Samuel Jay Keyser, On his book The Mental Life of Modernism: Why Poetry, Painting, and Music Changed at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Rorotoko, July 15, 2020.
Every account that I know of views Modernism as a cultural phenomenon. [...] There is, however, another way to look at what happened. This book is an attempt to put that way on the table. One can view works of art in terms of unconscious knowledge shared by the artist and the audience. Theorists talk about this knowledge in terms of rules. But they don’t mean rules like “Keep off the grass” or “Never end a sentence with a preposition.” The rules they (and I) have in mind are hypotheses about the character of that unconscious knowledge in terms of which artists do what they do. The artist uses this knowledge to create works of art. The audience uses it to enjoy works of art. The transaction is exactly like the one we are engaged in now. You understand what I write because we share a body of unconscious knowledge called the English language. This knowledge enables us to understand that this sentence backwards is not a product of our shared body of knowledge while it is perfectly intelligible in the other direction. Just now I used this unconscious knowledge to create this sentence—writer as artist. You used it to understand this sentence—reader as audience. Art is an extension of that kind of mental activity.
As many great artists have noted (Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot) there can be no art without rules (read ‘unconscious knowledge’). I would like to suggest that Modernism is the name given to what happened when shared rules were abandoned. It was as if artists had stopped speaking a common language and started using a variety of new ones, ones that audiences were forced to learn and keep up with. Between the time of Manet and Andy Warhol there were over 500 manifestoes of what constitutes a work of art, Dadaism being just one of them. Keeping up was no mean feat.
It's happened before:
When artists abandoned the set of rules that they shared with their audiences, they replaced them with private formats. Audiences had to learn what these private formats were in order to enjoy the art that they produced. In this sense, much modern art has been an acquired taste. It is no accident that college courses in the poetry of John Ashbery or the music of Arnold Schoenberg or the painting of Jackson Pollock were a side effect of Modernism. Prior to the sea change it was perfectly obvious what a poet was saying or a painter depicting. Afterwards, like Dante in purgatory, people needed a guide.
There is a punchline in all of this. Modernism is not sui generis. I believe it is the same phenomenon that led to the abandonment of the mechanical philosophy of the Galilean revolution and of Descartes in the 17th century when Newton’s postulation of action at a distance required the same kind of mental gymnastics; namely, abandoning the idea of an intelligible world for the idea of an intelligible theory. In short, Newtonianism and Modernism are work-arounds devised by the brain on encountering its own limitations.
As an undergraduate, I was a student of English literature. I loved the subject matter, but not the discipline. I was interested in explanation. Practitioners of the trade were interested in interpretation. It is not surprising that I turned to modern linguistics, a field devoted to the tool that gives rise to literature, but devoted to understanding the nature of the tool and what it says about human nature. It was also not surprising that I would return to literature. But what was a surprise was that thinking about things linguistically would shed light on the nature of Modernism.
Do we have more?
The second notion also relates to the history of ideas. If post-Newtonian science and Modernism are instances of the brain coming up against its own limitations, perhaps there are others. For example, modern economics is highly mathematical. One might even think of it as a branch of applied mathematics. But it wasn’t always a branch of mathematics. When did that shift occur? And why? Perhaps the change was a natural one in the normal course of things. But maybe not. Maybe commonsense notions of how human beings behave in the marketplace were simply too slippery to get a handle on.
Of course we do. David Hays developed a model of this back in the 1980s and 1990s. We talked of cultural ranks, and we covered Newton and Modernism and a whole lot more. Here's a guide to that work: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society
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