ABSTRACT
A single cultural temper, mood, movement has persisted for more than a century and a quarter, providing renewed and sustained attacks on the bourgeois social structure. The most inclusive term for this cultural temper is modernism. Modernism insists on the meaninglessness of appearance and seeks to uncover a substructure of the imagination. The very search for the roots of self moves the quest of modernism from art to psychology, from the product to the producer, from the object to the psyche. What modernity has done—in its drive to enhance experience, in its repudiation of tradition and the past, in its sanction for the new and the idea that the individual could remake his self in accordance solely with desire—is to disrupt that coherence in the name of an unbounded self. The difficulty in the West is that bourgeois society—which in its emphasis on the self gave rise to modernism—is itself culturally exhausted. And it, too, now exists in a beyond.
