Modernist form emerged to reconcile authentic individual experience with true global cognition

Evidence

There comes into being, then, a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience. It is evident that this new situation poses tremendous and crippling problems for a work of art; and I have argued that it is as an attempt to square this circle and to invent new and elaborate formal strategies for overcoming this dilemma that modernism or, perhaps better, the various modernisms as such emerge: in forms that inscribe a new sense of the absent global colonial system on the very syntax of poetic language itself, a new play of absence and presence that at its most simplified will be haunted by the exotic and be tattooed with foreign place names, and at its most intense will involve the invention of remarkable new languages and forms. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 879

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up the core tension (authentic vs. true experience) that defines modernism’s formal project — foundational for distinguishing modernism from postmodernism later.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated goal that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing — this is the mechanism stated plainly. — connects to: Personal healing drives transformative theory when experience grounds it — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 133