ABSTRACT
MODERNISM Modernism is the aesthetic practice of modernity, a period which is almost impossible to define. For some modernity began with Descartes, and can therefore be identified with the Enlightenment. For others it owes its origins to Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert, and the bloody suppression of the revolutions of 1848. For others still modernity is an essentially twentieth-century condition. Likewise, modernism itself resists easy definition. Indeed the provisionality of modernism, its fragmentary nature and constant search for progress and new forms, would seem to preclude any totalizing definition. Whatever its precise definition, ‘modernism’ has been adopted here as a term of convenience to group together the work of certain thinkers who have a broadly modernist outlook, and who focus on the social problems and the aesthetic practices of modernity. Many of the extracts are underpinned by a Marxist understanding of aesthetics as the embodiment of underlying social and political forces. Yet they go beyond a traditional Marxist view to see aesthetics as having an important cultural role.
