923 the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the Republic of Turkey.
Following WWII from 1945 onward revolutions be ongoing against the remaining colonial empires in Africa and Asia, with France being the most notable with the the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962, and the Vietnamese Revolt of 1945. In Vietnam unrest would rise again leading to the eventual fall and exodus of the French leading to the divide into North and South Vietnam in 1954. This would lead to the Vietnam War from 1955 to 1975. The United States of America would enter the war with troops in 1964, and would remain until the fall of South Vietnam in 1975.
1949: The communists under chairman Mao Zedong expels the ruling Nationalist Party in the Civil War and establishes the People's Republic of China.
1956-1989: The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact would face revolts from the end of WWII until its dissolution in 1989, most notably in 1956 in Poland, Romania, and Hungary.
1956–1959: the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro against Colonial rule.
1966–1998: The Ulster Volunteer Force, Northern Ireland uprising against English rule.
1979: The Iranian Revolution against Imperial rule and Western domination.
1987–1991: The First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
What are the types of revolution? Resistance by traditional Native Societies like the Indian Wars in the US, or the Tibetan uprising, the Mayan Zapatista Uprising; Religious Revolutions like in Iran; Nationalist anti colonial uprisings in South Asia and Africa; Bourgeois-Capitalist-Oligarch revolts where what is at stake is not the tradition but who is in charge and who is part of the Club - US, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia; peoples revolts as in the French and Haitian Revolutions; the Peasant and Communist Revolutions of 1910-1919; Cold War revolutions as in Cuba, Peru, Chili, Hungary, Czech, Poland; Youth revolts as in ‘68; Intifada; Apartheid; modern Color Revolutions as in Georgia, Ukraine, Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria.
Conspicuous is the Bourgeois revolutions of the Former Colonies in the Americas. Here revolution is about power and administration of Liberal, Enlightened, Prosperity among the Gentry and the Merchant, and Middle Class; the Local Power Elite of the Colonies rebelling against Control by a distant aristocracy. This is not about the overturning of traditional society of Patriarchy, Business, Slavery, or National identity - but one of Control by the broader moneyed and landed elite of the growing Capitalist Oligarchy.
The Critique of Enlightenment Modernity (19th to 21st c.)
— the critique of (Classical) Modernity (19th to 21st c.) seen as Critique, Hegelian Dialectics, popular revolutions, Anti-colonialism, Freedom Movements, Marxism, Socialism, Workers Rights, Abolition of Slavery, Universal Suffrage & Women’s Rights, Civil Rights, LGTBQ Rights; Bohemianism and the Counterculture, Nihilism, Nietzsche, and “the death of god”; the Avant-garde, Modern Art, the creation of Western Popular Arts & Entertainment, and creation of Country/Western & Black Culture in the USA.
Colonization, new gold and silver reserves, and expanded trade brought wealth if you were a member of the Aristocracy or Bourgeoisie - an insider. The Bourgeoisie in their position as functionaries of this society, acted to secure their own seat at the table with or without a Monarch. The revolutions in England and the British Colonies were not about Freedom, but about Power and who holds it; they did not seek to overthrow this society but to take it over.
This is the Enlightenment Modernism of Reason, of Progress, of Humanism, and Neo-Classicism. It is a rigidly Patriarchal and Control oriented Oligarchy producing the Modern Police State, as embodied in the work of Jeremy Bentham. All things are to be brought under the control of Man and the Reason of the Scientific Method and the new Academy and Higher Learning, and the new (Napoleonic) Bureaucracy.
Capitalism, Banking, Land Reforms, the Courts would all fuel the Industrial Revolution and the woes of the urban Working Class men, women and children; and the Domination and destruction of Wild Nature - Progress. While the Professionalization and Commercialization of all of Modern Middle Class domesticity and city life would bring a flood of technological development, new gadgets, and new ways of commerce, advertising, and jobs. While the 18th century transforms the world, Publishing and the Free Press would spread new thinking and transform the Ideas and mental life of the populace. Magazines, pamphlets, broad-sheets, News Papers, books all become widespread as does literacy with the spread of Public Schools.
During Classical Modernity - blacks, women, workers, colonists, children, gays, natives, and artists - would all begin in a state of servitude and end in revolt. They would reject Imperialism, Patriarchy, Control, Slavery, Colonization, Enlightenment, Bureaucracy, Inequality, Limits, Domination, and Tradition.
Abolitionism would spread beginning with the French Revolution as would Suffrage, but both would be turned back by Napoleon. In the United States all northern states would abolish slavery by 1804, as would United Kingdom with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. It was not until 1865 that the United States would abolish slavery with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This however would not stop Racism and Jim Crow from impoverishing Blacks in America and much of the world; and abolition would not stop slavery from continuing in Africa and Asia into the 21st century.
Universal Suffrage would not come easily as even most white men were unable to vote until reforms gradually spread from the French Revolution on to many of the early reforms in America. Women’s Suffrage had appeared in limited cases during the 18th century but its first major development would not come until Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Though it would not be until 1906 that the Grand Duchy of Finland would become the first European state to grant women the right to vote. It would not be until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that racial minorities would gain the right to vote in the United States.
Unionization had been banned in Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution, but would see increasing militancy and organization up to the 1820 Rising in Scotland. It was in this turmoil that in 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels together published the pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism would continue to be radical philosophies to this day, as would workers rights.
Manifest Destiny would arise in the 1840s as a justification of the Mexican–American War and along with the earlier Monroe Doctrine would establish the philosophy of a rising American Empire. This would seed the American Hegemony over the Western Hemisphere and ratify the Genocide of the American Indians as part of American Progress. This however would be met with resistance by the Native Tribes and over a 100 years of the Indian Wars until the Reservation system and internment in 1922.
With the failure of the French Revolution and the changes brought on from the Industrial Revolution and Urbanization much of Europe and Latin America would continue to seek the changes that had been witnessed in France, Haiti and the U.S. The Revolutions of 1848 in Europe would be about many of the same issues that would bring about the two world wars.
In France the French Penal Code of 1791 would be the first European country to de-criminalize Sodomy. While the norm was for homosexuals to hide or be prosecuted, and executed, there were exceptions as in the case of 1720s Molly Houses and Masquerades where gay men would meet and some dress in Drag. Princess Seraphina (a.k.a. John Cooper) the most famous of the time. In 1880 a Drag Ball occurred at Temperance Hall in Hulme, though it was raided by police with 47 men arrested. In the US former slave William Dorsey Swann was the first to dress in Drag and hosted many Drag Balls in Washington DC which were eventually raided and Swann prosecuted in 1896. And in 1897 LGTB Rights are first expounded by the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.
Critique, popular revolutions, anti-colonialism, freedom movements, Marxism, Socialism, workers rights, the abolition of slavery, the granting of Universal Suffrage & women’s rights, Civil Rights, LGTB Rights, Bohemianism and the Counter Culture, Nihilism, the Avant-garde, Modern Art, the creation of Western Popular Arts & Entertainment, and creation of Country/Western & Black Culture in the USA; all have their roots in the developments of the 19th century. The proposed Postmodernity of the 1980’s onwards fails to contend with this history, and the historical struggles of the past 233 years of revolt and critique.
Despite the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the 19th century would also be a period of Idealism, and the pursuit of spiritual and the esoteric, and theories counter to reductive, rationalized Scientism of the age. Spiritualism, fathered by Emanuel Swedenborg, mesmerism started by Franz Mesmer, hypnotism, and Séances would all be very popular throughout the 19th century. The later part of the 19th century would see the radical philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883, where his ideas of the “superman” and the “death of God” are put forward; and Henri Bergson and his philosophy of Intuition; Sigmund Freud and his theories of psychoanalysis, free association, Oedipus complex, dreams, unconscious, id, ego and super-ego, and libido.
The increased contact with China, the renewed contact with Japan, and the British Raj, saw an influx of foreign ideas and goods as never seen before. Indicative of this is the rise of International Expositions, with the Great Exhibition of 1851, in London, at the Crystal Palace. Various European Modern artists would be greatly influenced by these encounters; such as Picasso with African sculpture and masks, or Artaud and the Balinese Theater.
There was also the beginning of historical research, archeology uncovering the splendor of Egypt, and the Middle East, which would influence the arts and spirituality in the 19th century. Freemasonry was at its height, and would be greatly influenced by Egyptian culture and art. In 1856 the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis was founded in America, and in 1887 the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was formed. This would also see the rise in popularity of the Tarot and its new interpretation in the (very Egyptian) Rider Waite Tarot Deck coming out of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
Yoga had already been known by intellectuals in Europe and America and in 1893 the Hindu leader Vivekananda's would make his first visit to America, establishing itself widely from then on, with Alestair Crowley being a major proponent beginning in 1900.
These three, and the craze for Egyptian antiquity, would greatly influence trends in religion, the esoteric (occult), and thinking about consciousness. These would run counter to the ‘rational’ sciences, offering alternative modes of thought and aesthetics then prevailing Modern Enlightenment thinking and the Canon. In the arts all of these foreign influences would enter into architecture, design, popular culture, and Modern Art.
As we can see above, while the 19th century is thought of as prototypical Modernity, “Classical Modernity”, it also gave birth to most forms of the critique of progress and the Imperial Order now associated with Postmodernism.
Progress and Imperial Neoclassicism is a look back to Imperial Rome, and a look forward to the New World Order; and it is this view that the new White Male Bourgeois order looked to enact for themselves. The world was theirs to plunder. Peasants and workers are to be controlled like children, women are property and subservient to men, non western non Christian empires were to be conquered, Black Slaves were sub-human (but valued property), and Indigenous ‘savages’ were pests to be exterminated.
The Progress of Modernity was that of Europe and the now majority White colonies. For a 100 years the World would be dominated by these Imperial Colonial Powers. With the loss of it’s American Colonies Britain would remain and even increase its Colonial holdings with the taking of India, and the colonization of Australia and New Zealand, while increasing the land holdings of Canada. France and the other European Powers would also take advantage of the weakness of the Ottoman Empire taking its holdings in North Africa and the Middle East. They would also carry out the partitioning of Africa with the Berlin Conference of 1884, known as the Scramble For Africa and New Imperialism. Meanwhile with the Spanish-American War of 1898 would see the USA become a Colonial Power taking the remaining colonies of Spain in the Americas and the Philippines as US protectorates. Japan would also enter the Colonial Era expanding across the Western Pacific. Germany would be another country to enter the fray as it sought to unify under the Chancellor Otto von Bismarck forming the new German Empire which would last until its defeat in WWI.
These Colonial Powers would see the Modern World as the Western World, and European Culture. The return of China, India, Japan, and the Muslim countries following WWII would not however fundamentally change the idea of Progress or High Culture and Imperial or Elite Power; these former world powers would return with the same traditional Patriarchal Power structures and prejudices of the past.
The Dialectical Negation of the Progress of Imperial Modernity, and then Bourgeois Modernity, begins with Critique and ends in Revolution by those who are not a party to this Progress. But as with the Bourgeoisie it is a desired inclusion not always a total destruction. Marxist Revolution is a desire for Control over the levers of industry. Freedom is a desire for personal sovereignty not particularly the destruction of the Sovereign; at least until the Imperial Sovereign stands in the way of change. This we would see in France and in Russia, but in France there is a return to Monarchy, while in Russia we will see the rise of powerful dictators; so to with Germany, Spain, Italy, and later in China. And these new Elites would see new revolutions and calls for freedom, progressive change, and laws and governments that serve the people not the elite. Even with new governments in the later part of the 20th and then in the 21st century we see the civil and political revolutions for change and equality; the youth and workers revolts of 68, the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, the color revolutions, and the fall of the Eastern Block Communist countries. The people will be free or else!
The Negation of Modernity is the desire for Integration into Modernity (for most but not all), and when this can be accomplished is when the worker and the oppressed become Modern. This is the Hyper Modern world of Popular Consumer Culture spanning the globe — New World Order. In the United States this becomes the myth of the self made man pulling himself up by his boot straps, from “rags to riches,” popularized by Horatio Alger, and later in the 1930’s the promulgation of The American Dream as the ideal for every Man (or at least every white man). To a large extent this is the same around the world - the pursuit of prosperity.
Modern Art, the Avant-garde, and the New
The traditional forms in Europe, are Synthetic developments themselves, but within what is thought of as “High Culture”. This is a point that applies as well to what is considered Traditional/Classical Arts (not folk traditions) worldwide, which are just like in the West serving the Royal Courts first and foremost, and then the Bourgeoisie that develop in the urban centers and Imperial Capitals.
The Modernity of Europe in 1789 and up to c. 1880 is Imperial High Culture — Imperial Arts were that of the “Classical Arts,” Architecture (the highest form of art), decorative arts, and sculpture; there was haute couture; Shakespearean Theater and Lyric Poetry; Opera, Ballet, and formal Orchestral Music; and there was Painting and the hierarchy of the Paris Salon - history paintings, portraiture, landscape, the "genre scene", and still life — what comes after could very easily be said to be ‘Postmodern’.
Between the Revolutions of 1789 and 1848 Romanticism and Bohemianism would be the dominant trend of the new Metropolitan lifestyle of the young artists and intellectuals of the Latin Quarter in Paris; as well as the rest of Europe and America. Bohemianism consisting of wanderers, and vagabonds, eschewing self imposed poverty, interest in the occult, seeking a life of drugs, art, music, and free-love. This would be the foundation of the Avant-garde that would develop towards the later years of the 19th century.
This Romanticism was a reaction to the new Urbanization and Industrialization occurring in Europe. The Romantics were just that Romantic, emotional, dreamy; they looked away from the Urban and the Industrial, and towards Nature as an ideal of living and beauty, and it was suspicious of progress, science, rationalism, realism, and classicism.
While notable Romantic writers like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley were prototypical Romantics, Mary Shelley would write Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in 1818, seen as the first science fiction novel, dealing with the horror of science gone wrong. Similarly the Americans Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne would write of the dark sides of man and modernity of the time; while others like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman would write of Nature and personal perspectives of the modern age they were entering.
Others who would later write of the depredations of Modernity were Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Knut Hamsun; while writers such as Rimbaud, August Strindberg, Alfred Jarry would be great influences on later avant-garde writers as progenitors. The Uruguayan Isidore Lucien Ducasse known under his alias Comte de Lautréamont, who would write the proto-surrealist Les Chants de Maldoror in 1868.
Francisco Goya (1746-1828) a painter for the Spanish Court, would paint among the first political paintings with The Third of May 1808, and The Disasters of War series, and would secretly produce his Black Paintings (1819–1822) depicting scenes of darkness and disturbing actions. And the English painter J. M. W. Turner would become very wealthy as an artist and is seen by many as a proto-Impressionist.
Photography would spend many years in development before Daguerre and Niépce would develop the daguerreotype silver-haloid process and Daguerre would take the photograph View of the Boulevard du Temple, in 1838. By the end of the century the Lumière brothers' would develop the cinematographic process of projected motion pictures, with their series of ten short films first projected in Paris on 28 December 1895. Within a few years Hollywood would become the world capital of the silent film era with DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation , in 1915: and soon after with the first sound film, the The Jazz Singer in 1927.
Harper's Magazine began as Harper's New Monthly Magazine in New York City in June 1850 and would be one of many new magazines catering to the new urban middle class. In 1865 Charles Baudelaire would write in the Painter of Modern Life, of the “Haute Couture,” and the Boulevards of Paris. “Modernity -to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.”
The Paris Salon, first exhibited in 1667, sponsored by the French government and the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1863 the Impressionists were refused entry into the salon and protested with word reaching Emperor Napoleon III who put these ‘Refuses’ to the judgement of the people, establishing the Salon des Refuses. The Salon was classified by genre, with a hierarchy of history paintings, portraiture, landscape, the "genre scene", and the still life last. Since 1851, Gustave Courbet one of the Refuses had been turned down repeatedly. In 1863 he was again turned down as were Camille Pissarro, and Édouard Manet, with his painting Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Critics and the public alike ridiculed the Refuses. The Salon des Refuses would occur again in 1874, 1875, and 1886; critic Louis Leroy reviewed the 1874 Salon des Refuses with the title The Exhibition of the Impressionists, thus codifying the movement as the Impressionists.
During the Enlightenment the Bourgoise in France and the Middle Class of England, and elsewhere, were growing in size and power as Urbanization and Industrialization spread. The Petite Bourgeois, as the poorer of the Middle Class were called, in the 19th century would become an entity apart from the more wealth Oligarchs and Industrialists. These shop keepers, business men, artists, tradesmen, professionals, bureaucrats, and managers would come to define a new Urban Culture. We can thus speak of a Middle Class Modernity, as an adjacent Modernity, one which looks to Imperial High Culture as an ideal, while bringing forth its own forms of Sport, Dress, Popular and ‘Ethnic’ Music, and Popular or Kitsch Culture.
Urbanization brought with it entertainment, and it also brought sport. The worlds most popular sport, Association Football (first played in China during the Song Dynasty in several forms), was codified in England with the Cambridge Rules in 1848, and in 1863 the Football Association was formed. Other forms of sport had tended to be divided between that of the peasant and that of the Gentry; as with Football, in the 19th century these divisions would gradually diminish but some would remain. College Athletics would develop as would middle class leisure sports. Boat racing, regattas, horse racing, and Cricket (first played in the 16th century) would be primarily the realm of the rich. College athletics would begin with the Yale Rowing Club formed in 1843. Rugby Football had been a sport of the people since the middle ages, but was reformed as a collegiate sport in 1845. In the US Modern Baseball would be formalized under the Knickerbocker Rules in 1845; this was a development out of the English game of Rounders popular among children. Other collegiate sports would be Track and Field events had its origins in Ancient Greece but newer events would be developed since the middle ages; the first Steeplechase in England was in 1834; Basketball first played in the US in 1891. The Modern Olympic Games developed in Europe since the Renaissance, and interest in the Classical world, with the revival taking root in 1856 in England. In the 1890s the International Olympic Committee would be formed and in 1896 the first Summer Olympics would take place in Greece.
There was also an expansion of what had previously been reserved for the Elite, into that of the middle class - entertainment, design, and portraiture. In the new urban world there were cafes, and bars where workers, Bohemians, Artists, writers, and revolutionaries would mix. There were also the Salons and Galleries catering to the desire of the new Bourgeois taste for luxury, and the new Museums of the State, as with the establishment of Musée du Louvre (the former Palace taken by the Revolution in 1793, following the overthrow of the Monarchy). By the mid to late 19th century there were also cinemas, cabarets, and dance halls.
Before Los Vegas the first modern Cabaret (combining cafe service with music and other entertainment) was Le Chat Noir in the Montmarte district of Paris, opened in 1881, and the Moulin Rouge opened in 1889. The composer Eric Satie would play the piano at Le Chat Noir, while Édith Piaf would sing at the Moulin Rouge, and the painter Toulouse-Lautrec, would make posters. The first Broadway musical, The Black Crook, premiered in New York on September 12, 1866. Also there was Burlesque and Vaudeville, or variety entertainment, born in France at the end of the 19th century, they would become popular in North America.
La Belle Époque ("Beautiful Epoch"), beginning in 1871 and ending with the World War I, was considered a "Golden Age" of peace, prosperity, advancement of technology, and the arts and literature. This period would see the spread of photography, metropolitan train networks (London Underground 1890, Budapest Metro and the Glasgow Subway both in 1896), electric lighting, balloons and airplanes, automobiles, bicycles, avant-garde art, greater education and health care. This would also see a revolution in the sciences. Concurrent with this would be the “Guilded Age” in America from 1877 to 1896, with many of the new American Aristocracies founded upon the riches of the Modern Industrialist, Manifest Destiny and American Imperialism.
First Modern, or first Postmodern?
Painting — 1863, Édouard Manet, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe.
Philosophy — 1882, Nietzsche who would write that "God is dead" in The Gay Science
Architecture — 1899, The Glasgow School of Art
Sculpture — 1900, Auguste Rodin, the The Thinker
Music — 1910, Arnold Schoenberg's chromatic twelve-tone scale.
Writing— 1922, stream of consciousness technique of James Joyce, novel Ulysses.
Dance — 1929, Martha Graham, and Rudolf Laban
(Critic Clement Greenberg called Immanuel Kant, "the first real Modernist," Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) initiating the start of German idealism )
What then is Modern? In Part Two, The Modern, I established that the Imperial Culture of 1789 was Modern; and these styles of the Academy would remain dominant into the 20th century. However it is from the Impressionists onward that critics would declare various artists and styles as being “Modern”, and then quickly to “Postmodern” for the art following Impressionism - so which is it?
Painting: Romanticism, Symbolism, Art for Arts Sake, and Impressionism? If we are to place the start of Modernity in 1789, and listen to Baudelaire talking of his Paris of 1871 as being thoroughly Modern, we have to ask if the Impressionists of the Salon des Refuses, who were rejected by the (Modern) Academy, are Modern or Postmodern? Are they not a challenge to tradition and thus Avant-garde? Was not the art of the Academy that of Portraiture, Scenic, and History Painting that developed in the Royal Houses since the Renaissance? So, should we not take all those movements that came after both Revolutions, the French and the Industrial as being Modern? Shall we start with Romanticism? Or should we look on all these new challenges, Critique, the New, and the Avant-garde as being Postmodern?
Philosophy: The Enlightenment and the long century, Kant and Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel, and Marx. - are these Modern? Or is Nietzsche and his "God is dead" our man? If Modernity is founded on the Enlightenment and Reason then is the rest, all that is new, all that is critique, are these not Postmodern? Again we are talking about critique, the Avant-garde, and the New; all following Enlightenment Modernity - are these Postmodern, or is this simply just the world “After (or With) Modernity”; or as I would say “Modernity, Now What?”
Architecture: Brick factories, iron-reinforced concrete (1853, François Coignet house), iron & plate glass (1851, Crystal Palace), steel-framed skyscrapers (1884, Home Insurance Building in Chicago), Art Nouveau, Vienna Secession; are these Modern or do we need to wait for the International Style in the 1920s to be Modern? And I would rather not talk about Venturi’s brick-a-brac; just call it bad architecture. So many different styles and new forms and use of materials. But let me step back a moment; for 100 and more years the architecture of State and Power was Neoclassical architecture (the White House, Congress, the MET), which over the course of those years incorporated new materials with iron, concrete, steel, and plate glass building the new Urban growth of Europe and around the world from the mid 19th into the 20th century. So should we call all that is new Modern, or is the new also both critique and avant-garde; and so, are these all Postmodern?
Sculpture: Romanticism, Modernism, Avant-garde, Abstraction, DADA? We can add to the list of course but if we ask what of the Paris of 1871, again, in the world of the Academy of the Royal Houses, the State Institutions, the houses of Capitalist power we see Neoclassicism as the Sculptural tradition of this new Modernity. So again, should we look on all these new challenges as being Postmodern? Shall we start with Auguste Rodin as the first to challenge tradition, too romantic? Should we wait a few years for Constantin Brâncuși, and Marcel Duchamp?
Music: Romanticism, Modernism, the Avant-garde? Was not the first 100 years of Democratic, Capitalist, Industrial Modernity that of Romanticism? Was not the Orchestra of Classical Music the dominant form of Modernity at that time? Do we really have to wait for Schoenberg in 1910 to challenge ‘tradition’ for us to declare music to be Modern? Classical Music, which in fact was a synthetic development of the Enlightenment, itself challenged the actual traditional music of the European courts and Cathedrals. The Modern orchestra begins to come together with the introduction of the Piano in 1700, and continues on to c. 1815 with innovations in woodwinds and composition innovations by Beethoven; a full 100 years before Schoenberg. Does Jazz get a place at the table?
Writing: Romanticism, all the rest of the 19th century, Stream of Consciousness, Surrealism, Absurdism? I know it’s difficult to wait 126 years for writers to get their act together, though they did beat dance to the party, but I ask, what about Edgar Allen Poe, or grand Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein in 1818, too Romantic I know. All those French poets, those Victorians, that wild Alfred Jarry in 1896, or Baudelaire; was he just pretentious in his flaneur feelings for Modernity? What of Isidore Ducasse and Les Chants de Maldoror of 1868? I guess one could just listen to the Bourgeoisie and go to the proper theater and listen to the immortal bard, dear Shakespeare.
Dance: Burlesque, Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Judson Church, Butoh? I know, I did miss a few, like how about Tap Dance and the Lindy Hop? Again, for the first 100 years of Modernity, ‘Classical’ Ballet was THE form of Modernity, until le Chat Noir (Black Cat) Cabaret in 1881; is that too Blue, should we go with Loie Fuller and her Light Dances in 1891? Are these critiques or just something NEW, or maybe just wait until Martha Graham and Appalachian Spring of 1944? A full 155 years into the Modern Industrial Age.
What I think can be seen here is that there is no one Modern movement, only a long line of new movements and critiques extending out from what is thought of as the traditional forms in Europe - as Ezra Pound had pronounced in 1934, “Make it new” is the definition of the Modern. A definition that would fit the world of technology, culture, and commerce throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
And already by 1870, the term “postmodern” would first be used by John Watkins Chapman referring to works following Impressionism as being "a Postmodern style of painting." While following the developments in writing in 1942 H. R. Hays described the new writing as postmodernism, 24 years before Robert Venturi would write of a postmodern architecture, and 40 years before Postmodernism would be declared the current mode. So what is Modern? Is it the Academy from 1789 on through the 19th century, or is it something else? Did Pound get it right?
The early Imperial Academy was about tradition, technique, and pleasing wealthy patrons. The Modern Academy would change by the end of the 19th century with the development of University systems and the new Middle Class demands for luxury goods, and so now, it will always devour new forms. However, High Art would remain a specialty of the rich, like architecture, names on buildings, parks, monuments, libraries, hospital wings, parks, public works, galleries and the like. For the lower Middle Class, the Petite Bourgeois, it would be mass produced goods of the new industrial commerce, Photographic Portraiture, Prints, crafts, the Circus, the Cabaret, dance halls, and later the Silent Movies and Phonograph that would be their connection to the world of luxury and art. Throughout the 20th century this would expand as more goods would become available and at cheaper costs. Music would boom with industrial production of musical instruments, vinyl records, and the radio introduced in 1920. The Silent Movie era would go from 1895 to the 1920’s when talkies would be produced and the Hollywood Film would become an international phenomena. Then in the 1950s Television would enter middle class homes and transform the post World War era.
While Europe and the US would dominate cultural production and popular entertainment before and between the World Wars, after World War II popular culture would expand throughout much of the world. How does Asian Pop, Japanese Butoh and Anime, African Cinema, Bollywood and others fit into these definitions?
And what of Black Culture in America? Black Culture since Reconstruction has been among the richest contributions to the New Modern America which would transform the world: Tap Dance (1800’s), Lindy Hop, and Jazz, Soul, Blues, Rock, Funk, Pop, Hip Hop, Rap and the dance styles that came with them would spread across the Globe in the 20th century.
Bohemianism, and Sub-Cultures and the rise of Youth Culture would also be transformative, as would the European immigrants with Country Western and Rag Time similar to the mix of Spanish Music Waltzes and Mexican transformation into Ranchero and other new forms of Music across Latin America.
The expansion of the Middle Class and the new Urban Working Class, that began in the late 18th century would, by the Post World War II era, dominate the cultural production of the world. A revitalized Europe, an emerging Black Cultural production, and regional developments such as Bollywood, or the Tango in Argentina would gradually overtake the former Imperial Culture with attendance of Classical Arts such as the Ballet, Opera, and the Symphony declining during the later part of the 20th century. This would only increase as even Hollywood, TV, and the music industry begin being subverted by the rise of Do It Yourself (DIY) artistic production, Garage Bands, personal tape recorders, home video, personal computers; all radically transforming artistic production beginning in the 1970s. Pound’s definition of the Modern becomes all the more profound as “The New” becomes not just generational in scope but the onslaught of yearly turnover in style, and the ubiquity of the Popular. This would reach new heights with the Internet age, the iPhone, Twitter, Instagram, and TicTok making the New a daily affair.
We Have Always Been ‘Postmodern’ — or has it all just been DIALECTICS?
The relationship between Modernism and the argued ‘Postmodernism’ is actually a dialectic between (Royal & Bourgeoisie) Academy-Canon-Control and (Bohemian & Popular) Critique-Novelty-Revolt.
Dialectics: the Enlightenment Progress as thesis, the Romantic and Avant-garde antithesis, followed by the Pop Art and Middle Class American Synthesis. Morphing into a Global Hyper Culture of TikTok memes, attention points, and social credits. The negation of Modernity becomes the Nihilism of Modernity.
Thesis = Modernity = Academy-Canon-Control (before & after 1789)
Antithesis = Postmodernity = Critique-Novelty-Revolt (after 1789)
Synthesis = Pop = Hollywood-Memes-Advertising-Attentionalism (after 1865)
Modernism & Modernity only become manifest in 1789 when the process of their development fulminates Protest, and Revolution against Imperial Order, and Bourgeois Modernity; and the Critique of their declared Enlightenment and Progress. But the Academy eventually incorporates Critique, the New, and even the Avant-garde; and the Academy itself transforms under the New of the Modern development.
There is no one Modern Art and there is definitely no Postmodern Art, there is only Academic Art, Popular Art, and the Avant-garde.
The Academy eventually incorporates the New. The Classical of the Imperial Modernity were new synthetic forms which the (Imperial) Academy formed (by the Royal Courts) around. The new movements that rose over 100 years would enter the Canon as art history, and art criticism becoming incorporated into the Academy, and even more so as Academy became Collegiate, and also as artists entered as Leaders of the Academy themselves.
The triumph of Modernity since 1950 — BP, B.P., Before Present, Before Plutonium, Before Contact — is in the conversion and integration of the Working Class, and believing in their Middle Class inclusion, and/or their Middle Class lifestyle. The American Dream is the triumph of Modernity; a House, a green grass yard, a car, a driveway, college, Jesus, Nation, the Brat Pack, Elvis, Hollywood, guns, anti-communist, anti-union, pro-war, anti-drugs, pro-corporate, cigarettes, and alcohol, plastics, oil, big pharma, computers, rockets, vacations, jet set crowd, swingers, hepsters, jazz, musicals, singles, films, Kodak, Vegas, Broadway, Cops, FBI, CIA, SWAT, surveillance, fear, campaigns, propaganda, Nukes, NATO, Control, manners, places, silence, products, coups — a completely manipulated and controlled populous, brainwashed into Modern thinking. BRAVO! HYPERMODERNITY! The new "Beautiful Epoch" and “Guilded Age” is The New World Order.
The triumph of the Modern is also the return of China, India, Japan, and the Muslim world to their former Imperial status. But now as Nation States reasserting their former regional hegemony within the new World Governance of the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Court and the rest of the Post World War Globalization, and the Hegemony of Corporate and Capital power.
So, Where Are We Now? We are more modern than ever as the working class and even the poor watch the Rich parade in their Haute Couture and diamonds on the Red Carpets of Cannes, the Oscars, the Grammies, the MET Gala, and the Nobel Prize. Sitting back in a lounge chair with a BigGulp and BBQ wings in front of a large screen Plasma TV.
“Spend like a Billionaire,” sings the American Black Queen of Pop at the Super Bowl half-time show; which commercial did you like best?
Next: Part Four: Negation: Negation
Art Press 292, Aesthetics, Un Postmodernisme Sans Réserves, byMark Alizart
https://www.artpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2392.pdf
— First, the order of (Early) Imperial Modernity (16th & 17th c.) with developing/modernizing European Feudal Monarchies and established Asian Empires, defined by the inclusion of the Americas in the new Global Maritime Trade Network, Urbanized Asia, and the spread of Chinese inventions such as (just to name just a few): gun powder, paper money, banking, capitalism, industrial processes, the printing press, the compass, coal coke and gas energy, state development projects, agricultural revolution, public schools, and scholar bureaucrats.
— and the joining of (Early) Bourgeois Modernity (18th c.) in the West, seen as the formalization of Neoclassicism in Europe, the rise of the Bourgeois/Middle Class, the Urbanization of Europe, the rise of Imperial Russia, the Enlightenment and the rise of Freemasonry, Parliament, Empirical Science, Secularism, Constitutional Law, Liberal Democracy, Capitalist Oligarchs, the steam engine and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
— Third, the order of (Classical) Modernity (19th to mid 20th c.) with expanded colonization by Europe into Asia and Africa, the urbanization of the Americas and other former Colonies, the rise of Colonial Japan, the rise of the United States of America and Manifest Destiny, and increasing technology development - commercialization, programming, electricity, photography, communication systems, machinery, and air travel.
— and the critique of (Classical) Modernity (19th to 21st c.) seen as Critique, Hegelian Dialectics, popular revolutions, Anti-colonialism, Freedom Movements, Marxism, Socialism, Workers Rights, Abolition of Slavery, Universal Suffrage & Women’s Rights, Civil Rights, LGTBQ Rights; Bohemianism and the Counterculture, Nihilism, Nietzsche, and “the death of god”; the Avant-Garde, Modern Art, the creation of Western Popular Arts & Entertainment, and creation of Country/Western & Black Culture in the USA.
— Fifth, the order of Advanced or Hyper Modernity (late 20th to 21st c.) with the ending of Colonial Empires (though many colonies would remain or become Nations), Nuclear Weapons, the Cold War, the United Nations, the European Union, Communist China, the Partition of India, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Bretton Woods Agreements (International Monetary Fund, and World Bank), the International Court of Justice, the Digital Revolution, Space Travel, Transnational Corporations.
— and the joining of “New World Order,” (21st c.) with Gene Technology, the World Wide Web, Neoliberalism, Bitcoin, Digital Ubiquity, Crisper, Ubiquitous Surveillance, Space Tourism & Colonization, and the rise of China as a Super-Power.
The New and the cyclical theory of history of Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. — 1776, Liberal (Revolution & Constitutional Confederation); 1788, Conservative (Hamiltonian Federalism); 1800, Liberal (Jeffersonian Democracy); 1812, Conservative (War of 1812); 1829, Liberal (Jacksonian Democracy); 1841, Conservative (Slave-owners Control Gov.); 1861, Liberal (Civil War, Abolition of Slavery and Reconstruction); 1869, Conservative (The Gilded Age); 1901, Liberal (WWI Progressive Era); 1919, Conservative (Republican Restoration, the Roaring Twenties); 1931, Liberal (The New Deal, Great Depression, World War II); 1947, Conservative (Postwar Era, The Fifties); 1962, Liberal (Civil Rights Era, The Sixties); 1978, Conservative (Reagan Era); 1992, Liberal (Neo-Liberalism); 2000, Conservative (Post 911); 2008, Liberal (Obama); 2016, Conservative (MAGA)