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CHAPTER ONE

Science, Postmodernity, and the Rise of High Modernism

IN JULY 1945 Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, submitted a presidential report titled Science: The Endless Frontier in which he detailed a plan for federal support of scientific research in peacetime. With a certain utopian flourish, Bush argued that “advances in science, when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages past.”¹ Given the climate of a society transitioning to an uncertain peacetime order, Bush’s arguments for a permanent collaboration between universities, corporations, and the military to conduct basic and applied research found a receptive audience. The technological achievements made by civilian scientists working under the auspices of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the Manhattan Project had made federal officials very aware of the contributions to national strategic policy offered by scientific experts and generated considerable enthusiasm for extending large-scale, government-sponsored research into the postwar era, giving rise to what Alvin Weinberg, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, termed “big science.”² Indeed, by the end of hostilities with Japan, the “great science debate,” as Fortune magazine described, had begun.³ In obvious ways, the rise of Cold War tensions gave considerable urgency to the development of a working accommodation between scientists, military planners, and government officials, an accommodation that was formed through a series of protracted debates over the creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950, over the shortage of scientific manpower that reached a crisis point during the Korean War, and over the challenges that Soviet advancements presented after the famous launching of a Russian satellite in 1957. James Conant, in his 1947 retirement speech as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, summed up conventional wisdom in claiming that “every industrialized nation is dependent on applied science for the continuing welfare of its economy and, alas, for the military security of its frontiers and cities.”⁴ This dependence, argued Conant, meant science “will play a determining role in the outcome of affairs.”

With considerable speed, the scientific establishment was institutionalized nationally within the Department of Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.⁵ Various branches of the armed services, moreover, contributed funding for research into military equipment. For instance, the Office of Naval Research individually sponsored twelve hundred research projects at almost two hundred universities, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research supported university research into guided missiles and aviation devices.⁶ Programs across the country at places such as MIT and Stanford University were the beneficiaries of this funding, dramatically increasing research budgets. Besides their growing role as sites for scientific research, American universities also shouldered the burden of producing an adequate number of trained scientists and engineers, a responsibility that grew in importance as the Cold War lingered.⁷ Graduate fellowships in the physical sciences were funded by several federal agencies including the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Science Foundation as well as by many defense contractors including IBM, General Electric, DuPont, and Westinghouse. But the outbreak of the Korean War proved that the supply of scientific talent did not match demand. Both during and after hostilities, the Office of Defense Mobilization issued regular warnings to the president, arguing that the current number of trained scientists and engineers “may well prove fatally inadequate to the great requirements of American leadership and security.”⁸ In response to a 1957 presidential committee on scientists and engineers, which encouraged the “marshaling” of the nation’s “brainpower resources,” President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which provided federal assistance to states to improve education in math, science, and engineering and increased federal loans and fellowships for college students studying science.⁹ Additionally, a number of curriculum reform movements in the late 1950s, including the Physical Science Study Committee, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, and the Chemical Education Material Study, reshaped school programs in the hopes of garnering student interest.¹⁰ By late 1958, the U.S. Office of Education enthusiastically reported that the nation’s universities would confer one-third more bachelor degrees in the sciences than the previous year and that graduate programs in physics and engineering registered similar increases.¹¹

As the sales of amateur microscopes, science kits, and telescopes escalated, American scientists achieved a corresponding elevation in their social standing. Mass-circulation magazines and television programs introduced the “wizards of the coming wonders,” and several scientists, including J. Robert Oppenheimer with his ubiquitous porkpie hat, became national celebrities.¹² Many scientists were also swept into politics. When the Atomic Energy Commission was established in 1946, a civilian advisory committee was formed to serve as a scientific liaison to commission members. Even more directly, President Truman established the Science Advisory Committee within the Office of Defense Mobilization in 1951 to advise on national security policy, a committee whose original members were some of the most prominent American scientists including J. Robert Oppenheimer, James Conant, and James Killian. Despite their continuing rancor toward military officials over security regulations, postwar scientists received an inordinate amount of respect. Indeed, because they represented “the leaders of mankind’s greatest inquiry into the mysteries of matter, of the earth, the universe, and of life itself,” Time magazine named “fifteen scientists” including I. I. Rabi and Edward Teller the “men of the year” for 1960.¹³ At the moment when science was “at the apogee of its power for good or evil,” everyone in the United States including “statesmen and savants, builders and even priests” had become, according to the editors at Time, the “servants” of the modern scientist.

Of course American society as a whole had difficulty swallowing such a notion.¹⁴ Warning that “the monuments of Big Science—the huge rockets, the high-energy accelerators, the high-flux research reactors” had become “the symbols of our time just as surely as Notre Dame is a symbol of a past age,” Alvin Weinberg was just one of many commentators wondering if federal support of large-scale scientific research was a “marvel or menace.”¹⁵ By the time scientist and writer C. P. Snow delivered his famous 1959 lecture at Cambridge University in which he marked the mutual distrust between the “two cultures” of science and literature, intellectuals in America had already taken umbrage against scientists such as Snow for making disparaging remarks about the supposed failure of men of letters to offer anything more than “imbecile expressions of anti-social feelings.”¹⁶ For instance, in his response to the public debate that emerged after Snow’s lecture, literary critic Lionel Trilling challenged Snow’s promotion of “scientific philosopher-kings” to a position of power, noting that modern science, unlike literature, was incapable of “making a declaration about the qualities that life should have, about the qualities life does not have but should have.”¹⁷ As threats of impending nuclear disaster lingered in the air, many men of letters issued a similar defense of the humanities in the face of the militarization of American life.

The Challenge of High Modernism

Although modern science had become, as J. Robert Oppenheimer explained, part of “the common understanding,” many postwar intellectuals such as Lionel Trilling worried about the implications, both political and psychological, of this intellectual shift, arguing that the scientific method was not the only framework for understanding the surrounding world.¹⁸ Indeed, a conglomeration of artists, writers, and literary critics, both separately and in tandem, rethought the nature of aesthetics within this Cold War landscape, giving rise to the movement known as high modernism. Arguing that bourgeois society had failed in its emancipatory promises, that bureaucratic rationality had usurped the public sphere, and that the scientific method had morphed into a form of domination, high modernists went to great lengths to carve out aesthetics as the last vestige of prior utopian promises vanquished by recent atrocities. The constellation of intellectual traditions that composed the high modernist position in the 1940s and 1950s included the literary practices of the New Criticism, formulated in part by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks; the cultural criticism of the New York intellectuals, including Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and Philip Rahv; the critical theory of the relocated Frankfurt school, centered on the work of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm; and the aesthetic writings of the art critic Clement Greenberg. At its core, high modernism was a defense of the humanities in the face of this rising enthusiasm for science and an argument for a disinterested and polite observance of the natural world in contrast to the aggressive hand of technology.

To many high modernists, the development of modern science went hand-in-hand with the rational administration of social life; for others, it marked the widespread acceptance of unimpeded capitalist growth as a social imperative. Members of the transplanted Institute for Social Research acknowledged both. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), for instance, opened with an oft-repeated claim: “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”¹⁹ Packed with topical references to the military-industrial complex of the early Cold War, One-Dimensional Man was a vociferous critique of the intermingling of science, technology, and capitalist production, an indictment not only of the sacrifices demanded by American politicians but also of the historical trend of mechanization that characterized modern life. The footnotes in his book pointed to an earlier German text by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno that had first outlined the Frankfurt school critique of modern industrial society. Written primarily while the two German scholars were living in southern California during the war, Dialectic of Enlightenment reflected the despondency of two Jewish émigrés coming to terms with the devastation in their homeland and with an American landscape that seemed, in Adorno’s words, to “[display] capitalism in a state of almost complete purity.”²⁰ Borrowing language from Nietzsche, Weber, and Marx, the two writers brushed aside the naïve belief that the technological advances ushered in by the Enlightenment were harbingers of a better tomorrow. Eighteenth-century proponents of the Enlightenment had promised that a commitment to the scientific method would bring emancipation from prerational forms of thought. In fact, the opposite was the case; the Enlightenment had produced unimaginable suffering. “Enlightenment,” argued Horkheimer and Adorno, “dissolves the injustice of the old inequality—unmediated lordship and mastery—but at the same time perpetuates it in universal mediation, in the relation of any one existent to any other.”²¹ Reason, the guiding force of the Enlightenment, was seen as responsible for the domination of nature. Once envisioned as a benign tool for understanding the material world, reason had morphed into an insidious form, into an instrumental rationality that indiscriminately carved up and objectified a living reality. For Horkheimer and Adorno, instrumental rationality was reason stripped of any consideration for the qualitative differences between the objects to which it was applied and reason utilized without any acknowledgment of the ends to which it aimed. Everything in turn was reduced to an abstract equivalent. Even worse, instrumental rationality had reduced man, just as it had reduced nature, to an objective other, making him just as exchangeable as goods, services, and materials. The Enlightenment, in this sense, demanded sacrifice—both on the part of the natural world, which was stripped bare, and on the part of the masses, which produced and consumed the stale goods offered. For Horkheimer and Adorno, mastery over nature had led to mastery over man.

The lessons of Dialectic of Enlightenment were translated into an accessible language in Max Horkheimer’s 1947 Eclipse of Reason, originally a series of lectures given at Columbia University. Continuing his melancholic view of recent history, Horkheimer argued that “the hopes of mankind” expressed in the revolutionary sentiments of the previous decades seemed “to be further from fulfillment today than they were even in the groping epochs when they were first formulated by humanists.”²² Reason, once seen as “a spiritual power living in each man,” had morphed into merely an instrument to calculate the production and distribution of goods, bereft of the power to reflect upon the human condition as such. Horkheimer presented both pragmatism and positivism, which he considered to be the foundations of American thought, as successors to eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy, which had jettisoned its speculative promises by redefining technological progress as progress as a whole. According to Horkheimer, science had become the new theology. Although priding themselves on their open-mindedness, pragmatists and positivists were unwilling to interrogate the foundations—logic, intuition, experimentation—upon which their scientific methods were based. Consequently, according to Horkheimer, the nation’s “official body of scientists” was “more independent of reason than the college of cardinals, since the latter must at least refer to the Gospels” (79). Monopolistic, dogmatic, and paradoxically uncritical, the modern scientist had paved the way for “an ever more rigid control in the institutions of an irrational world” (72), whether those institutions were part of a liberal society or a more authoritarian one.

Dwight Macdonald, the native-born high modernist whose theoretical position most closely paralleled that of the Frankfurt school, offered a similar critique in his 1946 manifesto The Root Is Man. In fact, Macdonald himself admitted that his work had much in common with “that remarkable group of historians of culture centering around Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research.”²³ Macdonald’s goal in that work was twofold. First, in the wake of American atrocities committed during the war, he leveled a vicious critique of scientific rationality and its cultist adherents, blaming them for the recent barbarism. In language comparable to that of Horkheimer and Adorno, Macdonald argued that the scientific method lacked the capacity to make “a qualitative discrimination about something which is by its very nature not reducible to uniform and hence measurable units.”²⁴ Science was thus antithetical to morality. Second, he chastised contemporary radicals for failing to develop a political critique that did not partake of the language of historical progress or human engineering. Tying together the pragmatism of John Dewey, the scientific materialism of Marxism, and the reformist politics of the New Deal under the rubric of scientific optimism, Macdonald chastised supposed radicals for their faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class and for their naïve belief in the supposed laws of historical progress. He also criticized contemporary radicals—from Communists to New Dealers to Progressives—for believing that centralized state power and applied scientific rationality were tools of social change. After the destruction in Japan, Macdonald wrote in the pages of Politics that “it seems fitting that The Bomb was not developed by any of the totalitarian powers … but by the two ‘democracies,’” who continue to express “at least ideological respect to the humanitarian-democratic tradition.”²⁵ The way forward seemed no way at all.

Macdonald was not the only American modernist to reach such conclusions. In many ways, his arguments in The Root Is Man were prefigured by the cultural criticism of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate (two of the early proponents of the form of textual analysis that became known as the New Criticism). Although both Ransom and Tate became influential literary critics, they began their careers through their association with the Fugitive group—a community of southern intellectuals who issued a series of proclamations throughout the 1930s lambasting industrialization, large-scale property holdings, and corporate control of the economy.²⁶ In particular, the Fugitive group, beginning with John Crowe Ransom’s The World’s Body (1938), criticized the growing dominance of scientific discourse in American life. According to Ransom and others, modern science had transformed curiosity into control, seeing the world as merely a collection of objects to be used and discarded and as reducible to a series of laws and measurements. Devoid of compassion, scientific rationality, as Ransom explained, had produced a “totalitarian state” in which its occupants were “not regarded as citizens,” were deprived of their “inalienable rights to activities of their own,” and were considered mere “functions” to the “effectiveness” of the state.²⁷ The goal of the New Criticism, as it developed as a form of literary practice, was to demonstrate that scientific discourse was not comprehensive of the whole range of cognitive possibilities. The language of science, according to Ransom, existed only on the level of symbols—words that operated in discourse as references to semantical objects. Such a use of language deprived “the world of actual objects” of any “qualitative density.” Such a language also became a technique for control, as instrumental engagement with the world and with others became the only mode of apprehension.

The realization that scientific rationality had inexorably led to the gas chambers of Europe meant for many high modernists that the Enlightenment project, with its visions of inevitable progress, had been pregnant with barbarism from the start. The original project of modernity, as outlined in the late eighteenth century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, developed under the belief that the autonomous development of the separate fields of science, moral law, and aesthetics according to their individual logic was the key to the rational development and enrichment of everyday life.²⁸ Beginning with Immanuel Kant’s three critiques, in which the German thinker differentiated theoretical knowledge, practical reason, and aesthetic judgment, Enlightenment philosophers had gone to great lengths to liberate the critical rationality at play within each sphere from historical tradition and external authority. But as instrumental rationality gained primacy under the scientific-military alliance, high modernists argued that Enlightenment progress had turned into a nightmare. Vanquished from the public sphere, moral law and aesthetics seemed to have no place in a world run by scientists. Consequently, the characterization of the current situation as “post-modern” became commonplace.²⁹ Across academic disciplines, many intellectuals, even those uninterested in the project of high modernism, sensed that the project of modernity was over. In his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination, sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that Western society was “at the ending of what is called The Modern Age,” soon to be “succeeded by a post-modern period.”³⁰ According to Mills, “the ideological mark of The Fourth Epoch—that which sets it off from The Modern Age—is that the ideas of freedom and of reason have become moot; that increased rationality may not be assumed to make for increased freedom” (167). Management theorist Peter Drucker, in his own study of the early Cold War landscape, Landmarks of Tomorrow, also sensed a moment of passage. As Drucker explained, “we live in an age of transition, an age of overlap, in which the old ‘modern’ of yesterday no longer acts effectively but still provides means of expression, standards of expectations and tools of ordering, while the new, the ‘post-modern,’ still lacks definition, expression and tools but effectively controls our actions and their impact.”³¹ Similarly, in his 1957 introduction to Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, a collection of essays by a number of prominent postwar intellectuals, Bernard Rosenberg, too, invoked a sense of historical transformation: “In short, the postmodern world offers man everything or nothing. Any rational consideration of the probabilities leads to a fear that he will be overtaken by the social furies that already beset him.”³² For many, the promise of modernity appeared shattered.

The only solution for high modernists was to accept the splintering of art from its entanglement with political, economic, and scientific fields. If the separate movements of high modernism in the 1940s and 1950s amounted to anything, it was the defense of the humanities as a corrective to modern science. Dwight Macdonald’s project, for instance, in The Root Is Man was to “define a sphere which is outside the reach of scientific investigation, and whose value judgments cannot be proved (though they can be demonstrated in appropriate and complete unscientific terms).”³³ For Macdonald, such a realm was “the traditional sphere of art and morality.” He was echoed by Theodor Adorno who noted that “with the objectification of the world in the course of progressive demythologization, art and science have separated.”³⁴ As such, aesthetics became for high modernists the only imaginable field through which the particular, the sensuous, and the contingent might be saved from the desiccated and desiccating methods of science and the only remaining habitat for intellectual engagement in which intuitions were not brutalized by concepts. The project of high modernism, then, was to protect the autonomy of art from outside impositions and to offer a form of experience—the aesthetic—that might mitigate the overbearing tendencies of modern life.

The Autonomy of the Aesthetic

To begin, high modernists charted the historical progression of art from its ritualistic uses to its isolation within a separate sphere of development at the end of modernity. Following in the footsteps of his friend Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, for instance, noted the historical disintegration of the cultic function of art, which had once linked artistic production to the needs of religious and cultural institutions.³⁵ But after the subsequent revolutions in nineteenth-century Europe had severed the connection between artists and their courtly patrons and with “the authority of everything traditional irretrievably lost,” artistic production became implicated with the rising bourgeois market society.³⁶ Freed from the bondage of church and state patrons but lacking monetary support, artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were forced to align with the bourgeoisie and produce artworks for commodity circulation. Whereas premodern art had participated in religious and political life, modern art, in contrast, was a product of capitalist relations, which, having reduced all production to utility and exchange, had allowed aesthetics to develop autonomously. As Adorno explained, even though it railed against capitalist expansion, modern art “[owed] the historical unfolding of its productive forces” to “the advances of a civilizing rationality” (147). For the first time, artists were free to experiment with the formal properties of their respective mediums, a move evident in the litany of artistic styles in literature and painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the problem for modern artists was to defend their newly won autonomy from their bourgeois consumers who often appropriated modern art for their own ideological commitments. Having experienced the power of the New York art market to determine not only the success of particular artists but also the development of specific artistic movements, Clement Greenberg, for instance, was very cognizant of the “umbilical cord of gold” that attached the avant-garde to the financial support of the “elite.”³⁷ This defense of art as a singular discipline was a daunting proposition under such conditions.

Paradoxically, then, aesthetics became an autonomous discipline only when artworks became commodities, that is, only when market forces freed cultural production from serving any other purpose except exchange value. Socially, an artwork became autonomous by remaining “derivative, a mere agent of the law of value,” forever tied in bad faith with “economic considerations.”³⁸ Equally problematic was the recognition that the materials, designs, and schemas used by modern artists were contaminated by the historical context from which they were appropriated. Clement Greenberg, for example, connected the origins of Cubism not merely to the unresolved problems in Cezanne’s picture planes but also to the “scientific outlook” of “the highest stage of industrial capitalism.”³⁹ Consequently, “art’s shame,” as Adorno stated, was its closeness to “the existing pattern of material production” from which it tried to distinguish itself.⁴⁰ But since artworks now received their importance in relation to their exchange value because they had been freed from any overarching political, moral, or epistemic purpose, aesthetics was now ironically provided with a ready-made defense against any utilitarian subsumption. Modern artists did not have to provide any justification for the character of their works except through reference to the formal properties of their respective mediums. As pure, self-referential objects deprived of any standardized purpose, artworks retained an intrinsic autonomy through the unique organization of their materials and elements. “The more heavily the situation weighs upon it,” Adorno explained, “the more firmly the work resists it by refusing to submit to anything heteronomous and constituting itself solely in accordance with its own laws.”⁴¹ This notion of form as the key marker of high modernist aesthetics was most fully developed in the literary practices of the New Critics. Reacting to the trends prevalent in American criticism throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, New Critics such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Cleanth Brooks went to great lengths to defend the aesthetic work as a unique source of meaning that was irreducible to historical, biographical, moral, or psychological explanations.⁴² Calling for close readings and textual analysis to protect art from both propagandists and complacent readers, the New Critics argued that the modernist poem had no meaning or purpose extrinsic to its formal structure or to the poetic techniques with which it was constructed. In this way, aesthetics was safeguarded within its own space of development.

Officially announcing this new school of analysis in his 1941 book The New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom defined the poetic object as a unified structure of various elements, often contradictory and conflicting, held together by certain literary devices. Weaving together words, images, symbols, feelings, and rhythms into the “complex of meaning” that constituted the poem as a whole, the modernist poet attended to the “heterogeneity” of his elements while maintaining an overall “principle of assembly.”⁴³ The New Critic who most thoroughly outlined the formal properties of modernist poetry was Cleanth Brooks, whose Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn (1947) marked the theoretical culmination of the project begun by Tate and Ransom. Envisioning the modern poem as an unforced balancing of discordant attitudes and feelings such as pity and laughter, tenderness and frustration, and love and intellect, Brooks examined the use of four essential elements—paradox, wit, irony, and metaphor—that constituted the modernist poem. Paradox, for Brooks, was the juxtaposition of incongruous views in a given situation, such as the modernist refusal to suppress poetic references to the Christian in the celebration of the pagan. Similarly, wit was the ability to attend to the nuances of language, in particular, the refusal to privilege the denotative or dictionary meaning of words over the countless connotative meanings that might arise within the context of the poem itself. Irony was used, like wit, to temper or qualify a particular statement by offering a “reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities.”⁴⁴ The form most appropriate for these expressions of wit, paradox, and irony was of course metaphor, arguably the most important term for the New Critics. Given the poet’s unwillingness to sacrifice the complexity of experience in the name of direct expression, metaphorical comparisons allowed for subtle shifts in tone, paradoxical attitudes, and pointed suggestions. As a structural component, metaphor also provided the context within which divergent images, words, and ideas gained meaning. Consequently, as Brooks argued, “comparison is the poem in a structural sense” (15). In this way, the form of the poem was not something that merely contained the poem’s content; form was inseparable from the content by virtue of the subtle unity achieved. Therefore, since its meaning was not dependent upon any mimetic relation to the external world, the poem was the site of a distinct experience, wholly determined by the inner dialectic of its elements. Poetry, then, was similar to painting as “a pattern of resolved stresses,” that is, as an ever-evolving matrix of “resolutions and balances and harmonizations” that submitted to no extrinsic standard or preconceived system (203).

Cleanth Brooks’s reference to modernist painting marked the similarity between the formalism of the New Critics and the defense of abstract art offered by high modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg.⁴⁵ Modernism, for both Greenberg and Brooks, meant purity, self-definition, and self-criticism, that is, the willingness “to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art.”⁴⁶ In an endless series of reviews throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the famed New York art critic famously outlined the basics of abstract painting—its all-over composition, its flatness, and its optical effect—that marked its autonomy. Equally worried about the gross assimilation of art for political or entertainment purposes, Greenberg outlined the means by which modern artists assured “that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.” This involved a “radical reduction” of the medium itself.⁴⁷ Most important, abstract artists, according to Greenberg, had correctly jettisoned the imperative to represent external reality, an imperative that had once forced them to create “the illusion of a boxlike cavity” on their canvas to maintain the sense of three-dimensional space. But by preserving the “integrity of the picture plane,” modern painters gradually sacrificed “verisimilitude” for the relentless experimentation with the effects of paint on the canvas. By abandoning representation and turning to abstraction as a guiding principle, modern artists now treated “every part of the canvas equivalent,” creating all-over compositions woven “into a tight mesh whose principle of formal unity is contained and recapitulated in each thread, so that we find the essence of the whole work in every one of its parts.”⁴⁸ Consequently, the aesthetic effect was “optical rather than pictorial,” created through the “relations of color, shape, and line largely divorced from descriptive connotations.”⁴⁹ Through the flatness and impenetrability of the picture plane, the abstract painting was a solid object, no longer a vehicle for transcendence nor a mirror for the outside world.

By clinging to a discussion of formal properties, high modernists placed the aesthetic object outside any discussion of artistic intention or audience reception. In his 1933 work The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, T. S. Eliot laid the framework for such modernist reading practices by arguing that the enjoyment of poetry was contingent upon acceptance of the poem’s fundamental separation from both the author and the reader. Eliot claimed that the “mature stage” of critical reading occurred “when we cease to identify ourselves with the poet we happen to be reading” and recognize that “the poem has its own existence, apart from us.”⁵⁰ Critiquing most literary theories for reducing the aesthetic experience to merely a psychological or emotive state, John Crowe Ransom followed Eliot in defending the poetic object as “nothing short of a desperate ontological or metaphysical manoeuvre.”⁵¹ Consequently, Ransom directly challenged the “Humanists,” who were using literary criticism to promote the “Aristotelian moral canon,” and the “Proletarians,” who appropriated literature for “the cause of loving-comradeship.”⁵² All attempts at mimetic representation, despite even the most politically progressive intentions, ushered in, as Theodor Adorno explained, an immediate accommodation to the world. Echoing Adorno’s rejection of social realism, Ransom praised the German critic’s willingness to provide a “special asylum of art” and to “[award] to it an imperium in imperio,” thereby helping to move aesthetics away from the politics of “collectivism.”⁵³

In railing against any extra-aesthetic uses of art, whether for consumer gratification, for politics, or for profit, high modernists appropriated the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant to defend the passive, disinterested reception of art and the noncognitive dimension of the aesthetic experience. As John Ransom explained, modern criticism “leans again upon ontological analysis as it was meant to do by Kant.”⁵⁴ Having set the agenda for modernity by distinguishing between the three spheres of intellectual and cultural development (science, morality, and art) and having, in his third critique on the nature of judgment, separated aesthetics from other realms of knowledge, the German philosopher had done “everything possible to prevent the confusion” between art and science.⁵⁵ Consequently, Clement Greenberg affectionately acknowledged Kant as “the first real Modernist” and argued that the philosopher’s aesthetic ideas remained misunderstood by most critics.⁵⁶ The revolution in epistemology that Kant famously initiated in his first critique overthrew most forms of empiricism by showing that knowledge claims stemmed not from the character of the objects themselves but instead from the thinking subject. Noting that all experience was predicated on the ability of the knowing subject to subsume the perceptions it received under particular categories, Kant argued that the faculty of understanding contained those concepts necessary for categorizing perceptions and thereby making them meaningful. Similarly, the faculty of judgment was the capacity for subsuming perceptions under the rules provided by the concepts themselves. But Kant famously revised the role of judgment when he addressed the problem of aesthetics. In the case of particulars for which there was no corresponding universal given, judgment was forced to develop its own universal. Such reflective judgments, “obliged to ascend from the particular in nature to the universal,” were not successful at locating a proper concept for the given material; consequently the act of judgment occurring in the absence of a given concept left the subject with only a nonconceptual awareness of order.⁵⁷ The elements of the individual aesthetic object might exhibit a coherence and unity, but the concept with which to judge such order was not given in advance. For Kant, there were no a priori rules or principles for making a judgment about a particular artistic object. Consequently, since such an object was not understandable by reference to any prior concepts, it existed for no predetermined purpose. Asserting its autonomy by virtue of the fact that there existed no predetermined concept with which to consume it, the object retained its beauty simply through its particular form. As Kant explained, “beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose” (73). Aesthetics as such was now separate from the governing hand of science or morality. John Crowe Ransom noted that Kant had “carefully disengaged the artistic motive from ‘pleasure’ in the common sense; then from ‘usefulness,’ which would involve it in a labor for the sake of pleasure; then from the pursuit of the ethical good.”⁵⁸ In a world governed by the exchange principle, the sheer uselessness of the modernist work revealed its contradictory position in society.

High modernists appropriated Kant’s defense of the aesthetic work as a cognitively nonsubsumable object as a way to challenge the perceived encroachment of scientific discourse into everyday life. To counteract the ruthless domination of the particulars of life by the categorical claims of science, high modernists promoted the disinterested, purposeless, and humble reception of art. “The world of art,” John Crowe Ransom asserted, “is the actual world which does not bear restriction; or at least defies the restrictiveness of science and offers enough fullness of content to give us the sense of the actual object.”⁵⁹ For this reason, the New Critics waged their famous war against paraphrase. Arguing that the truth of the poem was the unique way in which the poet had worked out the various tensions—rhetorical, semantic, and philosophical—within it, the New Critics claimed that the meaning of the poem was not reducible to a series of propositions. Indeed, the “heresy of paraphrase” was the “violence” done to “the internal order of the poem itself” by believing the poem to be a verifiable, “logical conclusion.”⁶⁰ Such Kantian residues appeared in the aesthetic modernism of Theodor Adorno as well. Arguing that modernist works were a special form of “knowledge” as “nonconceptual objects,” Adorno claimed that the “total purposelessness” of the work “gives the lie to the totality of purposefulness in the world of domination, and only by virtue of this negation … has existing society up to now become aware of another that is possible.”⁶¹ High modernists, in this regard, set up a “dual theory of truth,” contrasting the nonviolent synthesis of the particular and the universal within the modernist work as a “rival mode” of knowledge to the “functional” nature of science.⁶² But fearing that their discussions of form seemed at times to echo rational discourse in an instrumental way, high modernists also argued that artists needed to be decidedly innovative, continuously breaking apart received traditions in an endless series of determinate negations. The modernist object needed to exhibit some form of confusion, distortion, or incalculable defect, something that challenged its formal brilliance in order to distinguish it from any simple piece of craftsmanship and to ensure the endless overturning of received tradition. Consequently, the poetic work was most successful when its language escaped “the subjective intention that occasioned the use of the word” and the musical piece was most successful when it temporarily shot beyond its structure with “a few superfluous notes or measures.”⁶³ Modern artists avoided merely producing forms of consolation by refusing to create just pleasant or beautiful forms and by refusing to produce mere decoration. Art, if anything, was to resist such silly affirmations by revealing instead “what is ugliest and most distorted” through the disruption of conventions.⁶⁴

Arguably the most famous analysis of the history of modernism as the dialectical unfolding of the advances and limitations of previous artistic traditions was Clement Greenberg’s reading of the paintings of Jackson Pollock, and Greenberg’s art criticism in large part was devoted to an analysis of the rise of abstract painting in the twentieth century as the inevitable evolution of this investigation into the formal properties of the medium. Beginning in the late nineteenth century with Paul Cezanne, who was, according to Greenberg, the “most copious source of what we know as modern art,” contemporary painters dealt with the ambiguous position of art in bourgeois society.⁶⁵ Cezanne, in his mission to reaffirm the traditional Renaissance project of presenting “an ample and literal rendition of the illusion of the third dimension” (84), particularly in the face of Impressionism’s failure to maintain pictorial depth in its exploration of color, ironically called attention to the surface of the canvas at the expense of maintaining the appearance of depth. In reducing his images to basic “masses and shapes” as a way to translate “the color method of the Impressionists” into solid brushstrokes, Cezanne inadvertently flattened his images, making “his backgrounds just as emphatic as the objects in the foreground.”⁶⁶ This cunning of art history paved the way for Cubism, which furthered Cezanne’s project by breaking up the pictorial object and its background into “little facet planes” through which “all space became one, neither ‘positive’ nor ‘negative.’”⁶⁷ Paralleling this revolutionary development was the radical exploration of the Impressionist use of color by Henri Matisse, who, by stressing the intensity of color as a sheer surface manifestation, treated “the painted surface as something breathing and open.”⁶⁸ In this way, the Cubists, by flattening the picture plane, and Matisse, by treating color as a solid form in and of itself, heralded the transition from figurative to non-figurative painting, a project that, according to Greenberg’s chronology, was completed by Jackson Pollock.

Clement Greenberg’s adoration of the early work of Jackson Pollock was predicated on the artist’s willingness to dispense with pristine images. In his 1945 review of Pollock’s second one-man show at the Art of This Century, in which he praised the artist “as the strongest painter of his generation,” Greenberg noted that Pollock was “not afraid to look ugly—all profoundly original art looks ugly at first.”⁶⁹ Having criticized Picasso’s later works in which the artist failed to transcend the boundaries of Cubist form by eliminating any moment of spontaneity, Greenberg celebrated Pollock’s success in moving beyond Cubism with his famous “drip” paintings of the late 1940s. In a series of canvases, including Full Fathom Five, Lavender Mist, and Autumn Rhythm, Pollock pointed the way to the “formal essence” of painting by asserting the “ambiguous flatness” of the canvas, thereby allowing him to “control the oscillation between an emphatic physical surface and the suggestion of depth beneath it.”⁷⁰ The optical impact of Pollock’s style, with its subtle undulations, controlled chaos, vacillating layers of texture, and all-over composition, offered an aesthetic experience that freed the viewer from the heavy-handedness and didacticism of most art. Of course, Pollock’s own understanding of his art, predicated, as we will see, on “romantic modernist” ideas of spontaneity and release, had little in common with Greenberg’s formalism. But Greenberg’s success in promoting his particular reading of Pollock’s art demonstrated the success of high modernism overall.

Blending together the beautiful and the sublime and offering a form of experience in which the sensuous remained untrammeled, the high modernist artwork was seen as the privileged site for cultural rejuvenation. Ever more difficult and ever more hermetic, such works were reminders of the lost realm of the sensuous—those affections and inclinations that had been brushed aside by the impersonal, means-ends rationality of science—not by the mystical or sentimental examples of the Romantics but by merely maintaining a contradictory position in society.⁷¹ In part, then, high modernists hoped that the aesthetic experience might teach the viewer to respect the transient and the ephemeral in and of itself without reference to abstractions. Clement Greenberg, reacting to the apparent cultural vacuum in America, expressed this sentiment most clearly: “I think a poor life is lived by any one who doesn’t regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from that which is gazed at, listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon.”⁷² Although each critic promoted slightly different modernist practitioners (Adorno favoring Arnold Schoenberg and Samuel Beckett, Clement Greenberg favoring Jackson Pollock and Henri Matisse, Lionel Trilling favoring Henry James and John Keats, and Cleanth Brooks favoring William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot), all argued that such art needed to figure within public life as prominently as science did. The distinctiveness of the modernist work—its formal autonomy and its unique assembly of materials—testified to the possibility or at least the illusion that the world might be different. Continuing the Fugitive critique of science, Cleanth Brooks argued that the tempering hand of modern art might serve as a fundamental corrective: “A diet of straight science, because science is power-knowledge, may contribute to hubris; whereas poetry … constantly reminds man that the thing described lies outside man’s control, and thus rebukes hubris.”⁷³ The problem, as Brooks realized, was finding adequate avenues in which the language of modernism might be translated. As federal funds flowed into universities for military research and scientists became national celebrities, high modernists waged a campaign within universities, publishing houses, and art galleries to defend the humanities as an antidote to modern science.

The Institutionalization of High Modernism

In January 1962 the Saturday Evening Post ran a front-page cover painted by Norman Rockwell, the popular commercial illustrator and artist. The image featured a wealthy-looking art collector, umbrella and hat in hand, intently pondering a large abstract canvas, unaware that Rockwell had made him the focus of attention. The editors of the magazine joined Rockwell in his playful joke, asking whether the man was “about to reach for his checkbook to buy a prize-winning work titled ‘The Insubstance of Infinity’” or whether he was “imagining his teen-age daughter calling it ‘Strictly from Blobsville.’”⁷⁴ Rockwell continued the joke in describing his experimentation with the Pollockesque-style canvas on the cover. According to Rockwell, he had recently attended a class in modern art techniques where he “learned a lot and loved it,” although he did eventually tire of “waving a dripping brush” and had to invite the man painting the windows in his studio to help finish it. Sarcasm aside, Rockwell’s commentary reflected the astounding success high modernism achieved in the 1940s and 1950s. Several legendary moments marked the ascendancy of high modernism. In 1944 director Alfred Barr facilitated the acquisition of Jackson Pollock’s She-Wolf by the Museum of Modern Art, giving institutional recognition to the abstract expressionist movement and paving the way for the escalating “Pollock market” after the painter’s untimely death.⁷⁵ The “picture boom,” as Art News described, that followed the favorable economic climate after the war also advanced the cause of modern art.⁷⁶ In 1949, William Faulkner, praised for his insights into the psychological landscape of the human mind, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, helping to advance the reputation of the aging modernist writer. Similarly, despite considerable debate because of his political leanings, Ezra Pound won the Bollingen Prize in poetry that same year. In 1956 T. S. Eliot, whom Delmore Schwartz acknowledged as having his own “literary dictatorship,” famously lectured to a crowd in Minneapolis, equaling, according to one account, “that of three hockey games.”⁷⁷ Finally, in the most public moment of recognition, poet Robert Frost and abstract artist Mark Rothko were invited to the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1960, standing beside politicians, celebrities, and sports figures as representatives of American culture.

Despite such public exposure, appearing in photographs on the pages of countless mass-circulation magazines, high modernists recognized that their true cultural project rested elsewhere. The problem of modernism in the postwar era, as David Hollinger has argued, was neither a problem of authorship nor even of critical attention but a problem of readership.⁷⁸ Although experimental literary works were still in production and abstract paintings were filling gallery walls, the task in the 1940s was to promote modernism by gaining new financial support for artists and writers after the end of New Deal–sponsored federal subsidies, developing an educational curriculum to consolidate reading practices, and carving out avenues to translate modernist forms to an educated public. In 1946 Clement Greenberg, for instance, was troubled that “there exists in this country no self-assured, self-intelligible class of connoisseurs and amateurs of art with defined and independent tastes.”⁷⁹ Culture required cultivation, literary education required educators, abstract painting needed gallery space and promotional support, and poetic production depended upon publishers and sales. Therefore, despite the seemingly ever-present elitism of high modernist rhetoric, many critics made deliberate efforts to carve out an intellectual milieu for modernist works. In his contribution to the 1952 Partisan Review symposium “Our Country and Our Culture,” Lionel Trilling, for instance, encouraged the growth of a “new intellectual class” to counter the erosion of public tastes, and he asked his fellow men of letters to help “in the continuation of the traditional culture in the traditional forms.”⁸⁰ Along with Jacques Barzun and W. H. Auden, Trilling served as a literary consultant for two book clubs, the Reader’s Subscription and the Mid-Century Book Society, and wrote a number of introductions for the selected works.⁸¹ Other high modernists, including many New York intellectuals, also took seriously this responsibility. Philip Rahv wrote several introductions to rereleases of works by Henry James, Franz Kafka, and Leo Tolstoy for Dial Press and the Modern Library, and William Phillips engaged in a similar project for English translations of the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Many other modernists including Allen Tate, Irving Howe, and Robert Penn Warren worked with major commercial publishers such as Henry Holt and Prentice Hall to publish collected volumes of writings by modernist writers. Likewise, Cleanth Brooks coedited four famous textbooks of literary criticism (Understanding Poetry, Understanding Fiction, Understanding Drama, and An Approach to Literature), and the success of those collections prompted countless other modernist critics to publish similar volumes, including the ubiquitous Norton Anthology collections. The most noteworthy pedagogical effort to introduce high modernism to a broad audience occurred in a series of “Round Table” discussions in the pages of Life magazine.⁸² Appropriating the idea from Fortune magazine, which had held a series of public discussions in the 1930s concerning the international economic situation, the editors of Life, under the instruction of Henry Luce himself, routinely gathered prominent intellectuals to discuss the state of American culture. The most famous was the 1948 “Life Round Table on Modern Art,” featuring “fifteen distinguished critics and connoisseurs,” including Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Alfred Frankfurter, and H. W. Janson, all of whom attempted to translate high modernist art into an accessible vernacular. In fact, moderator Russell Davenport offered a suggestion on the problem of the “esthetic experience,” telling the confused Life reader that when confronting a piece of abstract art “he should look devotedly at the picture, rather than at himself, or at any aspect of his environment,” language borrowed directly from Clement Greenberg.⁸³

Even more dramatically, high modernism was institutionalized in English classrooms across the country. The rise of the New Criticism was aided, as Gerald Graff has noted, by the explosion in undergraduate and graduate enrollments in the 1950s, caused in part by federal subsidies for war veterans to attend college and by a growing middle-class population whose employment prospects were linked to educational status.⁸⁴ As literary experts, New Critical practitioners gained cultural capital for their possession of a formal body of knowledge and a recondite professional vocabulary, and their success in shaping the nature of criticism was the result of the ease with which their reading practices were converted into a standardized teaching method. The codification of what John Crowe Ransom referred to as “Criticism, Inc., or Criticism, Ltd.” was aided by the publication of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938) and their Understanding Fiction (1943), two textbooks that disseminated the methods of the New Criticism into university classrooms. A number of academic journals devoted to New Critical reading practices appeared as well, including Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Sewanee Review. New Critical practitioners also took over English departments at Yale, Princeton, and Cambridge, and independent poets such as Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Allen Tate found academic positions. John Crowe Ransom even obtained financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation for his School of English, a summer program at Kenyon College to educate English instructors on New Critical practices. Indeed, the New Criticism, as a commentator in the Antioch Review explained, “achieved for literature a superior status within the hierarchy of society’s aspirations and values: the ‘difficult’ writer, the free writer, even if he is not read, has now come to be respected, and his societal role has at least a basis from which to develop toward some sort of leadership.”⁸⁵

Many of the literary critics associated with the New York intellectuals joined with the New Critics in promoting and canonizing modernist literature.⁸⁶ While critics such as Irving Howe had little patience for the aloof aestheticism of many of the New Critics, the similarities of both groups of modernist critics outweighed their differences. For Howe, both groups were “equally assertive in affirming their minority splendor, equally ideological in styles of thought.”⁸⁷ Both groups were also interested in carving out an antibourgeois cultural stance that was unconnected to utopian politics or fellow traveling. Thus, despite a certain level of disagreement, it was “no wonder conflict melted into a gingerly friendship, plight calling to plight, ambition to ambition.” Delmore Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Rahv attended Ransom’s summer program; Irving Howe readily used New Critical methods in the classroom when he taught at Brandeis University in the 1950s; and essays by Theodor Adorno, Philip Rahv, and William Phillips appeared in Kenyon Review while articles by Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom were published in Partisan Review. More important, both groups were instrumental in promoting modernism as a literary form. Beginning with Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle (1931) and continuing through Cleanth Brooks’s Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and Irving Howe’s The Idea of the Modern (1967), these critics developed and expanded a canon of high modernist writers, a list that included T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Butler Yeats, and a host of others.

Two modernist writers in particular, Henry James and William Faulkner, were promoted throughout the 1940s and 1950s as symbols of the American avant-garde. As Lawrence Schwartz has demonstrated, both the Fugitive critics and the New York intellectuals promoted Faulkner’s writing in the 1940s through the publication of his collected works and through a series of flattering reviews and literary studies as a way to promote their own cultural agendas.⁸⁸ Gaining monetary assistance from the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, which helped support several modernist journals in the 1940s such as Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, and Hudson Review, they refashioned Faulkner into a literary iconoclast whose blend of traditional American sentiment with an innovative European writing style echoed their own humanist commitments. Faulkner, who was suffering financially from a lack of sales in the early 1940s, worked particularly well for this collection of modernist critics because he represented both the southern renaissance promoted by the New Critics and the existential anguish favored by the New York intellectuals. Similar cultural prestige was also placed upon the work of Henry James. In his 1941 introduction to James’s collected short novels, Philip Rahv declared the novelist “among the two or three American writers” who was able “to invent and put to creative use the imaginative methods of the twentieth century.”⁸⁹ Similarly, Dwight Macdonald’s The Root Is Man (1946) celebrated James’s critical temperament; Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950) contained numerous references to the modernist writer; and Irving Howe’s Politics and the Novel (1957) included an essay on James. Several other works and collections by F. W. Dupree, F. R. Leavis, and F. O. Matthiessen also helped to solidify James’s importance to American letters. Although the more revolutionary hopes embedded within high modernism were of course never realized, the surprising success that many critics had in disseminating these cultural forms, although in a contained fashion, contributed to a decisive cultural shift. Even though many still clung to their minority status, the cultural prestige of high modernism was solidified as the years wore on. Never one to admit that his job was done, Clement Greenberg even marked with dismay the change he had helped produce: “The avant-garde writer gets ahead now, and inside established channels: he obtains university or publishing or magazine jobs, finds it relatively easy to be published himself, is asked to lecture, participate in round tables, etc., writes introductions to the classics, and can even win the status of a public figure.”⁹⁰ Unexpectedly, the culture in the United States had changed.

The ascendancy of high modernism, however, was not a total blessing for its proponents; indeed, the energetic and successful defense of the humanities in the face of the supposed vulgarities of modern science resulted in a considerable dilution of the critical and oppositional stance of highbrow culture. Four factors in particular distorted the high modernist project. The first was the limitations associated with professionalism. Obviously the institutionalization of the New Criticism contributed to its meteoric rise, but its classroom dissemination by second-rate interpreters effaced much of the sophistication and political critique offered by its original practitioners.⁹¹ As a standardized teaching method, the New Criticism lost much of its critical edge. Writing in the pages of Partisan Review, Delmore Schwartz noted that as the New Criticism “[attached] literature to the university,” the modernist canon became “merely a set of courses in the departments of English and comparative literature.”⁹² Even Lionel Trilling, the high modernist seemingly most attached to his professional identity, expressed his own concerns in a well-known short story, “Of This Time, of That Place,” a semiautobiographical piece about a published poet and university professor whose encounter with a bohemian student precipitates his own anxieties about the demands that scholarship and decorum had forced upon him.⁹³ Trilling realized, as his friendship with many of the emerging Beat writers in the 1950s confirmed, that high modernism lived in part with a bad conscience.

Just as problematic was the fact that high modernism at times collapsed into mere elitism. The subtle theoretical position of Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, for instance, was not matched by other promoters of high modernism such as Dwight Macdonald who lacked their sophisticated vocabulary with which to make aesthetic comparisons. Adorno’s essays on music and poetry and Greenberg’s commentaries on modern art were thoughtful discussions of these respective mediums. Macdonald’s cultural criticism, however, was less a sustained analysis of artistic developments than an angry diatribe against “a too ready acceptance of the avant-garde by the public.”⁹⁴ Having no notion or definition of the good, the beautiful, the sublime, or the transcendent and no understanding of the problem of form, Macdonald was unable to make convincing arguments about particular works of art. Claiming that high culture’s major contribution was not its aesthetic practices per se but its “desperate effort … to erect again the barriers between the cognoscenti and the ignoscenti that had been breached by the rise of Masscult,” Macdonald offered no explanation for his adoration of Pablo Picasso over Jackson Pollock or James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man over his Finnegan’s Wake.⁹⁵ Instead, as the numerous revisions of his famous essay “Masscult and Midcult” demonstrated, Macdonald offered only the restoration of “the cultural distinctions that have become increasingly blurred since the industrial revolution.”⁹⁶ Consequently, his defense of high culture was easily lampooned by the middlebrow producers he chastised. Writing in Harper’s magazine, editor Russell Lynes noted that the newest form of “snobbishness” in American society was no longer based upon wealth or family ties but on “high thinking,” emblematic of those intellectuals determined to divide the country into castes based upon levels of cultural consumption: “All middlebrows, presumably, would have their radios taken away, be suspended from society until they had agreed to give up their subscriptions to the Book-of-the-Month, turned their color reproductions over to a Commission for the Dissolution of Middlebrow Taste, and renounced their affiliation with all educational and other cultural institutions whatsoever.”⁹⁷ Appropriating Lynes’s schema and his sarcasm, Life magazine presented photographic images of the three cultural types—one gazing at a Picasso, one enjoying a Grant Wood reproduction, and one ogling a calendar pinup—and provided a classification chart for readers to plot their own cultural tastes according to their preferences for specific reading material, clothes, furniture, games, and even salads.⁹⁸

While such playful denunciations were mildly troubling, high modernists faced a third, and more difficult, problem. Their defense of modernist artworks as absolute commodities—their uselessness, their purposelessness, and their status as completely surplus labor—meant that such works were easily appropriated by bourgeois consumers for ulterior purposes. Willem de Kooning once proclaimed that “it is exactly in its uselessness that [art] is free,” but he soon realized, like many of his fellow painters, that such freedom came at a price.⁹⁹ Feted within mass-market publications, abstract art was appropriated, as Harold Rosenberg explained, by “educational and profit-making enterprises” for use in “color reproductions, design adaptations, [and] human-interest stories.”¹⁰⁰ For instance, Jackson Pollock’s art dealer, Betty Parsons, allowed Vogue photographer Cecil Beaton to pose fashion models in front of the artist’s abstract paintings for a magazine spread.¹⁰¹ The photographs, which appeared in a 1951 issue, were one of many growing links among the fashion industry, modern advertising practices, and abstract art. Modernism also became decoration. Noting that “the blossoming of art galleries” had led to an “increasing interest” in private collections for the home, Betty Pepis, the home editor at the New York Times, offered a series of articles on proper display techniques for abstract art in the home, giving advice on proper framing, wall locations, lighting, and furniture arrangements.¹⁰² Modern art was soon promoted in a number of advertisements as the perfect accessory for the modern home and as a symbol of cultural sophistication. Similarly, the editors at Playboy magazine refashioned the modern urban bachelor as a discriminating connoisseur of modern art and music. Modernism had become the latest form of conspicuous consumption.

Finally, in the ultimate moment of appropriation, high modernism was “borrowed” by politicians and intellectuals as a cultural tool in fighting the Cold War. Along with American symphonies, modern jazz, and Hollywood films, abstract art was one of many cultural exports federal agencies sent abroad as political propaganda in the 1950s.¹⁰³ Seemingly devoid of radical politics, antithetical to the social realism of the Popular Front era, outwardly universal while simultaneously very American, abstract expressionism became the perfect symbol of the intellectual, artistic, and personal freedom inherent to Western democracies and was seemingly antithetical to the oppressive cultures of totalitarian regimes. Unable to use federal funds directly because of negative publicity but determined to use abstract art as a symbol of American individualism in an ever-expanding cultural Cold War, the U.S. Information Agency and the CIA turned to anti-Communist supporters within the Museum of Modern Art for assistance. Under an expanded International Council branch, the Museum of Modern Art arranged a variety of exhibits of American art, including a major show of abstract expressionism titled “New American Painting” that traveled through European countries in 1958 and 1959. Former director Alfred Barr, in his catalogue introduction to the exhibition, reaffirmed the connection between the expressive freedom of abstract painters and the political freedom in Western countries: “They defiantly reject the conventional values of the society which surrounds them, but they are not politically engaged even though their paintings have been of freedom in a world in which freedom connotes a political attitude.”¹⁰⁴ Despite the politics of many abstract artists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, which often ran counter to American foreign policy aims, the apolitical and purposeless nature of modernist works left them quite vulnerable.

Compromised, diluted, and appropriated, high modernism consequently suffered under its cultural success. By the end of the 1950s, literary critic Harry Levin considered it more than appropriate to ask in a Massachusetts Review article “what was modernism?” According to Levin, the success of the movement had tempered its original revolutionary impulse, so much so that “the enfant terrible” of the movement’s early years had matured into “the elder statesman” of the mid-century scene.¹⁰⁵ Noting that the Institute of Modern Art in Boston had recently changed its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art and that a new apartment building in Manhattan had been christened the Picasso, Levin remarked that “we Americans have smoothly rounded some sort of cultural corner” (274) in which the bohemian had become fashionable, if not respectable. The official notice that the project of high modernism was in trouble was Lionel Trilling’s well-known 1961 essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” written as a personal response to the introduction of a required course on modernist literature within the core curriculum at Columbia University. Noting the all-too-easy acceptance of the existential anguish of Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche by his students, Trilling wondered if the contemporary adoration of such literature had merely resulted in “the socialization of the antisocial, or the acculturation of the anticultural, or the legitimization of the subversive.”¹⁰⁶ Under such conditions, high modernism was open to severe criticism.

Beyond High Modernism

Two challenges to the hegemony of high modernism appeared in the 1940s and 1950s. The first was an appropriation of earlier and more spontaneous forms of artistic practice that attempted to overcome the rigid divide between art and life. The rise of romantic modernism began innocently enough in a Harlem apartment one summer evening in 1948 when a 22-year-old Columbia University undergraduate named Allen Ginsberg, lost and lonely in Morningside Heights, began to pleasure himself. A student of two renowned champions of high modernism, Lionel Trilling and Mark van Doren, Ginsberg had spent the previous academic year trying to come to terms with their austere visions. But after an evening of reading William Blake and masturbating in his bed, Ginsberg received his own visions. Absentmindedly glancing at Blake’s poem “Ah! Sunflower,” Ginsberg heard “a very deep earthen grave voice in the room,” the voice of Blake himself telling Ginsberg that the young college student was the weary sunflower searching for spiritual redemption.¹⁰⁷ With this revelation came an increased sense of perception, a “sudden visual realization of the same awesome phenomenon,” allowing Ginsberg to see through the façade of the world around him and to gain “a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise” (123). Floating away from his own body, peering past temporal existence, and achieving a form of bliss, Ginsberg promised himself to never abandon the experience: “Never deny the voice—no, never forget it, don’t get lost mentally wandering in other spirit worlds or American or job worlds or advertising worlds or war worlds or earth worlds.” Even more convinced of his visionary experience when the feeling again came over him later that week in the Columbia University bookstore, Ginsberg set out on a lifelong spiritual journey to convince others of their connection to this eternal consciousness.

Ginsberg’s immediate response was to share this experience with his university professors. None were encouraging. As one of Ginsberg’s biographers has described, “when Allen ran into the English department office, saying, ‘I just saw the light!’ Mark van Doren was the only professor who was sympathetic and asked him what he meant. Trilling and the others thought Allen had finally gone over the edge.”¹⁰⁸ Even more troubling, Ginsberg had difficulty finding an adequate poetic voice of his own to translate his Blakean vision. Committed to the formal structure of poetry with its determined rhyme and syncopated meter and heavily borrowing motifs from his Romantic predecessors, Ginsberg merely produced straightforward, closed descriptions of his original experience. Eventually realizing that his Blakean vision was not simply about a spiritual reconciliation with the eternal but the transcendence of the quotidian through a deeper, more meaningful investigation of the world itself and encouraged by the example of William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg brought a new sense of openness into his poetry, rejecting his earlier focus on quatrains for a detailed examination of his immediate experience. As Ginsberg explained later in life, “after writing some very formalistic poetry, I decided I’d let loose whatever I wanted to let loose with and say what I really had on my mind and not write a poem, finally—break my own forms, break my own ideals, what I was supposed to be like as a poet and just write whatever I had in mind.”¹⁰⁹ The difficulty, according to Ginsberg, was that in the late 1940s “the academic people were ignoring Williams and ignoring Pound and Louis Zukofsky and Mina Loy and Basil Bunting and most of the major rough writers of the Whitmanic, open form tradition in America” (93).

Unable to confront the horrors of the atomic age because of their commitment to “leaden verse” and because of their useless defense of the humanities as an academic subject, the New Critics, argued Ginsberg, ironically encouraged a false reconciliation with the Cold War landscape. As “consciousness within the academy was narrowing down, becoming more anxious and rigid,” Ginsberg and his fellow Beat writers deliberately experimented with poetic form to reassert the fundamental connection between aesthetics and everyday life and thereby to transfigure the reified consciousness pervading American society. Determined to reassert man’s fundamental spontaneity, physicality, and spiritual nature, Ginsberg chided formalist aesthetics: “Mind is shapely, Art is shapely, Meaning Mind practiced in spontaneity invents form in its own image and gets to Last Thoughts. Loose ghosts wailing for body try to invade the bodies of living man. I hear ghostly Academics in Limbo screeching about form.”¹¹⁰ Ginsberg’s most acclaimed experimentation with open form was of course his 1955 poetic manifesto, Howl. Dispensing with any self-consciousness or fear, Ginsberg opened his poetic voice to the spontaneous, logically inconsistent, and unconscious thoughts that emerged from his contemplation of the world around him, what he once referred to as “prosaic realities mixed with emotional upsurges” (417). Ginsberg’s mixture of visual imagery, conversational prose, pornographic details, and unapologetic anger was a direct rebuke to academic formalism and a forceful announcement that the official conception of modernism was open to challenge. “Poetry,” as Ginsberg explained, “has been attacked by an ignorant & frightened bunch of bores who don’t understand how it’s made, & the trouble with these creeps is they wouldn’t know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight.” Ginsberg’s poetic project to merge art and life was also, as Howl famously demonstrated, a cultural and political challenge to the staid conformity and middle-class numbness he believed was spiritually destroying America. While he followed the New Critics in their concern with the political claims attached to poetry by both liberals and Communists and with their fight against the theoretical arrogance of science, which subordinated human existence to the strictures of categorical claims, Ginsberg, along with an emerging group of modernists who appropriated earlier and more open forms of artistic creation, instituted a cultural revolution of his own.

The other challenge to high modernism took a more conventional, if not more rigorous, approach in Kenneth Burke’s 1945 masterpiece, A Grammar of Motives, a book that marked both the author’s long struggle with the implications of formalist aesthetics and the emergence of late modernism. In this work, Burke questioned the efficacy and logic of high modernism, not in the name of metaphysics as Ginsberg would, but in the name of communication and rhetorical appeal. Equally disturbed by the will to power inherent within the rationalizing tendencies of modern science and technology, Burke too hoped that the aesthetic might serve as a counterbalance to the excesses of modernity. But he and those artists, writers, and critics who followed in his footsteps or paralleled the theoretical moves he made in that book were unwilling, on the one hand, to limit art to merely a disinterested, formal configuration of poetic elements separate from the interested hands of the artist and the audience and, on the other hand, to reduce art to the dreamlike, self-expressive activities of a poetic seeker in search of some form of holy communion. Burke would have little to do with either Lionel Trilling or Allen Ginsberg. Aesthetics, as Burke began to argue, was a very interested, very socially and communicatively grounded act in which the artist tried to construct a sense of self-identity from the crumbling landscape while simultaneously trying to appeal rhetorically to an often diverse and divisive audience. Burke’s modernism, in this sense, dealt with the complicated dialectic between the intrinsic and the extrinsic, that is, between what the aesthetic act accomplished for the artist in relationship to the social, historical, familial, theological, and psychological grounds from which it emerged and what that act accomplished as a discordant, yet communicative, voice amid the chattering of the audience that consumed it. Art served, Burke asserted, as a form of reconciliation, identification, and courtship between the artist who produced it and the audience to whom it was addressed. Art, in other words, was a rhetorical act.

Burke did not develop his position on aesthetics very easily. In fact, he began his literary career as a committed participant in the Greenwich Village modernist circles in the 1920s and 1930s, having found the intellectual climate at Columbia University, where he pursued his undergraduate studies, a poor substitute for the rich literary culture downtown. Indeed, Burke’s bohemian credentials were impeccable. A friend of William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, and Alfred Steiglitz, and a contributor to a number of “little magazines” of artistic and political dissent including the Masses, Secession, Broom, the Little Review, and the New Republic, Burke emerged as “something of an aesthete” in the 1920s, once referring to himself “as ‘a Flaubert.’”¹¹¹ His poetry, book reviews, and essays were published widely, and his 1924 collection of fiction, The White Oxen and Other Stories, placed him in the category of writer and critic. He was also editor in the 1920s of the literary journal The Dial, increasing his awareness of the modernist currents in poetry, painting, and theater in the international realm. His early career in the avant-garde was marked by the 1931 publication of a collection of essays, Counter-Statement, which tracked his development as a literary critic. Published the same year as Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, Burke’s book helped introduce high modernist criticism to a broader American audience and announced his early allegiance to formalist circles.

Although he had already published The White Oxen in 1924 and had won the prestigious Dial Award in 1929 for his work as editorial assistant and literary critic, Burke did not fully enter the cultural debates over modernism until the appearance of Counter-Statement. A collection of eight essays ranging from literary studies of Andre Gide and Thomas Mann to theoretical discussions of literary methods, Burke’s book was a celebration of the “antinomian” character of art and a commitment to the “purely aesthetic judgment” as distinct from “scientific criteria.”¹¹² Like the New Critics who would follow his lead, Burke distinguished between art as “the psychology of information,” which dealt with human existence only in generalities, and art as “the psychology of form,” which was an “exercise of human propriety, the formulation of symbols which rigidify our sense of poise and rhythm” (42). According to Burke, there were five aspects to this psychology of form: syllogistic (the logical unraveling of elements or plot); qualitative (the preparation for the quality of a particular element through the quality of the preceding one); repetitive (the maintenance of one principle under new guises); conventional (the categorical expectancy associated with standard formal practices); and minor (the appearance of brief yet moving elements). Such forms were the basic “appeal” of any work of art, the “equipment” that enabled “the mind to follow processes amenable to it” (143). The subtle artistic use of formal elements created frustrations and expectations within the audience that demanded some sense of resolution. In “Lexicon Rhetoricae,” Burke was willing to acknowledge that formal elements were integrated differently in each work of art according to the particular subject matter involved. He was also willing to acknowledge that the “perfection” of the aesthetic experience was continuously hampered by the “divergence in the ideologies of writer and reader” (178). Nonetheless, he was unwilling in this early book to consider “eloquence” anything but the formal properties of an artwork as they related to the particular content. Eloquence was jeopardized by the contingencies of history that distorted true “symbolic” interpretation, contingencies that included “variations in ideology,” the “remoteness” of patterns of concern, the “degree of familiarity” with a pattern of experience, and the “divergence” of modes of existence (172). Due to particular vicissitudes, an antiquated symbolic configuration soon lost its eloquence and became merely “quaint.” Consequently, Burke considered music the purest form of artistic expression because it was able to dispense with linguistic or verbal content in the name of structure by not relying on the “surprise” and “suspense” connected with imparting narrative “information.” Indeed, because music was “fitted less than any other art for imparting information,” its form could not “atrophy” and therefore was able to deal “minutely in frustrations and fulfillments of desire” (34). Eloquence as the subtle balance of formal elements and the minimization of extraneous content was for Burke the end of art and the essence of aesthetic appeal.

But Burke was not finished. If high modernists appropriated Kant to reflect on the productive side of aestheticism, Burke used the German philosopher to consider the consumptive side. In so doing, his early work brought the high modernist project full circle. Burke realized that to validate modernist goals he had to demonstrate that formalist elements were appreciable by the audience. In other words, he needed to prove that “though forms need not be prior to experience, they are certainly prior to the work of art exemplifying them” (141). He needed a theory of the subject, and Kant, not surprisingly, provided the answer. Kant of course had situated objective knowledge not in relationship to the natural world but in accordance with the thinking subject. Thus, as Burke explained, “we need but take [Plato’s] universals out of heaven and situate them in the human mind (a process begun by Kant), making them not metaphysical, but psychological” (48). In borrowing from Kant’s transcendental categories of apperception, Burke argued that the sense of contrast, comparison, expansion, and contraction needed for aesthetic enjoyment were formal categories within the mind, giving man “the potentiality of speech, art, mythology, and so on.” Thus, art appealed to the “innate forms of the mind,” “the germ-plasm of man.” A transcendental aesthetic needed a transcendental subject, both of which took part in historical time but were not limited by it.

But by the time high modernism was institutionalized in American intellectual circles after World War II, Burke had already rejected many of his earlier statements. Beginning with his Depression-era works such as Permanence and Change (1935) and Attitudes Toward History (1937) and culminating in his Cold War-era works such as A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), Burke unearthed the political implications of high modernism and reenvisioned aesthetics, if not social theory in general, as a symbolic act, that is, as a deliberate attempt to destabilize the key symbols of authority residing in prevailing systems of thought, in notions of social and religious piety, and in the overall sense “of what properly goes with what.”¹¹³ Art, as such, was a way to gain and offer perspective, a form of critical discourse that used the force of the poetic to violate decorum, taste, and propriety by “merging things which common sense had divided and dividing things which common sense had merged” (113). In this way, aesthetics blended with the psychological, the sociological, the political, and the familial, all of those areas abandoned by high modernism. Borrowing from Aristotle, Freud, and Marx, Burke rejected his earlier search for transcendental forms of appeal and instead linked the efficacy of the aesthetic work to the artist’s stylized and strategic resizing of an intractable situation in a way that appealed rhetorically to the social and linguistic communities of address. The artistic act was visionary, educational, confrontational, courting, and integrative, not through the artist’s invocation of some spiritual or metaphysical principle as Ginsberg would have it but through the artist’s use of comedy, burlesque, punning, incongruity, misnomer, and “verbal blasting.” Art worked through its immersion into the social and temporal scene in which it was placed, not as a form of disinterested contemplation or a form of spiritual absolution but as a poetic solvent that dissolved the stale orientations littering the scene and that imagined new, and possibly more liberating, ones.

An example of Burke’s “un-timeliness” was of course his participation in the 1949 “Western Round Table on Modern Art,” discussed in the Introduction. Amid the clamor declaring “the work of art independent of the artist” and the painter uninterested in “the reaction of the public,” Burke wondered aloud whether or not his high modernist counterparts had negated the efficacy of art in general.¹¹⁴ Burke traced the root of the problem to the beginning of the nineteenth century when the study of aesthetics as a singular discipline emerged and theoreticians separated the poetic (“the work in itself, its kind, its properties, the internal relations among its parts, etc.”) from the rhetorical (“the work’s persuasiveness, its appeal”).¹¹⁵ Noting that this decision was the effect of the “specialized nature of our modern culture,” Burke argued that the “systems of symbols,” despite claims to the contrary, used by artists were not different in essence to those used by other specialists. “Each of these symbolic structures,” continued Burke, “is an organized vocabulary which a man learns to manipulate for purposes of expression, discovery and communication” (36). Consequently, since there was no fundamental antithesis between art and rhetoric, there was no reason to keep reinforcing the solipsistic notion that the artist was merely “talking to himself” (33).

In a reversal of the argument of high modernism, Burke compared the disinterested stance of the formalist poet to the apolitical stance of the postwar scientist who reluctantly but thoroughly abdicated any responsibility for his role in furthering the advances of the Cold War state. While making claims about the purity and disinterested nature of basic research, the scientist refused to acknowledge that his specialized expertise, whether in chemical, biological, or physical research, was often swallowed up by larger military imperatives. Content with severing his role as a “technical expert” from his responsibility as a citizen, the “pure” scientist ignored the political purposes for which his discoveries were used. As Burke sarcastically noted, “the question of what the new force might mean, as released into a social texture emotionally and intellectually unfit to control it, or as surrendered to men whose speciality is professional killing—well, that is simply ‘none of his business,’ as specialist, however great may be his misgivings as father of a family, or as citizen of his nation and of the world.”¹¹⁶ Even those of “good will” associated with organizations such as the Federation of American Scientists, who clamored for international control of atomic energy, assumed that the inherent “morality of their speciality” would protect their discoveries from the ulterior motives of “fiends.” Science, just like art, was never able to fully protect its autonomy. Formalist poets, like their formalist scientific counterparts, accepted modernity’s severing of art and science from the sphere of moral development.

Or so it seemed. Burke also argued that claims for the purity of each branch of modernity were often merely a cover for motives hidden elsewhere. American critics who argued for the autonomy of scientific research, particularly in light of the pernicious use of science by Fascist countries during World War II, for instance, often used such arguments to overlook the growing relationship between research and development and the Cold War state. Burke argued that hidden behind the claims of high modernism were similar motives. For Burke, “although the cult of the ‘imagination’ is usually urged today by those who champion poetry as a field opposed to science, our investigations would suggest the ironic possibility that they exemplify an aspect of precisely the thinking they would reject” (223). Consequently, Burke turned high modernism on its head, arguing that the growing connection between the New Critics and the New York intellectuals and the emergence of an aggressive Cold War liberalism revealed the actual motives of Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, and others. As he argued in Rhetoric of Motives, “whenever you find a doctrine of ‘nonpolitical’ esthetics affirmed with fervor, look for its politics.”¹¹⁷ Aesthetics, despite claims to the contrary, was nothing but interested. The tradition of late modernism of which Burke was a key figure began with this principle.