THE MODERNIST CULTURE OF DESIRE

Both Enlightenment and twentieth-century modernisms made things “new,” but the intensity of newness, as both Stephen Dedalus and David Landes suggested, was particularly pronounced in the later era (or at least it seems that way to us, living in that later era). In fact, this intensity of feeling – of dislocation, of vague wonder, of free-floating anxiety, of inchoate need – seems to me to be a signal distinguishing feature between Enlightenment modernity and the cultural modernism of the early twentieth century. This feature has to do with the role of desire – again, dislocated, free-floating, vague, inchoate – within social, psychological, and linguistic cultural formations. In a review of Regenia Gagnier's study of aesthetics and economics in the late nineteenth century, John Coates notes that