The flight from subjectivity, around and after the First World War, into radical formal and temporal experiment: freed words, cult of youth, art as creation, internationalism.
Free fall on an amusement-park drop ride: thrilling, but with nothing to catch you.
The image Shore uses for it, in our paraphrase.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
On Shore's admittedly simplified schema, modernism answers modernity's uncertainty in two waves: a Freudian plunge into the self, then an avant-garde that vaults past it, almost a Hegelian Aufheben.
Put simply Shore, simplifying on purpose: modern art answered the age's uncertainty in two waves. First a Freud-like dive into the inner self, then an avant-garde leap past the self, almost a Hegelian "Aufheben": overcoming something while carrying it forward.
Around 1914 the inward plunge into radical subjectivity reverses into a flight out of subjectivity, bound not for where art began but somewhere else entirely.
Put simply Shore: around 1914, art's dive into the inner self turned around into an escape from the self. That escape did not lead back to where art had started, but somewhere completely new.
The avant-garde's trajectory ended in politics: Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, to Mussolini's fascists; most others, the Russians above all, went left, to the Bolshevik revolution.
Put simply Shore: in the end the avant-garde turned to politics. Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, joining Mussolini's fascists. Most others, the Russians above all, went left, joining the Bolshevik revolution.
Looking back years later in On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets, Jakobson judged Mayakovsky a man wholly unsuited to life.
Shore finds deconstruction thrilling and provoking, but it ultimately leaves us hanging as the avant-garde was: the leap opens every possibility and offers no handhold.
Put simply Shore finds deconstruction thrilling and provocative, but in the end it leaves us dangling, as the avant-garde artists were: once you jump, anything is possible, but there is nothing to hold on to.
Links from these claims to others in the course. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
ShoreOn Shore's admittedly simplified schema, modernism answers modernity's uncertainty in two waves: a Freudian plunge into the self, then an avant-garde that vaults past it, almost a Hegelian Aufheben. L10 · 3:21
ShoreThe avant-garde recasts the representation question: art is no mirror of life but a hammer for building it, a shift from representing to creating that eventually leaves no ground underfoot. L10 · 37:05
Shore sharpens the two-wave frame: first wave rethinks how art represents; avant-garde abandons representation for transformation.
ShoreThe avant-garde's trajectory ended in politics: Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, to Mussolini's fascists; most others, the Russians above all, went left, to the Bolshevik revolution. L10 · 45:30
MayakovskyShore reads Mayakovsky's 1930 suicide note, "the love boat crashed against the everyday," as the moment the avant-garde's leap proved existentially unbearable. L10 · 48:47
Mayakovsky's suicide is offered as the tragic endpoint of the leap.
ShoreThe avant-garde's trajectory ended in politics: Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, to Mussolini's fascists; most others, the Russians above all, went left, to the Bolshevik revolution. L10 · 45:30
MarinettiItalian futurism, more than its Russian cousin, was bound up with machines, science, speed, physical vitality and aggression; Marinetti went so far as to find war beautiful. L10 · 34:40
Marinetti's celebration of speed, aggression and war prefigures his move to fascism.Our inference
ShoreThe avant-garde's trajectory ended in politics: Marinetti and the Italian futurists went right, to Mussolini's fascists; most others, the Russians above all, went left, to the Bolshevik revolution. L10 · 45:30
ShoreDespite his dull bourgeois domesticity, Husserl is the avant-garde's alter ego: he attacks the same problem, groundlessness, from the opposite flank, sharing their maximalism and the earlier modernists' radical subjectivity. L11 · 5:48
Shore casts Husserl as the avant-garde's alter ego, answering the same modern problem of groundlessness.
FreudWe can never fully know ourselves: what is most basic in us sits in the unconscious, so the self stays opaque to itself and permanently at odds with itself. L9 · 48:02
ShoreOn Shore's admittedly simplified schema, modernism answers modernity's uncertainty in two waves: a Freudian plunge into the self, then an avant-garde that vaults past it, almost a Hegelian Aufheben. L10 · 3:21
Shore characterizes first-wave modernism as a basically Freudian turn inward toward what is dark, hidden and not rational.
Terms that appear in the same claims.