The historical movement that has set the self-regarding individual as the lodestar of social thought and organization is a multi-causal and multi-dimensional phenomenon. It has an aesthetic aspect: the arrangement of living space that encourages and accommodates full expression of that self.  That is the topic of this venerable essay that is taking its final bow.

I.

Modernism is something that we all grew up with. It’s in our aesthetic bloodstream. We tend to take its forms and modes of expression as natural; after all, it has been the dominant aesthetic motif for the better part of a century. Some of its features are more pronounced, and obvious, than others. In literature, music, and much painting, the common trait that our senses perceive is its jagged, disconnected, and fragmented nature. Those are also features of our current lives – a case of art anticipating life? For the artists who were the fountainheads of modernism actually lived in social, and physical, settings quite coherent and orderly by today’s standards.

The motor force of the modernist movement was freedom of self-expression, the rebellion against the constraints of all formalisms. Rules were the enemy. The society and the culture that insisted on fixed norms imprisoned the self. Modern art was at once an act of liberation and an assault on the established order. Disorder became seen as virtuous by its very apposition to all convention. There is an intriguing connection between modernism’s claim to unbridled liberty and the way that it has shaped the physical environment in which we live.

That trait stands out when our attention turns to architecture and décor. It this sphere, disorder gave way to clarity; complexity to simplicity. Uncluttered, clean, spare are the words that come to mind. For some, such a setting provides maximum room for a rationally organized and directed existence. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the renowned positivist philosopher, designed and minutely supervised the construction of a house in Vienna that was an exemplar of the modernist philosophy. 

Every linear specification was realized with exactitude. Upon completion, he insisted that the ceilings be raised by 30 millimeters in order to meet his exacting standard of mathematical abstract beauty – the reification of mathematics. Austerity of décor matched the architectural precision. Its interior was occupied by little more than the philosopher himself. There are more recognizable exemplars.

Think of Bauhaus design that has so profoundly influenced modern visual sensibility. Think of Le Corbusier and the regular lines of the omnipresent office block or commercial park that are its derivative. Think of the bleakly functional Pompidou Centre in Paris. Think of up-scale Italian décor.

The physical environment they have modelled for us is sleek and unencumbered. It is pale.  The living habitat emphasizes open space. It invites us to do what we will within that space.  It’s almost as if the modernist motto in this domain is: “it’s up to you.” There is no dictation of what to pay attention to since there is so little to look at. The stark geometric alignments offer only bare hints as to how we may arrange the space they compose. We are encouraged, in fact, not to fill the space with things. A spare abstract painting here, a bit of fabric there, a slight modulation of colour tones. That is about it. The unstated message is a powerful one: this is about you – only you.

This is narcissism friendly terrain – no threat, no challenge, no contender or contention for the imperial self. The narcissistic personality implicitly rejects all claims on it by opinion, by custom or even by visual obstruction. The absence of a defined aesthetic order, like a nihilistic public disorder, offers a convenient blank canvas for the socially disengaged.

The age of modernism is the age of self-conscious individualism. That strong affinity is mutually reinforcing. The very fact of whom and what a person is takes precedence over how he participates in a social environment. The ‘authentic’ individual self is somehow detached from any intense social interaction. Whatever comes out of that pristine self is thereby privileged as being truest and most genuine. It is sacrilized.

Minimalism is taken as an implicit virtue since it does not ask us to express anything deep or complicated – feelings, thoughts or emotions. For just trying to plumb those depths can interfere with what really counts: the self-absorbed, self-referential and restless individual doing his thing – however superficial and fleeting that thing may be. From the outset, the modernists’ envisaged community of free spirits risked materializing as an assemblage of narcissists. So it has.

Yet, we know that “The secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.” -  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Hence, the prospect that the totally ‘free’ person will wind up desolate … striving for nothing so incessantly … as to find someone [or some thing] to worship. Be it Trump, Taylor Swift or the iconic I-phone.

The Pompidou Centre is a fascinating amalgam of simplicity and introversion. Part Brutalism, part Cubism, part Jackson Pollack. Its uniqueness is to expose prominently the building’s utilities – inside and outside. It’s as if navel gazing pierced the epidermis to reveal the viscera. The construction’s devotees likely had been admirers of Max Ernst. Today, the Pompidou – wearied by weather and neglect while stuck in a crumbling concrete urban wilderness – looks like the centerpiece of a Detroit cityscape.     

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II.

Most of us associate modern design with liberation and freedom. Liberation from the stuffy, stultifying, cloying interiors and ornate architecture. Freedom to set in place a minimally intrusive environment that clears the way for our individual aesthetic proclivities to express themselves. It makes the individual central to the space we occupy. To achieve that goal, we must first destroy – tradition, established taste, the acquired preferences and expectations of our predecessors and many contemporaries. In other words, all authority.

The destructive process takes on another dimension when we apply novel technologies to our living space. Household appliances displaced both physical objects (laundry racks, wood stoves, ice boxes, coal cellars) and the routines associated with them. These days, computerized systems carry that logic to extremes. One ‘remote’ allows us to automate the lighting, to turn on the cook top, to activate the stereo/TV, to decline the chair we’re sitting on, and to start our car. If we misplace it, Alexa will tell us where it is. Soon, we are told, an analogous system will drive the car for us, too. Again – liberating.

One inescapable side-effect is to disengage us from our environment – physically, emotionally and mentally. For practical purposes, even the value of other human beings is diminished. Each of us thereby becomes not just the centrepiece of existence, but largely self-sufficient. Human bonding, empathy and community weaken - freedom at the expense of engagement and solidarity.

Free; free at last. Free to do what? Now, there’s the rub. For this nominal freedom comes at the expense not only of fellowship, but also yokes us to another master – our own commanding self. That self has an insatiable appetite for self-affirmation and validation. Only others can provide them – self-esteem is very rarely available from internal sources. Yet, those external connections are reduced and loosened. Moreover, since the goal is to have everyone enjoy that freedom, those within social reach are similarly self-absorbed and preoccupied.

Marooned on their social islands, people resort to electronic communications for validation. They cast into cyber space accounts of incidents from their banal lives in the hope of getting resonance and approval. Self-esteem turns on how many ‘likes’ they receive. That, too, is modernism.

One consequence is the encouragement of ideologies that assert that those constricted internal resources are sufficient. By denying the existence of an objective reality except in physical properties, and by enthroning subjective feelings as the only acceptable measure of value, the influential philosophies of relativism have offered intellectual grounds for just “doing your own thing.”

Dressed up in fancy intellectual garb (all the more impressive when expressed in French fashion), they have had a profound effect on social thought and ethics over the past 75 years.  While few actually have penetrated that prolix forest of words, the trickle-down effects certainly have reinforced the powerful cultural forces encouraging and facilitating a society of self-referential individuals.

Dark Side

The back-to-basics element of modernism also has encouraged some distinctly anti-humanist movements: Brutalism in architecture, atonal music (that obliterates harmony) being the outstanding examples along with Surrealism in art and literature. Each set out on a consciously destructive project to kill the past – to eliminate the accretions of culture. In Fascist Italy the destructive political passions drew part of their inspiration from the FUTURIST movement* - which made a fetish of technology driven power.

Notes

* Futurism (Italian: Futurismo) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasised speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. It glorified modernity and aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past; all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, “however daring, however violent”, bore proudly “the smear of madness”, dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science.

Futurism had from the outset admired violence and was intensely patriotic. The Futurist Manifesto had declared, “We will glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”