Stephen D. Dowden - Modernism and Mimesis

In the history of European literature, music, and pictorial art, one style has ordinarily evolved into the next. There was no great leap from Romanesque to Gothic. Their relationship was and remains simple to track. Even in cases in which a sharp break occurredbetween Enlightenment rationalism, for example, and the Romantic rebellion against itthe transformation is coherent. This linear model explodes into a thousand shards with the rise of modernism. Its confusion of artistic languages recalls the biblical Tower of Babel. The one language seems unconnected to any other. Painting seems disconnected from poetry or music. The spectacular efflorescence of modernist styles and forms has appeared chaotic to most observers. There ought to be a common denominator, a unified field embracing various aspects. Modernism, as the conventional unifying explanation goes, opposes tradition as an outdated, dogmatic, and oppressive force.

But how helpful is a negative definition, specifying what modernism is not rather than what it is? What might serve as a more exacting counter-definition? In this book the defining issue will be arts relation to the real and to the true , the here and now, but also its unfolding over time and with special attention to the refusal of fixity and formula. In The Painter and Modern Life, Baudelaire famously characterizes modernity in art as the awareness not only of the established, enduring truths but also being alive to the ephemeral qualities that are just as real but impossible to grasp with the tools at the disposal of Realism. Mimesis must reveal yet not reify or otherwise immobilize the transitory fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid. In his unmediated encounter with the real, there is a clue to the nature of aesthetic modernism.

These well-known forays into understanding preconceptual experience have a bearing on establishing what modernism is. Baudelaires key point is that the characteristic moment of modernism is this: modernism seeks out ways to come to terms with those exceptional, unnamed aspects of lived experience, including everyday experience, that elude conventional representation. Representation operates according to the abstract laws of sameness and certainty. Mimesis, sensuous rather than abstract, shapes itself to follow the mobile contours of otherness: the new, the different, the momentary, the unpredictable, the not yet known. Modernists seek strategies of mimesis to disclose these elusive realities without reifying them and so making them seem, falsely, to be merely novel iterations of the same old familiar truths and eternal verities. Arts task is not to reconfirm the familiar but to reveal what is not yet known. This claim raises the question of how we might clarify modernisms still uneasy, unsettling relationship to the real and to the truth.