"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Jameson on the end of modernism
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April 29, 2010
By his end of art thesis Hegel meant that 'For us art no longer counts as the highest mode in which truth fashions an existence for itself' For Hegel art is superseded by philosophy which becomes the highest mode in which truth manages to come into being.
Frederic Jameson in his essay "'End of Art' or 'End of History'"? in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 says that:
the art whose 'end' Hegel foresaw is, in the light of Kant, to be identified as Beauty. It is the Beautiful that comes to an end in this significant event, but what takes its place is finally not philosophy, as Hegel thought, but rather the Sublime itself, or in other words the aesthetic of the modern or the transaesth etic if you prefer. And of course, very much in the spirit of Peter Burger' suggestion, this supersession is accompanied by a low level persistence and reproduction of any number of secondary forms of the Beautiful in all the traditional senses; the Beautiful now as decoration, without any claim to truth or to a special relationship with the Absolute.
He adds that this particular 'end of something' can only be the end of the modern itself, or in other words the end of the Sublime, the dissolution of art's vocation to reach the Absolute.
It should be clear, then, that whatever this particular historical event is, it will scarcely present much similarity to that older and earlier 'end of art' in which philosophy failed to live up to its historic vocation, and in which it was left to the Sublime to supplant the merely Beautiful. The end of the modern, the gradual setting in place of postmodernity over several decades, has been an epochal event in its own right whose changing and shifting evaluations merit some study in themselves.
Jameson does acknowledge that The 'end of art' of this period, the waning of the modern, was not merely marked by the slow disappearance of d modernism in its grandest period; it was also accompanied by the emergence of all those now equally famous names from Levi-Strauss to Lacan, from Barthes to Derrida and Baudrillard, that adorn the heroic age of Theory itself. The transition was not characterized by an abrupt shifting of gears, in which a preoccupation with the narrative sublime, for example, suddenly gave way jarringly to a return to the study of logical categories: rather Theory emerged from the aesthetic itself, from the culture of the modern.
Jameson says that:
the function of the Sublime, the modern, of the one half of art, is taken over by Theory; but this also leaves room for the survival of art's other half, namely the Beautiful, which now invests the cultural realm at the moment in which the production of the modern has gradually dried up. This is the other face of postmodernity, the return of Beauty and the decorative, in the place of the older modern Sublime, the abandonment by art of the quest for the Absolute or of truth claims and its redefinition as a source of sheer pleasure and gratification (rather than, as in the modern, of jouissance). Both Theory and the Beautiful are constituent elements of that 'end of art' which was the postmodern: but they tend to block each other out in such a way that the seventies appeared to be the age of Theory, where the eighties revealed itself as the moment of garish cultural self indulgence and consumption (which began indeed to include signed and commodified Theory itself in its lavish feasts).
The return of the Beautiful in postmodernity after the dissolution of modernism is not that of Burke or Kant, as it commodified.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:52 PM | Permalink |
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