Critiques of modernism can be hijacked for reactionary cultural politics

Evidence

What is interesting and symptomatic about this book, however, is the absence of any Utopian celebration of the postmodern and, far more striking, the passionate hatred of the modern that breathes through the otherwise obligatory camp sarcasm of the rhetoric; and this is not a new, but a dated and archaic passion. It is as though the original horror of the first middle-class spectators of the very emergence of the modern itself — the first Corbusiers, as white as the first freshly built cathedrals of the twelfth century, the first scandalous Picasso heads with two eyes on one profile like a flounder, the stunning “obscurity” of the first editions of Ulysses or The Waste Land — this disgust of the original philistines, Spiessburger, bourgeois, or Main Street Babbitry, had suddenly come back to life, infusing the newer critiques of modernism with an ideologically very different spirit whose effect is, on the whole, to reawaken in the reader an equally archaic sympathy with the protopolitical, Utopian, anti-middle-class impulses of a now extinct high modernism itself. Wolfe’s diatribe thus offers a textbook example of the way in which a reasoned and contemporary, theoretical repudiation of the modern — much of whose progressive force springs from a new sense of the urban and a now considerable experience of the destruction of older forms of communal and urban life in the name of a high modernist orthodoxy — can be handily reappropriated and pressed into the service of an explicitly reactionary cultural politics. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 178

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of testing whether the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis is falsifiable — Jameson shows the same anti-modern position can carry opposite ideologies depending on context, complicating any fixed mapping of form to politics. — connects to: Habermas’s poststructuralism critique is shaped by German anxieties over reactionary challenges — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 367; Reactionary anti-modern viewpoints often yield the most penetrating analyses of the modern — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 399; Cultural critique’s political effect is indeterminate and unknowable in advance — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2223