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Sorin Alexandrescu
Modernists and Antimodernists: Enemies or Friends?
I. Three older assumptions about modernism and modernity – their similarity, their homogeneity and the affinity of modernism with (only) liberal and left wing politics -have come recently under heavy attack. Instead, different books revealed the last years that (aesthetic and social) modernism rather opposed (capitalist and materialist) modernity, that modernism has been akin also to right wing politics (Roger Griffin) and that it showed inner division between “strict” and “alternative” modernists, the last ones having adopted a rather critical stance on some common principles (Les Antimodernes, by Antoine Compagnon).
In spite of their differences, all these opinions do no longer discuss modernism only in terms of artistic achievements but also in terms of its political, social and general cultural substructures. I completely agree with this and so does a whole research group related to the Center of Excellence in Image Studies (CESI) that spent the last three years studying the social and cultural aspects of the Romanian inter-war Modernism.
In the following, I shall restrict my remarks to the book of Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism – a real turning point in Modernism studies – because we can find in it all the above-mentioned points of view.
II. The book is very convincing in taking into account the existence of a rightist inter-war modernism, supported by the Nazi and Fascist regimes of Germany and Italy, next to the earlier accepted left wing modernism of Russian constructivists and different Marxist groups in Western Europe. Nevertheless, some theoretical aspects demand further discussion. While both tendencies promote modernism, it is obvious that they do it in quite different ways: they contradict not only one another, but also the modernism in non-totalitarian countries. This complex situation was possible only because a kind of general system of values assigned at that time in Europe different political and cultural positions to each variant. Our task should be then to sketch such a system of (weberian) “ideal types”, as Roger Griffin rightly says.
Further, opposition was not the only relation between modernism and modernity: while many novels and paintings expressed in an allegorical way (see Adorno, Marcuse) some contemporary crises, they did not assert the decadence of the Western society and the necessity to embark on a quest for transcendental values, a generalization Roger Griffin pleads for.
Sorin Antohi
Modernism, Antimodernism, and the Transfiguration of the National: Ethnic Ontologies in Interwar Europe
Starting under the auspices of the palingenetic Romanticism of the European generation of 1848, modern discussions about national specificity or national essence have remained for half a century in the spheres of esthetics, symbolic geography, and national characterology. Under the impact of modernism (and of its negative double, equally obsessed with the future: antimodernism), these definitions of ethnicity undergo a radical turn after World War One, against the background of the rise of Western fascisms (a darker wave of palingeneticism) and of their Eastern counterparts. Simply put, in the span of a generation, Europe goes all the way from (usually metaphysical) esthetics to (usually racist) biopolitics.
Thus, national characterology becomes a collection of variations on the theme of ethnic stigma or on the related theme of national (later, racial, superiority); symbolic geography emphasizes both every ethnic nation’s isolationism and its geocultural and geopolitical ambitions, up to (micro)imperialist visions and projects; finally, ethno-national esthetics (a paradigm whose metaphysical and mystical accents were already present in its Romantic formula) is inserted into a more ambitious project, not devoid of the elements of a political religion: ethnic ontology.
Consequently, Europe’s ethnic nations are endowed with complete worldviews: time (not just history), space (not just territory), Being (not just national character) are understood as ontological (pseudo)categories. And when ethnic ontology itself goes through a crisis and proves to be insufficient for the ‘transfiguration’ of the country (from ethnie to society to the state understood as a total and messianic intitution-community), modernist science enters the stage and generates a biopolitics.
The paper outlines this phenomenon and provides a number of illustrations from several European national cultures.
Roger Griffin
(Western) Modernity + Anti-(existing)Modernity=’Modernism’ (?)
This keynote proposes that hosting a major international and interdisciplinary conference in Bucharest in 2008 is timely because the socio-political and intellectual emancipation of national cultures in post-Soviet Eastern Europe (keen to make sense of their unique modern histories without authoritarian blinkers) has coincided with a number of major advances in our understanding of particular aspects the modern age. This can be illustrated in an Anglophone context by growing sophistication in analysing the dynamics of ideology (e.g. Michael Freeden); Nazism (Ian Kershaw, Michael Burleigh) the Holocaust (Christopher Browning, Zygmunt Bauman); Fascism (Emilio Gentile); political religion (Hans Maier) and its relationship to totalitarianism (Emilio Gentile, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Compass: Political Religion), generic fascism (Stanley Payne, myself); communism (Bernice Rosenthal); the temporalities of modernity (Peter Osborne, Peter Schleifer), post-secularization, re-enchantment and post-secularity (John Gray, Michael Burleigh, Charles Taylor); the scientization of eugenics and biopolitics (Paul Weindling, Marius Turda).
The transdisciplinary ethos created by such developments and openness to the convergence of paradigms and clustering of concepts it promotes, especially among younger scholars, has fostered a greater recognition of the way so many apparently unrelated modern phenomena share a common palingenetic drive towards a new artistic, social, political or historical order (nomos) in order to restore a sense of transcendence and overcome decadence. Examples of this new wave of scholarship are the works of Tod Presner on Zionism, Adam Tooze on the Nazi economy, and Bernice Rosenthal on Stalinism, as well as recent exhibitions on modernism held at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library . It is in this context that the deficiencies of the old paradigm of ‘modern; and ‘anti-modern’/’progressive’/’reactionary’ have been exposed. This has liberated the concept ‘modernism’ from its aesthetic-cultural ghetto so that it can now acquire unprecedented heuristic value as a generic term for human bids in every area of human endeavour to counteract and neutralize the disembedding, nihilistic thrust of modernity and inaugurate a new futurity, a new reality, a new nomos. It can now evoke a striving towards transcendence and the erection of a new ‘sacred canopy’, whether at the level of almost hermetic aesthetic understanding or of a major experiment in engineering a new society undertaken by a self-proclaimed new order.
In different ways both the Romanian Iron Guard and Islamism illustrate the potential of the subsuming anti-modernity under the concept modernism within the new dispensation of the human sciences and the international academic community embodied at this conference. The key question then becomes, in Kantian terms, whether the new paradigm is emerging within a modernity which will prove to have been humankind’s protracted palingenesis (and hence a doomed attempted at self-renewal after the erosion and destruction of traditional societies and their nomoi), or the harbinger of an eventual metamorphosis which combines the awesome scientific and technocratic power of modernity with the sustainability of most traditional societies. If so it would be a synthesis which is only speciously Hegelian, and marking the temporary salvation of human history after self-inflicted ecological and economic catastrophes, not its ‘end’.