The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

280 The experience of space and timewithin a singular image. They sought to show how localism andnationalism could be overcome and how some sense of a globalproject to advance human welfare could be restored. This entailed adefinite change of stance with respect to space and time. The shiftthat occurred in Kandinsky's painting style between 1914 and 1930 isillustrative. Before the war, Kandinsky is painting extraordinary canvasesin which violent swirls of brilliant colour seem to implodesimultaneously upon the canvas and explode beyond the edges of aframe that seems powerless to contain them. Ten years later we findKandinsky at the Bauhaus (one of the key centres of modernistthought and practice) painting controlled pictures of spaces neatlyorganized within a secure frame, in some cases clearly taking theform of diagrammed city plans viewed from a perspective high abovethe earth (see plates 3.11 and 3.12). If modernism meant, amongother things, the subjugation of space to human purposes, then therational ordering and control of space as part and parcel of a modernculture founded on rationality and technique, the suppression ofspatial barriers and difference, had to be merged with some kind ofhistorical project. Picasso's evolution is also instructive. Abandoningcubism after the 'cubist war,' he turned to classicism for a briefperiod after 1919, probably out of some search to rediscover humanistvalues. But he returns shortly thereafter to his explorations of interiorspaces through their total pulverization, only to recoup thedestruction in a creative masterpiece, Guernica, in which the moderniststy Ie is used as a 'flexible instrument for the connection ofmultiple temporal and spatial viewpoints within the scope of therhetorically powerful image' (Taylor, 1987, 150)._Enlightenment thinkers had postulated human welfare as theirgoal. That objective was never far from the surface of the rhetoric ofinter-war modernism. The problem was to find practical circumstancesand the financial resources to realize such goals. The Russians,obviously attracted to the modernist ethos of a radical break with thepast for ideological reasons, provided a space within which a wholeset of experiments - Russian formalism and constructivism being byfar the most important - could unfold, and out of which came wideranginginitiatives in cinema, painting, literature, and music as well asarchitecture. But the breathing space for such experimentation wasrelatively short, and the resources were hardly munificent, even forthose most committed to the cause of the revolution. On the otherhand, this connection between socialism and modernism, howeverslender, placed a cloud over modernism's reputation in the capitalistWest, where the turn to surrealism (also with political overtones) didnot help matters. In societies where the accumulation of capital -The rise of modernism as a cultural force 281Plate 3.11 Kandinsky's paintings of the pre-1914 war period, such as theJugement Dernier of 1912, exhibit such an explosive sense of space that theyappear to spill off the canvas with an uncontrollable dynamismthat 'historical mission of the bourgeoisie' as Marx called it - remainedthe effective pivot of action, there was only place for machine-stylemodernism of the Bauhaus sort.Modernism's travails were also internal. To begin with, it couldnever escape the problem of its own aesthetic as a spatialization ofsorts. However flexible Otto Wagner's or Le Corbusier's plans werein their capacity to absorb future developments and expansions, theynecessarily fixed space in the midst of a historical process that washighly dynamic.How to contain flowing and expanding processes in a fixed spatialframe of power relations, infrastructures and the like could not easilybe resolved. The result was a social system that was all too prone tocreative destruction of the sort that unfolded mercilessly after thecapitalist crash of 1929. As spatializations, the artefacts produced bythe moderns (with exceptions, of course, such as the Dadaists) conveyedsome permanent if not monumental sense of supposedly universalhuman values. But even Le Corbusier recognized that such an