High modernism emerged in the space opened by radical social movements

Evidence

Perry Anderson has argued persuasively that modernism in the arts (although he rejects the category of modernism as such for other reasons) is intimately related to the winds of change blowing from the great new radical social movements. High modernism does not express those values as such; rather it emerges in a space opened by them, and its formal values of the New and of innovation, along with its Utopian sense of the transfiguration of the self and the world, are, in ways that remain to be explored, very much to be seen as echoes and resonances of the hopes and optimism of that great period dominated by the Second International. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 681

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s falsifiability test of ‘cultural dominant’ — Jameson (via Anderson) giving the causal origin of modernism’s formal values, which can be checked against postmodernism’s origins. — connects to: Modernism emerged from the risky space between past, present, and political future — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 210; Modernism emerged from a field spanning semi-industrial economy, fresh invention, and open revolt — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 217
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: if modernism’s utopian self was made possible by Second International-era social movements, what social movement condition (or its absence) made the waning of affect the postmodern condition?