Imperialism Was The Mother of Modernism

            On Tuesday morning it was the beginning of the eighth day of my cold. I was starting to worry that I would get so used to being sick that I wouldn't recognize when it was over. But my voice during song practice seemed to be improving. I was still a little hoarse, especially in the beginning but I was hitting most of the notes. 

            I worked on memorizing the chorus of “Jet Society” by Serge Gainsbourg but couldn't quite nail it down. I'll probably get it tomorrow. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            At 9:45 I logged onto Zoom for the Global Modernisms lecture but just before class started I lost the connection and by the time I got back on I was 20 minutes late. 

            When I arrived she was covering the Raymond Williams essay. 

            We have to make a case if we disagree with Williams. He's not the last word. His is a Marxist view. Williams and Jameson are talking Global Modernism and so that's why we study them. Joseph Conrad was an exemplary modernist engaging with imperialism as most modernists do. Impressionists were in the 1860s while only post-impressionists and cubists are in the tradition of modernism. Williams asks why symbolists were not as important. There are answers but there's a debate. The “late-born idea of modernism” is an important phrase. Retrospective from critically selective tradition. Modernism is preoccupied with subconscious feelings. So modernism is trying to find a way to represent experience. He's distancing from modernism and making it a concept. Kurtz's madness in Heart of Darkness and the politics of projects of interiority. What is at stake in the projection of interiority? Jane Austen was also interior but the political stakes are more pronounced with imperial and international modernism. Interrogation like this can be done for any modern period. 

            Self reflexivity in text is one of the unique things about modernism. Experiments with colour, for example painting a horse representationally, realist art makes it as real as possible but modernist art shows the limitation of the media to also show the signifier. The painting tells you it's not a horse. She shows a painting by Monet in which he used broad strokes. He painted fast because he was painting the light at a certain time. Impressionists were not modernists but post-impressionists were. The painter is making apparent the labour of painting. Stream of consciousness is not a linear story. Modernists are rejecting that model of reality showing that reality has many dimensions. Williams is saying modernists are rejecting the bourgeois. 

            The manifesto became a genre. The futurist manifesto, the surrealist manifesto, etc. Modernists were very public and made announcements. There was no Romantic manifesto. While that's true in the sense that they didn't call themselves Romantics and there was nothing written called “a manifesto”, I would say that Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads could be seen as an Early Romantic Manifesto and Shelley's “A Defense of Poetry” can be seen as a Late Romantic Manifesto. 

            There is also the image of the modernist artist as being an exile in a large international city, uprooted, and depressed. Williams thinks to be an exile is anti-bourgeois. Heterodox (non conformist) lifestyles. The non natural status of language, tentativeness and falsity of language. We are steeped in a world where language and facticity are debatable. The universal myth of modernism. Modernism's height was at the height of imperialism. The myth continues heterodoxies adapted and mimicked. Anti bourgeois stance is leading modernists into political polarities like fascism and communism. Late modernism was in the 50s and 60s, looking back. Williams thinks the universal view of modernism is stuck in the past but she doesn't. Works of radical estrangement became canonical modernism. Williams says Modernism became bourgeois. 

            We took a break. 

            Next Tuesday we will start with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness while continuing with Jameson and Achebe. 

            Williams means by postmodernism the same as modernism. Ideology for Marxists is a thought construct distinct from the social-historical context. One cant ideologize in that context. He's showing there is nothing fixed or self evident about homelessness and exile. The idea has been ideologized as a myth. He is showing it began as anti-bourgeois and then became an ideology. He says re-imagine it.

            Modernism's self-reflexivity can become an anti-imperialist tool. But not consciously. Some global modernists are doing it. Taleb Salih's hybrid character of Mustafa is doing it. 

            Jameson's essay “Modernism and Imperialism.” The period post-50s and 60s is known as post-modernism. It had a short-lived theoretical presence that lasted until the beginning of the millennium. Postmodernism was theoretical. Jameson is writing in the 1990s. “What is imperialism?” is an important question. Jameson says in the late 19th or long 20th Europeans formed competitive empires. It goes hand in hand with the establishment of global capitalism. Imperialism used capitalism to establish itself. Jameson is focused on political economy. Marxist anti-imperialism is just one form of anti-imperialism. Jameson is controversial but not canceled. His essay on third-world literature gets comebacks. Most colonial literature is not modernist. The idea that imperialism produced special literature. He's interested in how structures of imperialism shaped modernism. Modernism has turned inward. He's trying to redefine imperialism. Diffusing imperialism throughout history would make it about human nature. Laura Doyle will push back at this. 

            We will finish Jameson on Thursday. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before lunch. 

            I had thought that I was coming out of this cold but started feeling a little sicker today. 

            In the afternoon I bundled up and took a bike ride. The snow that fell yesterday on top of what remains from last week's blizzard wasn't as difficult to traverse as I thought it would be. It was still slippery though and dirtier than before. The Bloor bike lane was still passable. My most slippery moment was going south on Ossington between College and Dundas where there are streetcar tracks. There was a car parked in the snow on the right and I tried to get up onto the little two millimeter elevation of concrete that holds the tracks above the street but every time I tried my wheels would slip out to the right. Finally I got off my bike and walked around the car. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos at 17:30. 

            I cut up a whole chicken and rubbed it with Thai green curry paste. I roasted it in the oven. 

            I finished editing my lecture notes at 19:30. 

            I wrote my discussion board comment: 

            We looked at how modernism has a direct correlation with imperialism. Modernism is preoccupied with the subconscious in order to find a way to represent hidden aspects of experience. Modernist art represents the artist's attempt to access the self through the study of an external subject. But the modern world and self refection has also created in the artist a feeling of displacement and removal and so they feel like and express the sense of being exiles. There is the idea of the published manifesto as a genre for various modernist movements such as Futurism. There was no Romantic manifesto. 

            My take away: Imperialism helped create Modernism because it provided a pantheon of various manifestations of The Other. The distancing of the Other, such as images of Africa, and “the noble savage” allows it to become a representation of the artist's inner self. In our modern history, as mass communication causes the Other to diminish by becoming people like ourselves, Modernism also recedes. While it's true that there was no Romantic Manifesto in the sense that they didn't call themselves Romantics and there was nothing written called “a manifesto”, I would say that Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads could be seen as an Early Romantic Manifesto and Shelley's “A Defense of Poetry” can be seen as a late Romantic Manifesto. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a chicken leg while watching an episode of The Addams Family.

            In this story, instead of making small atomic explosions with his nuclear reactor like a normal Addams child Pugsley has decided he wants to get a job. At first Morticia and Gomez are angry since no Addams has worked in 300 years. They send Pugsley to his room. But then Morticia thinks that working might teach Pugsley a lesson and so they allow him to go out and look for work. Shortly after that a surgeon named Dr Bird arrives complaining that Pugsley walked into his operating room with a scalpel offering to help with an appendectomy. Next a banker returns Pugsley home after he tunneled into their vault and was caught counting the money. Then a bookie brings Pugsley back saying that he came to his horse race betting operation and started answering the phones. Finally Mr Henson across the street hires both Pugsley and Wednesday to trim his hedge, clean his car and clean everything out of his attic. But they drastically reshape the hedge, fill the car with water, and use dynamite to blow the attic and the entire top of Henson's house to smithereens. Henson threatens to sue but Gomez prepares a case to charge Henson with breaking child labour laws, Henson apologizes and says all he wanted was to fix his house up so he could sell it for $20,000. Gomez gives him $30,000 cash for it. 

            Dr Bird was played by Jack Collins, who played Mr Phillips on The Brady Bunch and Max Brahms on The Occasional Wife. 

            Mr Glenville the banker was played by Robert Carson.