Modernist inwardness paired with a utopian sense of self and world transformation

Evidence

But something more fundamental can be argued from the spirit of the works themselves, and in particular from a renewed scrutiny of the same high-modernist celebration of the self that the anti-political critics adduced to support a notion of the modernists’ subjectivism (in this, they joined hands with the Stalinist tradition). I want, however, to propose the alternative proposition that modernism’s introspective probing of the deeper impulses of consciousness, and even of the unconscious itself, was always accompanied by a Utopian sense of the impending transformation or transfiguration of the “self” in question. “You have to change your life!”Rilke’s archaic Greek torso tells him paradigmatically; and D. H. Lawrence is filled with intimations of this momentous new sea change from which new people are sure to emerge. What we now have to grasp is that those feelings, expressed in connection with the self, could only come into being in correlation with a similar feeling about society and the object world itself. It is because that object world, in the throes of industrialization and modernization, seems to tremble at the brink of an equally momentous and even Utopian transformation that the “self” can also be felt to be on the point of change. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 681

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading project’s core thesis that style is periodizable — this gives the economic-to-aesthetic mechanism for modernism (transformation of object world enabling transformation of self), the contrast case to postmodernism’s waning of affect. — connects to: Reflection on the wish-element in thought is the sole route to Utopia; Modernist art redeems reification’s fragments as Utopian compensation — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 5942; Fully describing utopia would betray it because it is a becoming, not a being — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1539 (+2 more)