ABSTRACT
This chapter assumes that if modernism has again become contemporary, it is because in some sense the social, cultural and economic conditions that gave rise to the earlier modernism now once more pertain to our lives. It also contends that systematic changes in the distribution of political power on a global scale, which registered as crises in the economic discourse of growth, have been matched in the realm of modernist cultural forms by an intense focus on human gesture. High modernism, as a new baroque, a nature-theatre of minutely observed gesture, bears the imprint of a post-Mackinder moment geopolitics, etched in the gestures of its metropolitan heroes and heroines. As Rosa Luxemburg herself explains in her own riposte, The Accumulation of Capital: an Anti-Critique, the possibility of the continuous accumulation of capital is both the aim of all capitalism, and one of its great mysteries. Capitalism wants always to grow: the desire is for profit, and always expanding profit.
