Modernism

Conceptual Overview

In the humanities generally, there is no agreement on what modernism was or on where and when it was. It seems to have been applied in quite general ways to aspects of music, painting, art, poetry, literature, and architecture in a variety of countries from the United States to the Soviet Union from the period 1890 to about 1939. Perhaps the only unifying theme was really newness, a radical celebration of the contemporary perhaps best expressed in Italian futurism, but the avant garde rapidly became the old guard, and by the mid-20th century, newer forms of aesthetic practice came to replace the by now elderly modernists. Even Le Corbusier's modern movement began to look elderly once the concrete started falling off the badly built tower blocks. In the social sciences, we can tell a different (though related) story. It seems that modernism was largely recognized only after its supposed high water mark, sometimes by a new avant garde that named itself (or was usually named by others) as postmodernist. So in some sense, it was postmodernism that brought modernism into being and gave it a putative unity that it had certainly lacked at the time.

It seems important then to define modernism as that which postmodernism claims to reject—the modernist, or Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment is usually taken to mean the European historical period during which the light thrown by reason and rationality begins to banish some sort of premodern superstition and myth. René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Galileo, and others are suggested to have struggled for a new, nontraditional understanding of what human beings can dare to know. Modernism can hence be characterized as a belief system that has elevated a faith in science and reason to a level at which they become equated with progress. For modernists, the world is seen as a system that comes increasingly under human control as our knowledge of it increases.

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