MODERNIST FORM AND MATERIAL FORM

I begin with form, modernism's defining obsession: for some modernist practitioners, the vehicle through which literature would save the world, or give it meaning, or at least shore up its fragments; for some of its detractors, the abstract space into which modernism retreated from the world, the sterile obsession through which it ironically secured cultural distinction and power, necessitating (for us, today) a critical-historical move towards plural modernisms – not, perhaps, formally defined. For Bourdieu, ‘the taste for formal experiment’ functions as the very essence of modern social distinction as embodied in (and advanced through) the judgement of art. For Jameson, modernist form registers the western intellect's progressive inability to grasp the social (or imperial) whole: fragmented modernist form is the symptom produced by the political unconscious in an age of alienation; this formal oddity is the essence of modernism. For Raymond Williams, languages and sign systems become estranged in the modern metropole because of new forms of journalism and the gathering of artists from various places who don't share a common language. The result? A literature obsessed by form, ‘an emphasis on the medium, the medium as that which, in an unprecedented way, defined art’.