Modernism was never a single unified project

Evidence

I don’t think that there is any such thing as the modernist impulse, in the singular. Modernism itself was a decisively “Western” phenomenon. It was always composed of many different projects, which were not all integratable or homogeneous with one another; they were often, in fact, in conflict. For example, consider Adorno and Benjamin: both were theorists of the modern and in some ways, very close together in formation. They are also bitterly, deeply, opposed to one another on some key questions. Now I know that shorthand terms like “modernism” can be useful in everyday exchanges but I don’t know, analytically, what the single project was which modernism might have been. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 716

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School debates Hall elsewhere engages; also echoes later uses of ‘modernity’ as multiple projects.
• SEED: An essay interrogating the singular nouns we use for plural historical phenomena (‘the Renaissance,’ ‘the Reformation’) could draw on this method.