FIGURE 10.1 Joseph Cornell, Hotel Eden.
Source: © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Mark Goble
Modernism persists for us today largely as an aesthetic of obsolescence, which is not just a sign of its advancing age but a crucial and originary aspect of its character that we now understand with greater clarity precisely because we no longer feel required to insist on modernism’s novelty as the most important measure of its value.
Imagine what modernism will look like in another hundred years, well into the century after the one in which it flourished in so many literary and artistic genres, across so many media, and from all corners of the increasingly global culture that modernism’s early masterpieces simultaneously anticipated and, at times, decried. Maybe nothing much is left to change: with the emergence of “the new modernist studies” powerfully mapped by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, critics now have access to a far more historically responsive and conceptually flexible set of terms and genealogies for talking about modernism in contemporary ways.1 The “new” modernism extends beyond the decades of the early twentieth century and reflects the work of countless figures once abandoned or never even known by another generation and the canon it produced. Where earlier critics of modernism such as Clement Greenberg or Hugh Kenner seemingly had endless energy for delimiting what kinds of art could really count as modernist or for debating whether the era belonged to Ezra Pound or someone else, few recent figures working in the field would champion or even countenance a return to the midcentury preoccupations that almost made modernism into a relic—isolated and anachronistic, redolent of a vanished, lifeless epoch cut off from a changing world—as artists, theorists, and academics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s increasingly conceptualized their time as “postmodernity.” The book that you are reading, on the other hand, is evidence that modernism is alive and well, or at least not dead. By turning its attention to a broader range of authors, movements, periods, and continents, modernist studies has aggressively pursued what Mao and Walkowitz characterize as “temporal and spatial expansions” that have inspired compelling projects too numerous to list. Modernist studies, put another way, seems to have faced the prospect of its obsolescence and realized the promise of one of modernism’s own most contentious bits of propaganda: “Make It New.” Which is only possible, as Pound would certainly admit, if you have something old already at your disposal.
I am not concerned here with the possibility that modernism may someday finally be obsolete nor with the perhaps inevitable future when its survival, like that of other, earlier aesthetic modes such as neoclassicism and romanticism, is, well, academic—as a feature of syllabi and survey courses that figures in the deeper logic of the contemporary moment but nowhere near the surface of its artistic practices and cultural affairs. I am interested instead in all the ways that forms of obsolescence—both anxious and aspirational—are part of modernism’s project from the beginning and speak to many of the conditions that helped bring it into prominence in the first decades of the twentieth century and beyond. It might even be the case that modernism persists for us today largely as an aesthetic of obsolescence, which I would like to argue is not just a sign of its advancing age but a crucial and originary aspect of its character that we now understand with greater clarity precisely because we no longer feel required to insist on modernism’s novelty as the most important measure of its value. As Michael North has recently reminded us, “the pretense to independence that is that basis of modernism clashes everywhere with the fact of dependence on the past,” and “though modern art is supposed to be absolutely new and different without compromise, its advent is often announced as if it were the return of something long exiled.”2 Modernism, especially in its most ambitious literary forms, has regularly functioned as an archaeology of mythic correspondences and reanimations of dead pasts that point to futures that look a lot like the ruins of a present we are trying to escape. We need only think of all the cultural material that Eliot recycles in The Waste Land or all the histories that Pound wants to revitalize in The Cantos. A certain style of “high” modernism is largely predicated on skillful and arcane invocations of obsolete traditions, mobilized at least in part to compensate for the unrelenting emptiness of time itself. “Quick now, here, now, always—” writes Eliot in “Burnt Norton,” “Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after.”3 For many Anglo-American writers after World War I, thinking about obsolescent forms of art and culture—Homeric epics, Provençal lyrics, Jacobean dramas—provided an alternative language of expression at a moment when the future loomed as a perpetual and enduring crisis, “catastrophic or intolerable,” as T. J. Clark puts it, “an epoch formed from an unstoppable, unmappable collision of different forces” and the wars, technologies, ideologies, and genocides they made.4 If this is the history that comes with modernism, then maybe we should be glad its time has passed.
The modernist period’s fascination with obsolescence should be distinguished from its related interests in various models of antiquity and other iconographies of cultural tradition. I would like to focus instead on obsolescence as a more specialized phenomenon of technology and the accelerated temporalities of modern life it comes to register. Obsolescence is an invention of industrial modernity. While words and things had been described as obsolete in English since the Renaissance, it is not until the nineteenth century that “obsolescence” is used to characterize a quality of objects and the processes that render them outmoded as a result of technological development. The nominalization that makes for “obsolescence”—apart from any instance of the obsolete—suggests a more pervasive sense of being somehow too soon outside of or behind the times, abandoned by the sheer scale and speed of the productive forces put in motion across England, Europe, and, later, the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is no accident, in other words, that a more conceptually abstract and portable idea of obsolescence emerges with the rise of an economy based increasingly on what Marx, writing in The Grundrisse (1857), termed “productive consumption.”5 Thus the perception of a commodity’s obsolescence, notwithstanding its actual durability or usefulness, provides one of modern capitalism’s central drives and, as Jennifer Gabrys argues, “creates a loop between production and consumption . . . where consumption provides the necessary dissolution of products in order to spur new production.”6 Or as Marx observes: “Consumption accomplishes the act of production only in completing the product as product by dissolving it.”7 The industrial technologies and economies of scale that make it possible to manufacture goods in unimaginable abundance by the middle of the nineteenth century—the Victorian excess that many modernists condemn with flair and passion—just as certainly demand that these same goods must be abandoned before their time, which, from the perspective of capital, has been too long already.
“The rose is obsolete,” writes William Carlos Williams in the seventh poem of Spring and All (1923), where he labors to bring an exceedingly dead metaphor back to life as an artifact of modernist depiction. He then goes on to talk of roses anyway:
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air—The edge
cuts without cutting
meets—nothing—renews
itself in metal or porcelain—
The lines break radically and unnaturally across the grammar of the sentences and the hackneyed symbolism they invoke by way of absolute denial. Rendered in a hard material—this rose, of course, is “cutting” edge—Williams’s rose feels like a manufactured object, mass produced for simple decoration but rewarding, in its formal structuring and crystalline complexity, the more sustained attention we would give a work of art. Summing up the literary tradition that the poem is salvaging from obsolescence, the speaker later says that “love is at an end—of roses,” a circular construction that conflates austere perception and sappy projection in a kind of productive consumption, borrowing from Marx, that at last inspires a positively cosmic vision of poetic fancy. “From the petal’s edge a line starts / that being of steel / infinitely fine, infinitely / rigid penetrates the Milky Way.” This rose is obsolete, but it finally takes dominion beyond the earth from which its raw materials are taken and out of which its natural referent grows.
We could find analogs to Williams in a range of modernist expression from the early twentieth century and see variations on the ways in which the materiality of technology was embraced as an alternative to aesthetic obsolescence. Still, Fredric Jameson would insist that underneath it all remains “this transfer of the temporality of capitalism” and “its ever-more-rapid style and fashion changes” to the “dynamics of artistic modernism,” which is why, for Jameson at least, modernism itself is “an immense negative process” that can only promise newness in bad faith since it is beholden to the “same boom-and-bust cycle of some desperate movement from markets saturated with commodities to new markets and new commodities alike.”8 His disdain for modernism is considerable and significant, particularly in that he seems scandalized that modernism has managed to survive the postmodernity that should have made it obsolete. Modernism in the present is not a canny or potentially disruptive version of what Raymond Williams, in a different idiom of Marxist criticism, would have characterized as “residual” for its implicit challenge to the “dominant” forms of a contemporary moment.9 The surprising durability of modernism as a category of both aesthetic judgment and cultural critique instead seems to Jameson positively retentive, a weird regression in the present to an even starker, more complete surrender to the rhythms and imperatives of the market. Postmodernism now looks in retrospect like a righteous but unfinished purge: Jameson writes, “in the midst of all the healthy movements of disgust and revulsion, indeed, to the very sound of windows breaking and old furniture being thrown out, we have begun in the last few years to witness phenomena . . . that suggest a return to and the reestablishment of all kinds of old things, rather than their wholesale liquidation” (1). It is not just that modernism is obsolete but that we have become obsessive hoarders of its objects and imperatives, unable to move beyond the spurious “value of the New that seems to preside over any specific or local modernism worth its salt” (121).
Jameson will be decidedly unhappy, then, if the future turns out like William Gibson pictures it in Count Zero (1986), the second novel in the “Sprawl” trilogy that began with Neuromancer (1984), where Gibson helped contribute to the mythology of postmodernism by coining the term “cyberspace.” Count Zero is set in a decade near the end of the twenty-first century and features all the variety of details that encode its genre as science fiction: artificial intelligences are real and sentient beings, human users can connect their neural pathways directly to the web, and most of the world’s nation-statues have faded as sovereign entities, replaced by ambitious corporate entities that simultaneously pursue bleeding-edge strategies for market dominance alongside feudal designs on status, grandeur, and virtual immortality. And modernism is in vogue, at least for Herr Josef Virek, a capitalist and collector, possessing “wealth on another scale of magnitude,” who approaches a disgraced art curator with a offer she cannot refuse.10 Virek hopes to upload his consciousness to a computer network large and complex enough to sustain his being forever, and he suspects that the hardware he needs in fact exists because he has discovered that somewhere on Earth, or in the space stations orbiting it, an “AI” has been producing some curious artifacts that not only suggest a version of a mind at work but one with a sense of history and taste that is plainly obsolete:
Marly [the curator] stared. Box of plain wood, glass-fronted. Objects . . .
“Cornell,” she said . . . “Cornell?”
“Of course not. The object set into that length of bone is a Braun biomonitor. . . .”
But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossible distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle, and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.
The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight. . . . Three archaic circuit boards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once of ridden flush with the surface of the skin—but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
(14–15)
Like an actual Joseph Cornell box, such as 1945’s Hotel Eden (figure 10.1), the AI in Count Zero has made a work of art invoking several of modernism’s most familiar strategies and principles. Gibson imagines a work of late twenty-first-century bricolage that seamlessly inserts the detritus of an age we cannot yet quite imagine—what exactly does a “Braun biomonitor” do? how impossibly advanced are these “archaic circuit boards,” having had another century or so of Moore’s law to condition their increasing speed and power?—into an aesthetic program whose every subroutine we know by heart. There are still, it seems, “no ideas but in things,” just as Williams once insisted, and the allure of materiality remains provocatively affecting long into a high-tech future where a bit of “small instrument” once wired into a body can seem as worn and homespun as a cardboard parakeet or uncoiled spring. Gibson’s appreciation may be overwrought (“the box was a universe”), but the idea that we perceive an aura of timelessness and presence in an artwork’s formal structure is something we know as dogma according to Greenberg, Michael Fried, or Stanley Cavell.11 Or borrowing from another idiom of modernism, we might note that when Eliot argues that the artists should be “perfected mediums” reflecting “a continual extinction of personality,” he certainly did not have an AI out of cyberpunk in mind. But Gibson’s anachronistic, simulated modernism suggests an aesthetic of technology that answers Eliot precisely, if only we can wait another couple hundred years for it to emerge out of the past. Jameson himself contrasts Gibson’s writing “to an exhausted modernism” and argues that “cyberpunk constitutes a kind of laboratory experiment in which the geographic-culture light spectrum and bandwidths of the new system are registered.” In the case of Count Zero, however, the only “new” seems like another form of obsolescence that has not been modernized, that has been retrofitted for another time.
FIGURE 10.1 Joseph Cornell, Hotel Eden.
Source: © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Or put another way, Gibson conceives an AI that didn’t just manage to become sentient but to become Walter Benjamin. Like the figures about whom Benjamin writes in his essay on “Surrealism”—and, it bears mention, influences on Cornell—we see an artist who “can boast an extraordinary discovery” insofar as they “perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded.’”12 Benjamin’s writings represent modernism’s most intensive and exhaustive encounter with obsolescence, which informs not only his elaborate archaeologies of nineteenth-century modernity in The Arcades Project but also his essays on storytelling, mimesis, and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” as well as the project that became The Origin of German Tragic Drama, where he is everywhere concerned with the “antique qualities of the baroque” that make it so uncannily contemporary.13 Gibson even echoes Benjamin on aura—“the unique phenomenon of distance”—in the way that these belated Cornell boxes provide for an “evocation of impossible distances” that has little to do with the hundreds of miles they may have already traveled down from orbit over Earth. In her wonderful account of “digital rubbish,” Gabrys borrows from Benjamin a methodology she links to his singular practice of “natural history” to reflect on “the fossilized commodities in the obsolete arcades of [Paris]”; here he found in objects variously “decaying” or “outmoded” what she terms “concrete facts about past cultural imaginings.”14 Gabrys herself is interested in the sorts of technological commodities that Gibson and other cyberpunk writers have long traded on, and by seeing the way that their future obsolescence gets projected onto even the latest gadgets, she helps us track the legacy of the modernist aesthetic I have been exploring here. “Obsolete objects,” Gabrys notes, evoked for Benjamin “a kind of prehistory when they fell out of circulation, at which time they could be examined as resonant material residues . . . of economic practices.” More importantly, Benjamin’s attention to obsolescence, in all its many modern forms, tried to slow down or perhaps more radically disrupt the very notion of what “progress” under capitalism really looks like in order “to demonstrate the contingency and transience of commodity worlds.” Or as Joel Burgess puts it, the modernist fetish for obsolescence, despite the ahistorical nostalgia it may risk, can generate “a series of relations between past and present as a function of the aura of datedness that its objects produce.”15 Obsolescence seems to work for modernism even when the point is that it doesn’t.
We can see this in a contemporary project that very much has modernism in its retrospective view. Produced in 2011 by Jung von Matt, a Hamburg-based digital ad agency, “The Museum of Obsolete Objects” (figure 10.2) was part of YouTube’s “Brand Channel” initiative, which allowed “marketers to create a bespoke interface, customizing the look and feel of their presence on the site” in order to “provide the opportunity to create truly persistent relationships” with customers online.16 The ephemerality of so much digital culture is an abiding preoccupation of Jung von Matt’s project, which commemorates a series of older technologies—such as the abacus, electronic calculator, telephone, fountain pen, telegraph, phonograph, and typewriter—that speak to the contemporary world of media in which they have all been replaced by the computer, just as some of them once replaced their predecessors (calculator for abacus, telephone for telegraph). In other words, a specter is haunting “The Museum of Obsolete Objects”: the specter of new media obsolescence, which corporations such as YouTube must find a way to overcome in order to make possible both “truly persistent relationships” and the profits that come with brand loyalty. What are the chances that any “marketers’” online presence—no matter how bespoke—will endure for as long as even the most short-lived obsolete technology that Jung von Matt identifies? The floppy disc, according to the “Museum,” survived for thirty-five years, from 1960 to 1995. Will YouTube, founded in 2005, last till 2040?
I am finally less interested in this popular culture of obsolescence than in the more rarefied ways that a project like “The Museum of Obsolete Objects” invokes a patently modernist iconography. Given the tropism toward dead media objects in Jung von Mott’s “museum,” the inclusion of an eggbeater seems at first an odd choice—of all the implements and gadgets in the world, why this particular object? Though I cannot be sure, I would venture that one of Jung von Mott’s designers is showing off a bit of training in art history and quoting one of Man Ray’s more iconic photographs of his early, Dada phase, specifically, the 1918 image entitled L’homme (though he titles a later print of the same photograph Femme, and the two names are used somewhat interchangeably in discussions of Man Ray, which is of course the point) (figure 10.3). This Man Ray photograph is one of many artworks from this period that helped fashion an early modernist idiom of technofetishism, a deliberate play with the hybrid mechanics of quasi–human sexuality put to work amid the turning gears and pistons of such works as Francis Picabia’s Machine Turn Quickly (Machine Tournez Vite) from 1916 or, more famously still, Duchamp’s Large Glass, which incorporates his Chocolate Grinder painting from 1914 in its lower panel.
Jung von Mott’s especially pristine eggbeater is also curious because it obviously and demonstrably still works. We can click to see a Flash video that shows it beating eggs, its functionality unimpeded by the countless electric mixers that have come after it. Its obsolescence, then, is a matter of our no longer wanting to use it, which is different than saying it is no longer useful. Obsolescence does not inhere in objects as a property of their being in the world but rather is a quality that we project upon them, an aura of uselessness and inefficiency that we could dispel or disbelieve if we insisted. It seems right, in fact, to think that most obsolete things must still work, just not for us—this, after all, is the scandal of “planned obsolescence,” where commodities are designed to fail, aesthetically if not functionally, before their time is really up.
We might say that “The Museum of Obsolete Objects” gives us a collection of what Heidegger would call “broken tools,” which are ultimately the only tools we ever come to feel and know. As Graham Harman writes in his exploration of this concept, first laid out by Heidegger in Being and Time, “equipment in action operates in an inconspicuous usefulness, doing its work without our noticing it. When the tool fails, its unobtrusive quality is ruined. There occurs a jarring of reference, so that the tool becomes visible as what it is . . . emerging into the sun only in the moment of their breakdown.”17 For Harman and other “speculative realists” such as Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier, this Heideggerian drama of perception marks only the first step toward getting past the privileging of human beings—over the “substance” of objects for Harman, over the mathematics and scale of time and space for Meillassoux—that has shaped the whole history of philosophy and theory as they critique it. At the very least, Harman’s reading of Heidegger’s famous account in chapter 16 of Being and Time of how “entities within-the-world” announce themselves can provide a way of understanding modernism’s fascination with technological innovation as more than just a reflection—a kind of mimetic investment after all—of its twentieth-century context.
FIGURE 10.3 Man Ray, L’homme.
Source: © Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY ADAGP, Paris 2015.
Heidegger argues that a tool can be what he terms “un-ready-to-hand”—which is to say, broken and thus actively perceived—for many different reasons, but what we term obsolescence corresponds best to Heidegger’s “obstinacy.” As he writes in Being and Time:
In our dealing with the world of our concern, the un-ready-to-hand can be encountered not only in the sense of that which is unusable or simply missing, but as something un-ready-to-hand which is not missing at all and not unusable, but which “stands in the way” of our concern. That to which our concern refuses to turn, that for which it has “no time,” is something un-ready-to-hand in the manner of what does not belong here, of what has not yet been attended to. Anything which is un-ready-to-hand in this way is disturbing to us, and enables us to see the obstinacy of that with which we must concerns ourselves in the first instance before we do anything else.18
Let me point to a single turn in this passage that registers the complex temporality of the tool or object whose obsolescence, as a kind of “obstinacy,” we find ourselves facing. At first, we have “no time” for it, and while it’s always risky to assume that Heidegger uses common phrases with their common meanings in mind, here, at least, it seems plausible to suggest that having “no time” for, say, a manual eggbeater does mean that we’re frustrated by the prospect of its slowness and inefficiency. From this, we project onto the object a more pervasive aura of anachronism, “in the manner of what does not belong here.” But this anachronism is perversely forward looking, as if pulling us not back in time to when all eggbeaters were mechanical but pushing us toward a future moment when we will attend to “what has not yet been attended to.” The apprehension of an object’s obsolescence, in this story, seems finally to reveal that we are constantly failing to pay attention to the things we use until the moment when their brokenness throws us into an existential awareness of them, an awareness that we know, at some level, we should have had already in the past.
FIGURE 10.4 James Agee, Beauties of the Common Tool.
Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 (1994.258.223; 1994.258.228)
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This is a logic far trickier than the one we might fashion from Williams’s dialectic of the emergent and the residual, but it nonetheless helps clarify how modernism can treat obsolescence as both a failure of a technology to stay current and as an apotheosis of technology that makes art possible. Consider, in this respect, a series of photographs that Walker Evans made just after World War II, when he would have had ample reason to reflect on how modernism and its technologies were aging with the century they helped fashion. Published in July 1955, “Beauties of the Common Tool” (figure 10.4) appeared in Fortune, where Evans had previously placed images throughout the 1930s, including some that eventually made their way into James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His introduction to the photo-essay assigns a catalogue of Machine Age virtues to the objects in the succeeding pictures: these common tools provide “a kind of offb eat museum show for the man who responds to good, clear, ‘undesigned,’ forms”; “aside from their functions—though they are exclusively wedded to their function—each of these tools lures the eye to follow its curves and angles, and invites the hand to test its balance”; “all the basic small tools stand, aesthetically speaking, for elegance, candor, and purity.”19 It is likely that Evans is also here remembering another “offb eat museum show” that appeared at the Museum of Modern Art a few years before Evans’s own American Photographs at MOMA solidified his standing as one of America’s preeminent modernists: in 1934, Philip Johnson’s Machine Art became the first major art exhibition devoted entirely to works of contemporary design, from industrial components and tools to scientific instruments and even human appliances. Indeed, the family resemblance between Evans’s photographs from “Beauties of the Common Tool” and some from Johnson’s Machine Art (figure 10.5) catalog are telling. But if Evans’s photographs of 1955 are gesturing back to a “machine art” of 1934, they do so obliquely and ironically; there is a feeling of premature “postmodernism” in way these photographs of tools also allude to some of his own from the 1930s, such as the closely cropped portraits from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I am especially tempted to anthropomorphize and project a human visage onto the tin snips, placing eyes in the handles and tracing the bridge of a nose down the blades. Whether we see these pictures as portraits, it remains the case that for all the functionalism he ascribes to their aesthetic character—as “undesigned” forms “wedded to their function”—he addresses them, in prose at least, as oddly feeling and virtually alive, which only underscores the pathos of their tangible outmodedness as “common tools” in a world of high technologies that are aggressively designed commodities. “Who would sully the lines of the tin cutting shears . . . with a single added bend or whorl? Or clothe in any way the fine naked impression of heft and bite in the crescent wrench . . . ?” These tools may be almost indestructible as material artifacts, but Evans makes them sound sensitive and easily offended. Like heroines in a Victorian melodrama, their moral and aesthetic “purity” is endangered by what Evans calls “design-happy manufacturers” who would have them tarted up with corrupting decorations or “tampered with” so brazenly that a “beautiful plumb bob” is made to look “suspiciously like a top space ship.” To borrow again from Williams, spaceships represent some of the most spectacularly “emergent” forms of new technology in these first decades of the Cold War. Evans is writing in the year that inaugurates the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, with both nations announcing their intentions to build ballistic missiles capable of putting satellites into orbit. There is nothing necessarily obsolete about a crescent wrench in 1955, but it perhaps is no longer a useful tool for fighting global communism.
FIGURE 10.5 Philip Johnson, “Machine Art.”
Source: © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resources, NY.
The same nostalgic tone pervades much of Evans’s work at Fortune after World War II and helps us track how modernism as such comes to deal with the specter of its potential obsolescence in the period. A photo-essay on “These Dark Satanic Mills” of the industrial Northeast—“factories and shops of America’s industrial age of innocence”—can look past an often violent history of labor politics and economic exploitation and instead describes abandoned cotton mills as good places “to find some mellow Americana.” “The Auto Junkyard” Evans explores in another essay is “rich in tragicomic suggestions of the fall of man from his high ride.” Here are other titles Evans uses to organize his increasingly melancholic imagery of American modernity growing old: “A Beautiful Factory Vanishes,” “Vintage Office Furniture,” “The Last of Railroad Steam,” The Twilight of American Woolen,” “Before They Disappear.” The signs of a more modern modernity are abundant, and nowhere are the consequences of progress more visible than in the ruination, as Evans sees it anyway, of a prior epoch of modernity that now appears antique.
This phase in Evans’s long career might readily be taken to mark the earliest moments of the contemporary genre of “ruin porn,” which has become one of the most prominent aesthetics for depicting the obsolescent landscapes of industrial modernity in the West. And like Evans’s own sad nostalgia for an “age of innocence” that somehow manages to survive the politics behind a manufacturing economy of “Satanic Mills,” the aestheticizing regard for what capitalism has left behind can all too easily structure a blindness toward the full complexity of the present—a variation on the anthropological primitivism that Johannes Fabian argues is invariably employed “for the purpose of distancing those who are observed from the Time of the observer.”20 That said, we can gain a more critical perspective on Evans’s turn toward obsolescence by noting that it coincides, in both chronology and subject matter, with the work of Bern and Hilla Becher, who begin their photographic project of documenting the “typologies” of industrial buildings in Europe and the United States shortly after marrying in 1957. What salvages the Bechers’ work from any intimations of the nostalgia that colors Evans’s postindustrial photography is both its excessive rigor and sheer excess: hundreds and thousands of programmatically composed black-and-white photographs made over several decades, with little stylistic development or alteration. The Bechers’ many books and exhibitions have accumulated an archive of minutely observed details about the anonymous architecture of heavy industry, which they understand as an increasingly obsolete sector of the global economy in much of the West. As Bern Becher recalled before his death, they were interested in “a kind of nomadic architecture” that “had a comparatively short life—maybe 100 years, often less, then disappears.”21 Becher here does not overtly link this epoch to that of modernism, but it remains implicit in the way their imagery recalls the “New Objectivity” of German photographers in the 1930s; it also plays more slyly with the documentary aesthetics of August Sander and his portrait series on “People of the Twentieth Century.”
The Bechers themselves regularly downplay the documentary nature of their agenda and see their work in far more abstract terms. Or still more pointedly, they insist in high modernist fashion that the most important content of the images are their own protocols and formal operations for making pictures. For Michael Fried, this makes for a remarkably absorptive mode of photography that depends on “the isolation and ‘silhouetting’ of the individual objects, the consistency of lighting, the duration of the exposure of the black-and-white film, [and] the choice of an elevated view-point that enables the object to be photographed head-on.”22 These are features of Evans’s photographs in “Beauties of the Common Tool” as well, where any sense of a world in which these tools could still be used has been obscured, if not obliterated. Such decontextualization might be just what it takes, or so these pictures argue, to render these obsolete technologies into works of art, but this is the same logic that makes it hard to grasp the Bechers’ buildings or Evans’s tools as parts not just of a world but of an industrial economy able to provide the West with an iconography of the bleeding-edge modernity it once pretended to monopolize.
In this respect, an aesthetics of obsolescence continues to pattern a way of looking at the presence and persistence of technology as a shared phenomenon of global modernity in the twenty-first century. Indeed, the spectacle of obsolete technologies—in all their decaying bulk and toxic materiality—has come to provide contemporary artists with compelling imagery to reflect upon the legacies of modernism not just as a surprisingly durable network of cultural practices but also as a set of ideologies that have reified the idea of technical and scientific innovation as a Western project against which the timelessness or slower temporalities of other peoples, places, and nations are reckoned. This is not to say that older forms of primitivism do not remain a part of modernism today nor that a decidedly postmodern set of anxieties about the hypermodernization of various Asian cultures in particular have gone away—as first Japan in the 1980s and now China, South Korea, and Singapore are feared and fetishized for leaving “us” behind. The bleeding edge in obsolescence, by contrast, appears in works that increasingly imagine how both technologies and the histories of consumption and production they make real are connected within a global ecology where the extreme disposability of the recently outmoded gives modernism a new afterlife as something retrograde and uncanny.
Consider this ancient iPhone (figure 10.6), meticulously aged and rendered as a relic by the Japanese artist Maico Akiba, one of many technological artifacts in her 2013 series One Hundred Years After, in which she paints items to look like salvage from a landfill from an imagined future where archaeologists are assembling a picture of our present from its ruins. Such a project resonates with any number of postapocalyptic visions of the contemporary—think of the talking children’s doll that Charlton Heston’s astronaut finds at the end of Planet of the Apes—but Akiba’s iPhone is particularly powerful because it reflects so sharply on the speed with which the consumer-electronics industry pursues a form of “accelerationism” as a marketing device.23 As we can see from its rounded back and edges, this is an iPhone 3G and so already “ancient” for its makers at Apple, which discontinued making them in 2010. Another century or so of projected wear and material decay gives form and texture to the obsolescence that Apple no doubt hopes that we perceive already in last year’s model. The fact that Akiba shows an iPhone that is fully charged and ready to make calls is thus part of the joke. Its “obstinacy,” to return to Heidegger, might even let us appreciate the old-fashioned modernism of Apple’s commodity aesthetic, which derives almost entirely from Bauhaus principles and the minimalism that Dieter Rams made his signature as an industrial designer at Braun starting in the 1960s.
We see another version of what a global modernism can make of obsolescence in Gibson’s most recent novels, which have been set squarely in the present and where his twentieth-century tastes have become pronounced and more austere. The protagonist of 2003’s Pattern Recognition wears a “fanatical museum-grade replica of a U.S. MA-1 flying jacket, as purely and iconic a garment as the previous century produced.”24 Except it didn’t: though fanatically accurate in the smallest details of design, the jacket Gibson describes was only ever made in green, not black, as worn in Pattern Recognition—a mere technicality that was corrected by the actual Japanese clothing company mentioned in the novel, which put a version of the jacket into almost immediate production and now sells a whole line of “William Gibson” coats and accessories based on classic twentieth-century work wear.25 His latest novel, Zero History (2010), features a “secret brand” of jeans and work wear as one of its several “MacGuffins,” as Hitchcock called his finally useless predicates for narrative action. The clothes are styled to embody an absurd excess of functionality and, though made from heavy fabrics “loomed in Japan” on antiquated machines, their maker is finally discovered in Chicago, where she labors among “the ruins of American manufacturing” as if better to impart the aura of an epoch that no longer requires workers, across much of Europe and the West at least, to dress in denim built to last for decades. “I saw that an American cotton shirt that had cost twenty cents in 1935,” Gibson’s designer says near the end of the novel, “will be better than almost anything you can buy today. But if you re-create that shirt, and you might have to go to Japan to do that, you wind up with something that needs to retail for around three hundred dollars.” The novel has a longing for “people who remembered how to make things,” and this adds a note of Rust Belt melancholy to what has always been a familiar theme in Gibson’s writing: the power and appeal of a residual materiality in digital culture that may not promise “disembodied consciousness” with quite the same abandon that it did in the 1990s but that remains beholden to the fantasies of an information economy that still has a great deal of trouble processing what might be somewhat euphemistically called its externalities. Thus the hyperbolic and expensive obsolescence of the commodities worn by Gibson’s technological elite find their dialectical reflection in the “e-waste” that Edward Burtynsky and others have made into a familiar trope in contemporary documentary photography. Burtynsky is only one of many photographers working in a super-large-format style of realism—which is aided by the seamless integration of analog and digital imagery—that operates at a scale of immersive detail and allover attention to the picture plane informed by abstract expressionism and postwar minimalist painting.
In an image from his photo book China (2005), Burtynsky wants to confront his viewers with the consequences of the computer industry’s relentless pursuit of perpetual and continuous obsolescence, which has accelerated in the iPhone era to reduce a technological “generation” to merely eighteen months (figure 10.7). And while the idea of such harrowingly productive consumption goes back at least to Marx and the Grundrisse, the term “planned obsolescence” does not enter the language of design and marketing until 1954, when it was coined by the industrial engineer Brookes Stevens at the very moment when modernism itself was becoming widely codified and taught by figures such as Clement Greenberg, who tracked each season’s trends with a ferocious dedication to whatever seemed most pure in its commitment to innovation. Just as Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers (1960) was lamenting an economy of “progress through planned obsolescence” as an increasingly dangerous “manipulation” of American consumers, Greenberg was offering one of his most doctrinaire articulations, in his essay “Modernist Painting,” of the need for artists to “make it new.” However suggestive this historical proximity may be, it mistakes the attitude toward “old” and obsolescent art that Greenberg saw as absolutely critical for modernism’s project. Thus the point of “Modernist Painting” is to dismiss as merely shoddy “journalism” the notion that “each new phase of Modernist art should be hailed as the start of a whole new epoch . . . marking a decisive break with all the customs and conventions of the past.”26 Instead, what Greenberg celebrated as truly “Modernist”—here, for the first time, he capitalized the term—was the much less newsworthy proposition that “Art is . . . continuity, and unthinkable without it” (93). Far from rendering outmoded figures and traditions obsolete, Greenberg’s modernism, in an argument analogous to Eliot’s in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” was positively obsessed with aesthetic forms and systems of meaning that cultures left behind, and that “lacking the past of art, and the need and compulsion to maintain its standards of excellence, Modernist art would lack both substance and justification” (93).
FIGURE 10.7 Edward Burtynsky, from China.
Source: © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto / Von Lintel Gallery, Los Angeles.
Modernist studies has largely abandoned both Greenberg’s restrictive terminology and the narrow prejudices and historical narratives that, as he might say, it justified. At the same time, I would not be so quick to abandon his sense that modernism’s value is just as much a product of the past that it recycles as the new ground that it discovers. Though it comes to us as something of a relic already worse for wear, modernism might be even more important to us now if it can help us come to terms with all the ways that its technologies—and the cultures that they have shaped—will persist for decades, even centuries, after most people have forgotten their emergence. Modernism began with obsolescence, which is one reason why, perversely enough, it was built to last for the duration.
Notes
1. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 737–748.
2. Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 149–151.
3. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1890–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), 122.
4. T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), 14–16.
5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 90.
6. Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 96.
7. Marx, Grundrisse, 93. I am indebted to Gabrys’s Digital Rubbish for calling this passage to my attention.
8. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 129.
9. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
10. William Gibson, Count Zero (New York: Ace, 1986), 11–12.
11. See especially Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148–172.
12. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 181.
13. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009), 134.
14. Gabrys, Digital Rubbish, 5.
15. Joel Burges, “Adorno’s Mimeograph: The Uses of Obsolescence in Minima Moralia,” New German Critique 40, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 91.
16. “The Museum of Obsolete Objects,” Jung von Matt, http://www.youtube.com/ser/MoooJvM. YouTube has since discontinued its “Brand Channels” initiative.
17. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 45.
18. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: HarperPerennial, 1962), 103.
19. Walker Evans, “Beauties of the Common Tool,” Fortune (July 1955); also reproduced in Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000).
20. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 25.
21. See Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 305.
22. Ibid., 306.
23. For more on “accelerationism,” see Matteo Pasquinelli, “The Labour of Abstraction: Seven Transitional Theses on Marxism and Accelerationism,” http://matteopasquinelli.com/labour-of-abstraction-theses/Accelerationism.
24. William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: Berkeley, 2003), 10–11.
25. More on William Gibson’s collection with the Japanese clothing company Buzz Rickson’s is available at http://bookshelf.wisebook3.jp/bookstore/h5/toyoenterprise/2500/#57.
26. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 93. See also Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986); and Michael North, Novelty, 144–171.
