ABSTRACT
During the first surge of early Modernism, the general response was derision and rejection. The difficulty of Modernist art seemed an alternative both to the Nazis and the manufactured consumer goods that so repelled the Frankfurt School, fleeing to the US from Germany. People need to end science envy and hence science creep—that they themselves allowed and indeed encouraged in the age of Modernism. The Modernist pulling back from a focus on a content of individuals to increased abstraction also meant that anything at all could be regularized and studied inside academia, since it was the method that provided the unity of the enterprise, rather than the object. Late Modernism, influenced by Michel Foucault, held consideration of geographic Others to be a culpable act of oppression, and anthropology agreed, whereas the similar academic conquerings of domestic sub-territories such as Queer or LatinX studies were held to be an act of freedom and affirmation.
