Uneven industrialization during France’s Fifth Republic briefly revived Modernism

Evidence

But why should a philosophical current so akin to Modernism in preoccupations and style arise in postwar France? Part of the answer is hinted at in a highly suggestive passage where Anderson suggests that the ‘cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, in the 1960s’, represented one of the few exceptions to the general decline of Modernism consequent on the disappearance of the historical conjuncture which produced it: … As the Fourth Republic belatedly passed into the Fifth, and rural and provincial France was suddenly transformed by a Gaullist industrialization appropriating the newest technologies, something like a brief afterglow of the earlier conjuncture that produced the classical innovatory art of the century flared into life again. Godard’s cinema was marked in its way by all three of the co-ordinates described earlier. Suffused with quotation and allusion to a high cultural past, Eliot-style; equivocal celebrant of the automobile and the airport, the camera and the carbine, Legerstyle; expectant of revolutionary tempests from the East, Nizanstyle. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 293

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Jameson’s core claim that modernist aesthetic forms correlate with specific economic conjunctures — a Marxist historicist model the whole Against Postmodernism argument aims to contest or refine. — connects to: Catholic Modernism, condemned in 1907, seeded later Christian Democracy
• QUESTION: Anderson’s account treats modernism as requiring a specific historical conjuncture; does this concede the very historicism that frames postmodernism as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’?