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The notion of modernity thus seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationship with other spheres of collective experience. · Sep 2, 14:15

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, pp 27-27

The notion of modernity thus seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationship with other spheres of collective experience. The confusion introduced by this notion has, it seems to me, two major forms. Both of them, without analysing it, rely on the contradiction constituative of the aesthetic regime of the arts, which makes art into an autonomous form of life and thereby sets down, at one and the same time, the autonomy of art and its identification with a moment in life’s process of self-formation. The two major variants of the discourse on modernity identified simply with the autonomy of art, an ‘anti-mimetic’ revolution in art identical with the conquest of the pure form of art finally laid bare. Each individual art woudl thus asert the pure potential of art by exploring the capabilities of its specific medium. Poetic or literary modernity would explore the capabilities of a language diverted from its communicational uses. Pictorial modernity would bring painting back to its distinctive feature: coloured pigment and a two-dimensional surface. Musical modernity would be indentitfied with the language of twelve sounds, set free from any analogy with expressive language, etc. Furthermore these specific forms of modernity would be in a relationship of distant analogy with a political modernity susceptible to being identified depending on the time period, with revolutionalry radicality or with the sober and disenchanted modernity of good republican government. The main feature of what is called the ‘crisis of art’ is the overwhelming defeat of this simple modernist paradigm, which is forever more disantd from the mixtures of genres and mediums as well as from the numerous political possibilities inherent in the arts’ contemporary forms.

This overwhelming defeat is obviously overdetermined by the modernist paradigm’s second major form, which might be called modernatism. I mean by this the identification of forms from the aesthetic regime of the arts with forms that accomplish a task or fulfill a destiny specific to modernity. At the root of this identification there is a specific interpretation of the structural and generative contradiction of aesthetic ‘form.’ It is, in this case, the determination of art qua form and self-formation of life that is valorized. The starting point, Schiller’s notion of the aesthetic education of man, constitutes an unsurpassable reference point. It is this notion that established the idea that omination and servitude are, in the first place, part of an ontological distribution (the activity of thought verses the passivity of sensible matter). It is also this notion that defined a neutral state, a state of dual cancellation, where the activity of thought and sensible receptivity become a single reality. They constitute a sort of new region of being – the region of free play and appearance – that makes it possible to conceive of the equality whose direct materialization, according to Schiller, was shown to be impossible by the French Revolution. It is this specific mode of living in the sensible world that must be developed b ‘aesthetic education’ in order to train men [sic] susceptible to live in a free political community. The idea of modernity as a time devoted to the material realization of a humanity still latent in mankind was constructed on this foundation. It can be said, regarding this point, that the ‘aesthetic revolution’ produced a new idea of political revolution: the material realization of a common humanity still only existing as an idea. This is how Schiller’s ‘aesthetic state’ became the ‘aesthetic programme’ of German Romanticism, the programme summarized in the rough draft written together by Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling: the material realization of unconditional freedom and pure thought in common forms of life and belief. It is this paradigm of aesthetic autonomy that became the new paradigm for revolution, and it subsequently allowed for the brief but decisive encounter between the artisans of the marxist revolution and the artisans of forms for a new way of life. The failure of this revolution determined the destiny – in two phases – of modernatism. At first, artistic modernatism, in its authentic revoltionary potential for hope and defiance, was set against the degeneration of political revoltion. Surrealism and the Frankfurt School were the principle vehicles for this counter-modernity. The failure of political revolution was later conveived of as the failure of its ontologico-aesthetic model. Modernity thus became something like a fatal destiny: the essence of technology according to Heidegger, the revoltionary severing of the king’s head as a severing of tradition in the history of humanity, and finally the original sin of human beings, forgetful of their dept to the Other and of their submission to the heterogeneous powers of the sensible.