Let’s start at the beginning, or the ending, or possibly the middle … it depends which way you’re looking at it I guess. Ever since the notion of ‘postmodernism’ as we know it gained popularity in the early 1960s, the idea has given birth to seemingly endless discourse from opposing theorists and critics. This discourse generally revolves around one main idea: the definition of the affix ‘post’ in ‘postmodernism’. Does Postmodernism imply that the ‘high-brow’ art of Woolf, Hamson, Proust, Joyce, Kafka etc is finished with? That it has failed to achieve its aims owing to its abandonment of the social world for a more narcissistic dive into the language and structural processes involved? Or perhaps modernity is a never-ending, self-sustaining flux which asks of the individual to always find new ways of decoding aesthetic methodologies. Is modernity cyclically inescapable? What is the role of the postmodern artist? Has Lyotard ever performed ballet?
So many questions. Let’s try to answer some of them.
For Habermas, modernity is a ‘project’ which hasn’t reached fruition. It is incomplete. It is also something society needs to strive for. He reviews the Enlightenment as a movement which was the first attempt in amalgamating life and art. He argues that, as the role of art is to function as a tool of liberation from oppression, and the obfuscation of art has come about as a result of existence in the modern world, art itself has lost its function in its inability to connect with people. Art, for Habermas, through its endeavour for self-justification, has drifted away from the layman:
“all those attempts to level art and life, fiction and praxis, appearance and reality to one plane; the attempts to remove the distinction between artifact and object of use, between conscious staging and spontaneous excitement; the attempts to declare everything to be art and everyone to be an artist, to retract all criteria and to equate aesthetic judgement with the expression of subjective experiences ‑ and these undertakings have proved themselves to be sort of nonsense experiments. These experiments have served to bring back to life, and to illuminate all the more glaringly, exactly those structures of art which they were meant to dissolve.”
(Brooker 132-134)
According to Habermas, philosophers in the eighteenth century initiated the ‘project’ of modernity as an attempt to “develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic” with the goal of the project being to use the “accumulation of specialised culture for the enrichment of everyday life ‑that is to say, for the rational organisation of everyday social life” (Brooker 131). Habermas here sees the possibility of salvaging Enlightenment rationality as a way of salvaging art.
Lyotard’s essay “What is Postmodernism?” sees Habermas’s proposed project as one which would “liquidate the heritage of the avant-gardes” (Brooker 142). He sees the world as too diverse and alienating for Habermas’s view of art’s purpose. Instead, Lyotard suggests an appropriation of the sublime for a ‘new’ post-modern art. This appropriation results in an art which is self-aware in that it exploits its very limitations as a way of presenting itself. Though, the possibility for Lyotard’s new Sublime is only achievable if Habermas’s clarion-call for a completed modernity is made invalid.
Is this whole modernity project malarkey, have we become ‘too postmodern’ for its actualisation, or should we all be working towards finishing this project? Let’s see.
Habermas’s essay “Modernity – an Incomplete Project” argues postmodernism to be reacting against modernism –it is “anti-modernism” (Brooker 136). Habermas has a ‘been there, done that, bought the t-shirt’ view of postmodernism as he sees it as nothing new. Even Plato had his detractors. Modernists were ‘new’ in the way that they challenged traditionalism and sought new forms. He sees the future as becoming popular owing to the “infinite progress of knowledge and in the infinite advance towards social and moral betterment” (Brooker 127). Modernism came to be seen as forward-looking. Emancipated from its past, a new aesthetic could be formed. “The emphatically modern document no longer borrows this power of being a classic from the authority of a past epoch; instead, a modern work becomes a classic because it has once been authentically modern”, he continues (Brooker 127). Aesthetic modernity, for Habermas, thus relies in the artist’s ability to ‘make it new’. Hegel remarked that modernity is the consciousness of a “new world” which has broken from the past, “a birth time, and a period of transition” (Hegel 75). Habermas mentions Walter Benjamin twice during his essay, who holds influence in his development of thought. Baudelaire was a massive influence on Benjamin’s work (thank you ENG30010 City in Literature). Baudelaire’s flaneur shows his prioritising of the new. Art, for Baudelaire, gets its value from its newness. This is seen as important in a period of instability and change.
With the ability to improve the lives of its audience, the Enlightenment’s purpose for art is one that Habermas commends. I reiterate: “The Enlightenment philosophers wanted to utilise this accumulation of specialised culture for the enrichment of everyday life – that is to say, for the rational organisation of everyday social life” (Brooker 132). Even though the modernist’s artistic endeavours seemingly bring life closer to art, Habermas believes they have reinforced the structures which art is supposed to break up. The ‘project’ was abandoned by the Modernists, according to Habermas, because they became too obsessed with style and form. It was elitist. He contends that its failure is owing to its assumption of the need for its (art) existence in society.
Lyotard’s essay “What is Postmodernism?” starts off summarising Habermas’s stance with regards to Postmodernism, seeing his essay as possessing an intent to bring the artist into the heart of society. He believes that this would be a step backwards for art owing to his belief that if artists were to limit their art to that which is acknowledged and accepted by the majority as ‘art’ there would be no innovation or investigation within and of art –there would be no questioning. With regards to the role of the artist, he believes that they must “question the rules of the art of painting or of narrative as they have learned and received them from their predecessors. Soon those rules must appear to them as a means to deceive, to seduce and to reassure, which makes it impossible for them to be ‘true’” (Brooker 144). Anything else would be self-gratifying. Lyotard sees the artist becoming less powerful as a result of the dangers of submission to conventionality. Art is being controlled by public expectation and market value. This differs greatly from Baudelaire’s notion modernity:
No industry is possible without a suspicion of the Aristotelian theory of motion, no industry without a refutation of corporatism, of mercantilism, and physiocracy. Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality, together with the invention of other realities. What does this ‘lack of reality’ signify if one tries to free it from a narrowly historicised interpretation? The phrase is of course akin to what Nietzsche calls nihilism. But I see a much earlier modulation of Nietzschean perspectivism in the Kantian theme of the sublime. I think in particular that it is in the aesthetic of the sublime that modem art (including literature) finds its impetus and the logic of avant‑gardes finds its axioms.
(Brooker 145)
“The Kantian theme of the sublime” becomes Lyotard’s main point (Brooker 145). Similar to Habermas, Lyotard uses the Enlightenment however he does so as a way of demonstrating how the artist can present the ‘unpresentable’. In this, the artist should no longer use mimesis as a tool of his art. This, he sees, is the only of connecting truly with society. Art will “avoid figuration or representation” (Brooker 147). All art is postmodern at the point of its creation, according to Lyotard, because “ A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” (Brooker 148).
Lyotard’s view of Habermas’s project is owing to his belief that the chaos of life can never become orderly again. Habermas sees art as a way for mankind to quell chaos. Lyotard sees this as a failing self-illusion. He wants artists to aestheticize the futile attempt of representation through the use of sublime. Habermas is pessimistic towards the future of the ’project’ of modernity, while Lyotard is fearful of its happening. There is a difficulty that exists in attempting to form a solution for this debate, that Habermas bases his essay on a narrow and subjective version of modernity and his notion of rejoining art and the ‘layman’ is seemingly shallow presents an obstacle. Those who object to him are designated as ‘conservatives.’
It is nice to think of the possibility of Habermas’s rejoining of life and art, rather than Lyotard’s postmodern sublimity, though the possibility of the project ever beecoming completed seems slim. Perhaps Lyotard is right in his argument that there can be no demarcation between modernism and postmodernism in terms of it as a ‘movement’, however I believe that this causes a problem through the way that artists and art are dependent on their predecessors.
Works Referenced:
Brooker, Peter, ed. Modernism/Postmodernism. London: Longman, 1992.
Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind. London: Allen & Unwin, 1966.
The Irish Lark 