What is our modernity from Baudelaire to Gorillaz

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the past 30-40 years, in academic circles, it has never been possible to achieve clarity: what is modernity, when was it, and what time do we live in now? There are several different points of view on this issue.

Historian, writer and journalist Kirill Kobrin believes that our time can still be called modernity in a number of parameters (there was no postmodernism), but in the past few decades, the time and the modern type of consciousness began to diverge a little.

The breaking point of historical reflection

The conversation will be about modernity, although I prefer the French term modernité, which migrated into the English-speaking world as modernity, and 10-15 years ago appeared in Russian as “modernity”. In this conversation, it is important to identify points related to ideas about modernity in relation to culture, visual arts, pop culture and literature.

“On October 15, 1764, sitting on the ruins of the Capitol, I plunged into dreams of the greatness of Ancient Rome, and at the same time, at my feet, barefoot Catholic monks sang Vespers on the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter: at that moment the thought flashed through me to write a story of the fall and the destruction of Rome. This is a quote from the autobiography of Eduard Gibbon, 18th century historian and author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon describes how he went on a grand tour of Europe as a young man. This is a traditional practice for English culture: young gentlemen from wealthy families traveled around Europe with teachers and got acquainted with ancient culture. So Gibbon finds himself in Rome, sits on the ruins of one of the main pagan ancient temples and sees Catholic monks walking on it. Christianity and the Catholic Church are what Rome tried to destroy. But the late Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion and continued to exist after its death in the form of the Catholic Church, claiming to be the heir to the great Rome.

At that moment, Gibbon realized that the world in which he is located, a specific number of a specific year is a point of both discontinuity and continuity in relation to Ancient Rome. Everyone who thinks or writes about historical and cultural processes should have such a point of insight from which he builds retrospective reasoning, reflection about the present, and reasoning about the future. The presence of this point is a characteristic feature of the period that is called modernity. The fact that I came across this reasoning was for me the point from which I began to think about what modernity is and in what relationship we are with it.

When modernity began

For the last 30–40 years, there has been a media-academic white noise, consisting of reasoning of the following kind. Point one - modernity is over, we live in postmodernism, or in a postmodern era. The second point, which contradicts the first: modernity is over, and we generally do not understand what we live in. Point three, which contradicts the first two: modernity has not ended, we live in modernity. And finally, the fourth: as the French philosopher Bruno Latour wrote, there has never been modernity. We almost blindly choose one of these options and begin to develop it, or we doubt the concept itself - in the latter case, the historian is trying to understand in what historical framework this concept is relevant.

Everyone who studied in the Soviet and post-Soviet schools knows that first there was the history of the Ancient World, then the history of the Middle Ages, and then the history of the New Time, consisting of two parts - modern and contemporary history, and the boundaries of Modern times were constantly shifting. So, in the Soviet period, it began in 1917 - that is, the first three years of the First World War took place in the New Time, and the last year fell on the Newest. It was as if someone walked through the trenches and explained to the soldiers: "You know, yesterday you fought and died in the New Time, but from tomorrow everything will be different."

Many misunderstandings in reasoning about modernity arise due to the lack of elaboration of our terminology: we often refuse to accept that Russian-language terms come from English and French, but there they mean something else.

In English, "new" is not "modern" but "new". What in the Russian historiographic tradition is called the history of the New Time (Modern History, or History of Modern Times, in the English-speaking tradition) began long before the beginning of modernity itself.

New times

Some historians begin the history of the New Age from the Renaissance, others start from the Great Geographical Discoveries, still others start from the Reformation, and some (for example, Soviet Marxists) - from the era of bourgeois revolutions. Others consider it from the 18th century, because this is the age of the Enlightenment. And the last, most radical view: New history began in 1789, when the Great French Revolution took place. One way or another, all these points are located before the term "modernity" appeared, but few people pay attention to this.

The concept of modernity came about when at some point some Italians (then they would call themselves Florentines, Bolognese or Romans) decided that they were new.

In Western medieval culture, the concept of the new as such did not exist: it was described as a return to the beautiful old. There were, of course, works like Dante's New Life, but they described the mystical experience of renewal, but nothing new could be on earth. And these few people decided that they were new, because they are like the ancients - only they did not rely on the previous period, but on the previous one, therefore they called their time the period of the Renaissance, the Renaissance. They revived Antiquity. Thus, from the very beginning, reliance on the old and, as a consequence, the absence of a definite image of the future was laid in the idea of novelty and New Time.

Then a series of events took place that turned the life of the Western world. The great geographical discoveries not only expanded the world, but also led to the beginning of the colonial conquest and unfair trade and, as a result, the rapid enrichment of the West, which was previously poor in comparison with the East. The foundation has been formed for that economic breakthrough, which we call modernity. The gigantic influx of gold and silver from the colonies, the beginning of international trade and the slave trade are the same features of the New Age as the writings of the Italian humanists.

The next stage was the Reformation, which ended the rule of a single Catholic Church and freed many areas of life from church control. These processes had a lot of side effects (nationalization of the Church, the emergence of a separate English Anglican Church, etc.) and led to an economic leap and at the same time a terrible devastation of Europe during the Thirty Years War. And the last brick in the building of modernity is the Enlightenment (both French and Scottish). It was on this foundation that the American War of Independence and the Great French Revolution took place. Thus, all the conditions were ready, a new story took place, but there was still no modernity.

Modernity and bourgeois consciousness

When does modernité arise? It's a French term, but there was no such word in French before. Essayist and cultural historian Roberto Calasso analyzes the emergence of the concept of "modernity" in the book "La Folie Baudelaire", which is dedicated to the 20 years important for European culture - 1850-60s in Paris. This is the period of the Second Empire, the time of the appearance of the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" and "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" by Karl Marx, the publication of the scandalous novel "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert, the beginning of the poetry career of Charles Baudelaire. It was then that the first modernist movement in the history of art was born - Impressionism. And all this ends with the first proletarian revolution in history and the Paris Commune of 1871.

The word "modernity" appears and runs between Théophile Gaultier and Charles Baudelaire, who in 1863 is looking for something "that we might be allowed to call" modernity "- since there is no better word to express this idea." What was this fresh and implicit idea? What was "modernity" made of? The evil Jean Rousseau (not the famous author of Confessions, but a writer and journalist of the mid-19th century) immediately proclaimed that modernity consists of female bodies and trinkets. However, this word had already burst into the dictionary - and soon no one remembered its humble and frivolous beginning.

In the 1850s and 60s, a radical revolution in French life took place. The capital of France is being rebuilt, becoming the Paris of Louis Bonaparte with a system of boulevards and wide streets, allowing the installation of barricades and the passage of cavalry. An important component of modernity is powerful urbanization, the penetration of the way of life of a big city into all spheres of life. In this atmosphere, a specific feeling arises, and Baudelaire is the first to define this experience, who experiences the city as a new nature.

Photography comes to the aid of the poet. Its appearance leads to a revolution in painting, the banner of which is carried by the impressionists, depicting the attributes of modernity: the city, its amusements, bars, ballet and nature. Manet draws water lilies, but he does it differently from romantics or classicists: he paints nature in miniature, compact - as if it could be wrapped in paper and put in a pocket. The Impressionist landscapes are presented through the optics of the consciousness of the bourgeois who lives in the city, rides in carriages, goes to ballet and rests in country houses. The range of female portraits is reduced to the image of family members or a kept woman. The bourgeois type of consciousness is the main feature of modernity.

Collective nostalgia and personal melancholy

This is how today's concept of modernity is born. Our cities are much the same as in the middle of the 19th century. We think about money in the same way as people of that time. For us, despite all the gender revolutions, the binary family remains the basic basis of relationships. Despite all the crises of the novel, it still remains the main literary genre. We still believe in progress.

Our consciousness has remained largely unchanged since the days of Baudelaire, Marx and the Impressionists.

But today we live in a slightly different world. The discrepancy between time and the modern type of consciousness began 10 to 30 years ago. This is the difference between the so-called objective historical period and the type of cultural and social consciousness. And in terms of their correlation, the history of modernity begins to end. My book On the Ruins of the New is just about this: in each of its heroes (Thomas Mann, Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Sorokin, H. L. Borges, John Berger, etc.) I was interested in his sense of modernity, the discrepancy between this consciousness and sociocultural reality and the emerging hence the presence or absence of images of the future.

After all, modernity since the end of the 19th century is a utopian dream of technical progress that will make everyone happy; this is the era of the technical revolution of the 1950s – 60s with its beautiful and unrealizable promises, the birth of electronic music with its futuristic imagery. Now all this is over and there are no images of the future.

The last attempt at a rational collective justification of a projective future for humanity is the famous Club of Rome of the early 1970s. Since then, the idea of projection has been exclusively alarmist, dystopian in nature. Films about disasters that came to us from H. G. Wells - a technologically and aesthetically transformed steampunk. The structure of this way of thinking is about the same: there will be an apocalypse, after which people will begin to arrange their lives. But this is not an image of the future, but a post-apocalypse.

We can imagine that now a comet will arrive and kill us all, as Mike Naumenko sang, but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism.

This is one of the main features of bourgeois consciousness - the striving for undivided universality and community.

And since there are no images of the future, then two completely different sensations arise: collective nostalgia and personal melancholy. Who claims to be the main European writer today? Sebald. And if we turn to music, art-pop, in the style of which Gorillaz work, it turns out that ten years ago they did funny and groovy things, and in 2018 they suddenly released the melancholic album "The Now Now". The meeting point of modern consciousness and modernity is melancholy.