Modernism’s ambiguity is an aestheticized romantic irony that drains the world of causal reality

Evidence

In a brief but remarkable essay Franco Moretti has recently warned against the tendency of contemporary Marxist criticism to become ‘little more than a left-wing “Apology for Modernism” ’, treating its devices as inherently subversive of the existing social order. Moretti argues that the characteristic Modernist stress on ambiguity expresses ‘an aesthetic-ironic attitude whose best definition still lies in an old formula — “willing suspension of disbelief” — which shows how much of the modernist imagination — where nothing is unbelievable — has its source in romantic irony’. … In order adequately to characterize Romanticism Moretti appeals to one of the most remarkable figures of the modern European right, the brilliant but sinister Carl Schmitt. ‘Romanticism is subjectified occasionalism,’ Schmitt says. ’. .. the romantic subject treats the world as an occasion and opportunity for his romantic productivity.’ Any sense of the world itself and of the subject’s transactions with that world being governed by objective, causal relationships is lost. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 212

Categorization

• XREF: Schmitt’s ‘subjectified occasionalism’ and the ironic subject who treats the world as occasion connects directly to the reader’s strategic-essentialism research — the same ironic-retreat structure described in Society Must Be Defended and Spivak’s coining. Jameson is the ‘Apology for Modernism’ target of the whole book.
• QUESTION: Does the ironic ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ stance Colletti/Moretti describe as modernism’s core share structure with strategic essentialism’s ironic identity-holding? Is collective strategic-irony possible when even the individual stance collapses into mere occasionalism?