Modernism emerged as private emotional life displaced a withering public sphere under market penetration

Evidence

It is plausible to follow Moretti in relating the emergence of Modernism to the transformation of nineteenth-century urban life analysed, among others, by Richard Sennett, as a result of which individuals’ primary emotional investment came to be in the private sphere of personal relations, while the public sphere withered into, at best, a means of self-expression, changes inseparable from the progressive penetration of social relations by the market on which Benjamin laid such stress (see also section 5. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 228

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Habermas’s public-sphere decline thesis and to Fraser’s and others’ critiques of the privatization of politics — relevant to whether strategic identity claims can find a collective public ground. — connects to: Decline of mediating institutions privatises stress into the domestic sphere — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2107