Each modernist avant-garde had a distinct redemptive or utopian vocation.

Evidence

Berger explicitly glosses these tenses as meaning not merely that the Utopian vocation of painting embodied in cubism was closed off by the war and the failure of global revolution that followed it, but also that this failed cubism of the past is also our future insofar as it expresses a Utopian impulse that we have not yet been able to reinvent. Yet the other avant-gardes all have their specific Utopian moments as well: in dada, an explosive negativity which is not merely critical but embodies the very dynamic of history itself as “the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man.” The Utopian vocation of surrealism lies in its attempt to endow the object world of a damaged and broken industrial society with the mystery and the depth, the “magical” qualities (to speak like either Weber or the Latin Americans), of an Unconscious that seems to speak and vibrate through those things. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 403

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up the baseline ‘Utopian vocation’ of each modernist avant-garde — the contrast against which postmodernism’s waning of affect and lost depth is measured.
• XREF: connects to: Photography has been reinvented in the postmodern period with its own utopian vocation.; Modernism’s utopian function was securing authentic experience against mass culture — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 193; Modernist inwardness paired with a utopian sense of self and world transformation — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 681 (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Photography has been reinvented in the postmodern period with its own utopian vocation.; Modernism’s utopian function was securing authentic experience against mass culture — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 193; Modernist inwardness paired with a utopian sense of self and world transformation — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 681 (+2 more)