In 2018, the Modernist Studies Association invited submissions to its annual conference under the rubric of “Graphic Modernisms.” This not only suggests the growing ascendency of graphic design during the period (the term itself was coined in modernism’s annus mirabilis, 1922), but also the general pressure which modernism as an aesthetic and intellectual movement puts upon figuration. Arguably, the most important “going beyond” was of the idea of the real itself, as the century took thought about how to manage its own hermeneutic suspicion. In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism Michael Bell speaks of modernism as a “living synthesis of different world conceptions…held together in a … mutually testing relation” (12). This panel of three speakers and a presider (who will facilitate the fifteen-minute discussion period) theorizes the 20th-century revolutionary aesthetic Figure in relation to its materialisms and politics, its cross and intermedia, its global travels and cultural histories, and tries to come to some conclusions about the lasting effects of modernism’s crisis of figuration on being human. Each paper examines a different way in which modernist style “goes beyond” a misleading binary of representation or abstraction, and thinks through the political work being done by the unsignifiable, the inarticulate, or the excessive in the sensible form. Perhaps the Figure can even help us to reimagine the Subject.
In “Modernist State Disfiguration” Devorah Fischler asks, what if we were to understand the relation between abstraction and figuration as dialectical rather than polemic? She argues that modernism’s crisis of figuration marks a mode of political engagement underwritten by a historical dislocation of economic power and state sovereignty. Enabled by the acceleration of global capital and the growth of economic institutions that seek to protect that acceleration from the paroxysms of state politics, a significant strain of modernist aesthetics engages politics on the level of form, mounting aesthetic challenges to the figuration of state power. Pairing James Ensor's sovereign-satirical painting of the early twentieth century with the paintings of contemporary Irish artist Genieve Figgis, Devorah explore the contexts for their seemingly anachronistic interests in defacing figures of sovereignty. She ends by reflecting on the modernist timeliness of the period film, The Favourite, and its crumbling, recessive, and non-reproductive sovereign. She demonstrates the importance of understanding 'the state' as superstructural—as form and as figure. Objecting to a reified, essence-bearing notion of the state, modernism sought not only to expose the 'mask of sovereignty' in order to challenge the violences enabled by the reification of state form, but also to actively disfigure state power by replacing that mask with a set of economic, historical, and political relationships unassimilable to a sovereign politics.
Jana Giles’ “Reterritorializing the Sublime” reads Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent as a sequel to Heart of Darkness that reiterates the trope of London as a monstrous city over which a brooding gloom perpetually hovers, contesting the popular imperialist and racist notion of Africa as the heart of darkness. If his metropolitan audience missed the subtle messaging in his first essai, Conrad doubles his point in The Secret Agent by repeating common tropes that appeared in the first text; London in The Secret Agent is depicted as a parasitic swamp, the terminus of the “vile scramble for loot,” which ends not in utopian socialist reform or celebratory capitalist progress, but in waste and futility. Understood since the late eighteenth century as enabling humanity’s access to Kantian supersensible pure reason, or releasing the revolutionary political energies of the masses, the Romantic sublime in Conrad’s hands evolves into a post/modern, posthumanist, and post-imperial sublime that anticipates the theories of the differend of Jean-François Lyotard. For Lyotard, the sublime is encountered in the irreconcilable differend between imagination and reason that refutes Kant’s “denatured” aesthetics. Additionally, the sublime differend manifests as the non-discursive signifier of political heterogeneity, and as avant-garde art that shocks its readers into witnessing the previously unheard phrasing of the politically oppressed. Such a reterritorialized sublime is not transcendent, but immanent, a more fitting aesthetic for Conrad’s prescient vision.
In “Figures of Assembly: Modernism’s Mass Body,” Judith Paltin argues that the mass body is a crucial intervention in 20th-century anti-fascist theories of assembly. In Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, at the outset of the political crisis, Doremus Jessup posits that the American core is rotten—that individualist democracy and a traditional sense of a body politic have dissolved into a hollow body, an uncivil mob, which is easily captured and given a fascist-inflected form to become the Corpo State. However, as Doremus travels from political naiveté and quietism to become an effective revolutionary organizer, he is transformed into a radical cipher of the text’s new mass body. The novel’s final line is dramatically optimistic: “And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die” (381). Thus, QED, the idea of a fascist-produced mass body had been a miscalculation, or a myth; in Lewis’ telling, the genuine mass body is born of collective action, not compliance; the factitious mass body, which hadn’t existed before its revolutionary activity, is self organizing. Mass bodies signal resistance and act out of a repertoire of contention. They intervene in the social dynamic, work to make it new, because they are a cosmopolitan phenomenon only lightly attached to history. What distinguishes the modernist mass body are its general refusal to adhere to an exclusionary group identification and its expressions of solidarity, made not by erasure of difference, but by welcoming and enjoying intimacy with heterogeneous others.