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Modernism
Modernism refers to the artistic practices of Enlightenment modernity in crisis. Those practices sought to bear the burden of political failure by simultaneously interrogating and seeking to twist free of the premises of enlightened rationalism that had proved not only incapable of realization but also were perceived to be wrong in themselves. Central among the recurring motifs of modernism’s critical practice is the repudiation of the idea that social practices can be grounded on unchanging and rationally secured foundations; this entails the embrace of contingency over eternity, particularity over universality, the new over the old, process over product, and a demand for experimentation without end.
If, since Friedrich Schiller, artistic modernism has been the stand-in for an absent politics, political modernism is the refashioning of politics ...
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