Fluidity, energy, and the promise of transformation

The opposition between cultural innovation and the bourgeoisie has become soingrained in accounts of modernity and its history that the argument of thischapter may well surprise some readers. It is that beneath all the declarationsof mutual hostility between artists and writers on the one hand and bourgeoislife on the other, there lay a series of deep and revealing interconnections,and that the substance of these ties provided much of the ground on which themodernist avant-garde would mount its challenges to established forms of lifeand culture in the years before and just after World WarI. The energies on which vanguard movements andfigures sought to draw were ones generated by society at large, particularly inthe selfsame commercial spheres from which aesthetic rebels sometimes felt mostdistant, and the pattern by which successive innovations in culture rose up topush aside their predecessors was intricately interwoven with what JosephSchumpeter called the “creative destruction” that characterizedtypical bourgeois activities.

Although he did not live to encounter the figures and movements who constitutedthe avant-garde in the fin-de-siècle, Marx was wellaware of these connections. In The Communist Manifesto he andEngels credited the bourgeoisie with revealing that humanity possessedpreviously unrecognized powers. “The bourgeoisie has been the first toshow what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders farsurpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it hasconducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations andcrusades.” The economy was the sphere in which these forces were rooted,but the impact of their unleashing was felt in every corner of life, mostnotably in the realm of consciousness and culture. In order to survive and carryon in the world it was creating, the bourgeoisie had constantly to be“revolutionizing the means of production”; these repeatedupheavals deprived things as they were of the stability that hitherto veiled thehuman capacity to alter them, revealing the true nature of social relations andtheir future.