Modernity’s fleetingness revives a longing for permanence, against which progress itself appears as self-annihilation

Evidence

In his essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire defines (and celebrates) modernity as the passing and always already disappearing, as “the transient, the fugitive, the contingent, one half of art, whose other half is the eternal and the unchangeable.” The fleetingness of the modern moment thus actualizes in a new way the longing for the eternal and permanent, the other half of art, on whose behalf Baudelaire greets the constitutively modern idea of (technological) progress with nothing but hatred and contempt, as when he observes that the will to self-annihilation that inhabits the thought of progress is suicidal and leads to eternal despair. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 161

Categorization

• DEFINE: Classic definition of modernity as the transient/fugitive/contingent half of art — a cornerstone definition worth resurfacing.
• XREF: connects to: Modernity is the permanent urge to modernize, not a destination; Modernity is best understood as compulsive, self-propelling modernization, not a completed state — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 651; Modernity is trouble and a problem, not simply progress — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 185

Broader Connections

• Modernity is the permanent urge to modernize, not a destination #qualifies (0.78)
• Modernity is best understood as compulsive, self-propelling modernization, not a completed state #qualifies (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 651
• Modernity is trouble and a problem, not simply progress #expands (0.72) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 185