Models for a history of Modernism
History, it is ordinarily claimed, lies outside the purview of Russian Formalism, and only at its latest stage, at the point of transition to Czech structuralism, was a theory of history or evolution supplied to it, by the collaborate effort of Jakobson and Tynjanov (1928). Yet, a theory of history of the history of perception, to be more specific is clearly implied, already by one of the central thesis of Formalism (as formulated by Sklovskij and, more in particular, Jakubinskij), according to which the habits of perception, which are acquired in our ongoing everyday experience of standard language and other standardised media (as, in the case of pictorial art, non-artistic pictures), thus becoming automatized, are disrupted by artistic creation, and thereby made strange, or actualized, for us; and which, when they have hardened into standardised artistic forms, are again transgressed by the invention of new ways for the making of art.
The historicity of Formalism
In this respect, as in many others, Formalism may well have formulated, not a theory of art outside history, but of the art of its time: emerging Modernism, created by friends of the formalists, such as Malevitch, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Chlebnikov, Brik, Majakovskij, Meyerhold, etc.; and even by the formalists themselves in another incarnation, as in the case of Eisenstein and early Jakobson (cf. Steiner 1984). The Prague structuralists, who took over, specified, revised, and extended the theories of Russian Formalism, certainly entertained similar connivances with the contemporary Czech avant-garde, Karel Teige and Poetism (cf. Deluy, ed. 1972). Thus, the formalist model, as well as its later Prague school version, is implicitly, if not overtly, historical, not only because its supposes a sequence of changing perceptual habits, but more fundamentally, it is historically dated, because of its reproducing the conception of art presupposed, and even explicitly formulated, by the exponents of Modernism. If the dialectics of art described by Formalism is really identical to the Mechanism of Modernism, there must have been a time when it was not yet a correct description of art; and we may thus be justified in asking whether, as the prophets of Postmodernity submit, it could also cease to be such a description.
It should be clear that Modernism, and thus the applicability of the formalist model has a beginning, not, perhaps, as far as the divorce from the standard medium is concerned, but as to the ever-repeated dialectics of struggle and reformation (in the terms of the Prague theses) applied to established artistic forms. It is not only that the character, direction and scale of this re-formation vary greatly, as Jakobson and Mukarovsky say in the Prague theses, but, although re-formations must have taken place before the advent of Modernism, they were not the order of the day: the breaking of the norms did not constitute the meta-norm of all artistic work. In the case of painting, for instance, there may have been a guiding idea, a common endeavour, since the Italian renaissance, aspiring to render ever more perfectly the appearance of the visual world; Progress in art, in Susan Gabeliks terms, was thus conceivable. But it is wrong to think that there could be a similar progress in abstraction: rather, following the dialectics formulated by the Formalists, each new generation of modernists found themselves, in Michael Frieds terms (as quoted by Singerman 1989: 158), under the obligation to work through the problems thrown up by the art of the recent pasts, thereby creating new problems for the future generation to work on.
Once the machine of Modernism has got going, however, there is no escape from it, and there can be no Postmodernism, if not as a (mis-named) phase of Modernism. This is not only because a lot of properties usually ascribed to Postmodernism are already present in Modernism. There are at least two, more fundamental, reasons for rejecting the claim of Postmodernism, one of which is simply semantical, the other properly semiotic. The semantic, that is, purely linguistic reason, has to do with the fact that the word modern must be an instance of the category of shifters (as defined by Jespersen and Jakobson): a word, the meaning of which refers to the act (for instance the time and place) of its own enunciation. Thus, the time span included in the domain of reference of the word modern must comprehend the moment at which the word is pronounced. Modernity is always on the point of running ahead of us, unavoidably lagging behind by an inch. Some modernisms, of course, become objectified in history: that of the new philosophy of the Middle Ages, or that of Perraults moderns struggling against les anciens, no longer seem particularly modern to us. But they continue to encapsulate the time of enunciation when the were truly modern.
The second, purely semiotic reason, because of which there can be no end to Modernism, is that its mechanism, as described by the Formalists, can never cease functioning, once it has started to work: trying the break out of the tradition of the new, the art work confirms to the very mechanism of that tradition, which consists precisely in transgressing the norms set up by the art-forms preceding it. Even if Postmodernity consisted in returning to the ways in which art was created before Modernism was invented (which is only true, and only to some extent, of postmodernist architecture), even this could only be interpreted, after Modernism, as a break with the earlier, temporary, modernist norm, and thus as a new phase of Modernism that is, it could only be so interpreted, as long as Modernism was remembered, and not lost too far back in the past. If, however, as Lyotard has often suggested (see, for instance, Appignanesi, ed., 1989), Postmodernism originates before, or at the same time as, Modernism (which does make sense in terms of the properties often ascribed to it), it is simply a misnomer.
The Lyotardean paradox and the two versions of Modernism
Lyotards paradoxical observation, and the claims of Postmodernism, become understandable, however, in the North American context, where the image of Modernism was very much influenced by the conception of Clement Greenberg writing mainly on the Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and William de Kooning. According to Greenberg, the modernist work of art was essentially a critical discourse applying to earlier works of art, and its methods required it to avoid dependence upon any order of experience not given in the most essentially construed nature of its medium (quoted in Rorimer 1989:129). Indeed, more recently, Greenberg himself has set up an opposition between Modernity and Postmodernity, quoting, in the latter case, in part the same persons and movements as are the heroes of Lyotard, many of which are contemporaneous with, or anterior to, his modernists: Duchamp and other Dadaists, certain aspects of Surrealism, and Pop art (see Tomkins 1988:7f).
The result is a curious amputation of the Modernist movement, two of the most important early constituents of which were Dadaism and the Surrealism, both of which left their imprint also on such an emblematic European modernist as Picasso, the modernist of popular opinion. Yet, it may perhaps be said that there were two, in some respects divergent, ingredients of early Modernism: on one hand, an inward movement, a tendency to reduce art to its smallest denominator, to highlight, under aesthetic focus, in Prague school terms, the minimal properties of the art work as a thing; and on the other hand, an outward movement, tending to include ever further properties, objects, and spheres in the world subjected to the aesthetic function. What came to evolve, under the name of Modernism, in the United States, was mainly the first endeavour (with the exception of Pop art). When the second tendency began to predominate in the United States (and, thanks to the cultural hegemony of USA, in the rest of the Occidental world), it was baptised Postmodernism.
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