Resisting Modernist Movements

Dr. Adrienne Janus

ABSTRACT for Paper delivered at Troublesome Modernisms – British Association of Modernist Studies Annual Conference, 2019

Resisting Modernist Movements: Stillness in the Midst of Revolutionary Storms, 1848 -1968

Modernist revolutions, whether aesthetic or political, avant-garde or high-modernist, have long been identified with radical temporalities of momentariness: Benjamin's 'instant', Marjorie Perloff's The Futurist Moment, Karl-Heinz Bohrer's analysis of 'suddenness' in the prose of Woolf, Joyce, and the French Surrealists. Little attention, however, has been paid to modernist efforts to linger in the perception of stillness in the midst of these revolutionary storms1 – in the perception of an uneventful eventfullness or an “enduring passing away” (Seel). Whether identified as a “residue of uncontained romanticism” (Adorno) that, in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848, crossed the threshold of modernity, or as an after-effect and prophylactic against the repeated shocks of modernity (Benjamin), or as a mode of resistance against modernist claims to revolutionary authority (Sloterdijk), phenomena producing this perceptual experience recur across different spaces and media: from the enduring passing away of murmuring forests and flickering flames in Wagnerian opera to the shuffling crowds, trembling airplanes and flickering flames of Italian Futurism; from the trance-inducing stillness in movement of Dada performances to the immobile vibrations of water-falls and 'gaseous perception' in the avant-garde cinema Rene Claire and Dziga Vertov; and from the fractal patterns of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Woolf's The Waves, and the paintings of Jackson Pollock to the modulations of white noise in the compositions of Samuel Beckett and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen on and around 1968. In tracing the transnational transmutations of these phenomena across different spaces and media, I explore how their production is both instrumental in encountering the de-stabilisation of identifiable fields of reference occasioned by environmental degradation, cultural dislocation, war and revolution, and a strategic means of challenging the boundaries of previously fixed aesthetic, cultural and conceptual forms, including that of modernism itself.

1 A recent exception is Louise Hornby’s, Still Modernism (OUP, 2017).