The Politics of Modernism

The 'when' in the title of this essay is of course polemically placed. It refers to a period of self-reckoning locked in with a commitment to collective social change. It refers to the project of figuring subjectivity as a locus of potential consciousness. The when is a site of vexed doubling within colonial/postcolonial identity and the permanent ambivalences that it launches. The painful debate on identity, nowhere more viscerally handled than by Frantz Fanon, is a debate within the modern consciousness at the last juncture of decolonisation when the question of freedom is lifted out of an existential universalism and cathected upon the subordinated yet intrepid body-presence of the 'other. A condensed unit of humanity drawn from an overwhelming demographical explosion caused by the emergence of the colonised people, this other displaces the safe space occupied by the pristine self in western ontological discourse. The entire western project for authentic being thus comes to be differently historicised in the moment of decolonisation. Identity is seen not simply as a rational individuating project within the utopian plenitude of romantic community. It also involves reclaiming the ground lost (or never found) in history, the ground where the self may yet recognise itself in the form of a collective subject. The debate on how to politicise one's otherness seems now to be given over to a politics of negotiation. It remains to be seen how a further project shall be set up to match that moment of modernity when a reflexive and revolutionary critique of its own deformities can still be mounted. The chips are down and there has to be some way, a political not a counter-metaphysical way; there has to be an alternative project whereby this nonidentity between the self and the other, which was once a call to rewrite history, has to be given a function larger than that of differential play. Or, that play itself has to gain a praxiological motive through a cultural avant-garde. In the postcolonial dialectic of modernity the term avant-garde is often subsumed by the term progressive, which refers more properly to the debate on realism/modernism. That is why I begin with Raymond Williams. But when realism turns rigid it is worth recalling with Fredric Jameson that the modern itself had a politicality far greater than we are taught to recognise. He notes the persistent use of the vocabulary of political revolution in the aesthetic avant-gardes which complemented, perhaps even compensated for, the deep subjectivity to which modernist works were committed. That subjectivity itself prefigured a utopian sense of impending transformation where society was seen to be moving towards a greater democracy.

From the essay 'When was modernism in Indian art' in When Was Modernism