Ihave been reading Perry Anderson’s descriptions of the state we are in, and his efforts to discover the whys and wherefores of that state—its origins, as he unrepentantly puts it—for thirty-five years. I can see the pale yellow cover of the copy of NLR containing his early essay, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, in my mind’s eye as I write; the colour plunges me back immediately, vividly, into the mix of feelings that the essay stirred up the first time I read it. The stakes were high then, or so we thought; and the disagreements deep—about how to frame an explanation of the crisis that, in 1964, was unexpectedly upon us; and, above all, about how to frame an effective response. In what follows I want to talk about Anderson’s recent work The Origins of Postmodernity and its treatment of art—especially, its characterization of modernism and its account of the circumstances in which modernism came to an end.footnote¹ I want to avoid another version of the ‘Does postmodernism deserve the name?’ debate, which I am sure has been mostly sterile. The fact that it is now fashionable to answer No to the question is no more significant than the fact that five years ago it was hard not to answer Yes. The question may turn out to have been the wrong one all along. Maybe it was the wrong one because it necessarily pointed to too many, too disparate phenomena at once—too many instances and levels—with no stable sense of separations and determinations among them. Or maybe that instability was its strength—the structure of the investigation taking, and giving form to, the special necessities of the matters being grappled with.

I do not know. I want to try to remain an agnostic on this question. All I assume is that we want a set of descriptions that goes some way to accounting for some specific turn—some rearrangement of features, maybe some deeper shift in presuppositions and procedures—in the visual and verbal culture of the past thirty years. And I assume that this turn has to do with modernism—with turning it, or turning it against itself, or turning away from it (but even that turning away is not fully conceivable except as something done to a past that tries to prevent its happening, still insists on facing the turning away, still wants the post- as its own posterity). So a great deal depends, it follows, on getting modernism right; on pointing to what it is in modernism that postmodernism still has to do with, like it or not; and finally, crucially, what it was about the circumstances of modernism that changed, some time in the 1950s and 1960s—Anderson says ‘[it] was not until the turn of the seventies that the ground for an altogether new configuration was prepared’—enough for the older configuration’s hold, its continual facing ahead, to relax.

Here, to remind you, are the lineaments of modernism as Anderson presents them. He has in mind primarily the European modernisms of the fin de siècle and the first thirty-or-so years of the last century. They are best understood, he says,

as the outcome of a field of force triangulated by three coordinates: an economy and society still only semi-industrial, in which the ruling order remained to a significant extent agrarian or aristocratic; a technology of dramatic interventions, whose impact was still fresh or incipient; and an open political horizon, in which revolutionary upheavals of one kind or another against the prevailing order were widely expected or feared. In the space so bounded, a wide variety of artistic innovations could explode—symbolism, imagism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism: some quarrying classical memory or patrician styles, others drawn to a poetics of the new machinery, yet others fired by visions of social upheaval; but none at peace with the market as the organizing principle of a modern culture—in that sense, virtually without exception anti-bourgeois.footnote²

Anderson has interesting things to say by way of qualifying this broad characterization. He builds in a sense of geographical differences and exceptions—notably (as usual) he recognizes the peculiarity of the English. He no longer believes that it was all up with modernism in 1945—the strange career of post-Surrealist, post-Expressionist avant-gardism in New York, and even Paris and Copenhagen, in the 1950s now looks more convincingly a part of modernism (less a last gasp or rote repetition) than it did to him fifteen years ago. But he sticks to the main lines of his picture, particularly of modernism’s enabling conditions: a bourgeois industrial order existing cheek-by-jowl with its outmoded but stubborn opposites—the village, the peasant, the dense cultural remains of aristocracy; an arriving world of mechanical wonders still, in its very newness and incompleteness, invested with the ‘charisma of technique’; and the presence of revolution, as an actuality or a pervasive myth.

His account of modernism’s disabling conditions seems to me to follow rather closely from this previous account. Postmodernism is again a field ‘triangulated . . . by three new historical coordinates’. Modernism was the product of a bourgeois society in which a bourgeoisie still struggled for cultural self-definition in face of its feudal, aristocratic other; one in which the sheer extremity of that struggle for self-definition forced the bourgeoisie to declare itself as a specific locus of cultural authority. One thinks of Barthes’s great normative definition of the bourgeoisie as ‘the class that does not wish to be named’, and realizes that Anderson is painting a picture of a necessarily exceptional and transient moment of the bourgeoisie’s self-positing. Postmodernism happens when that self-positing comes to an end—when ‘the bourgeoisie as Baudelaire or Marx, Ibsen or Rimbaud, Grosz or Brecht—or even Sartre or O’Hara—knew it, is a thing of the past.’footnote³ This begins with a vengeance after 1945—though the way had certainly been prepared by Fascism. And once ‘democratization of manners and disinhibition of mores’ have really done their work of symbolic pseudo-levelling, once ‘a general encanaillement of the possessing classes’ has overtaken the older, embarrassing, Bourdieu-type signs of distinction, the game, for modernism, is up. It has no adversary. Its endless riffs and deformations of the aristocratic legacy—the very legacy the bourgeoisie was struggling at the same time to turn to its own purposes—came to mean nothing, to have less and less critical force, because the bourgeoisie had abandoned the struggle, and finally settled (as it always wanted to) for purely instrumental reason.

Thus coordinate one. Coordinate two is the routinization of technique, and the saturation—the internal structuring—of the cultural field by ‘perpetual emotion machines, transmitting discourses that are wall-to-wall ideology, in the strong sense of the term.’footnote⁴ Television is the key technology here: and still, curiously, the matrix of the new apparatus of symbol management, and self-management via the symbol. Call this the colonization of everyday life—the arrival of the society of the spectacle. Where once the nature of bourgeois rationality had been congealed into specific pieces or dreams of equipment—specific invasions of the body or the landscape by this or that network or instrument, monstrous or wonderful or most likely a mixture of both—now the new nature was everywhere and nowhere, producing the very forms in which it would be conceivable. There was no outside to the imaginary any more; or rather, no inside—no critical distance possible in the space between its terms. ‘Image’, ‘body’, ‘landscape’, ‘machine’—these (and other) key terms of modernism’s opposing language are robbed of their criticality by the sheer rapidity of their circulation in the new image-circuits, and the ability of those circuits to blur distinctions, to flatten and derealize, to turn every idea or delight or horror into a fifteen-second vignette.