Wyndham Lewis and British Art Rock E-Book

Thomas Keller

• Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten (SAA)
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 932

Beschreibung

This study connects the idiosyncratic modernism of Wyndham Lewis, co-founder of the Vorticist art movement, with works of several artists from the British art rock tradition, among them Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, art-punk pioneers Wire and electronic pop musician John Foxx. By taking a transdisciplinary and intermedial approach to texts from two fields normally studied in isolation and staking out the elements of a shared modernist ethos, the book presents a new perspective on both fields relevant to scholars of literature, popular culture, and the visual arts alike. While the book rests on sound research from the fields of literary criticism, art history, and pop theory, the structure and writing of the book is fundamentally designed to be accessible and comprehensible to non-scholarly readers.

Leseprobe

Thomas Keller

Wyndham Lewis and British Art Rock

A Practicological Modernism

Cover illustration: Left: George Charles Beresford. Wyndham Lewis. 1929. Half-plate glass negative. 15.6 x 11.9cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Right: Lord Snowdon. David Bowie. 1978. Photograph. © Armstrong Jones / Trunk Archive.

Die vorliegende Arbeit wurde von der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Zürich im Frühjahrssemester 2017 auf Antrag der Promotionskommission von Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Bronfen (hauptverantwortliche Betreuungsperson) und Prof. Dr. Barbara Straumann als Dissertation angenommen.

Publiziert mit Unterstützung des Schweizerischen Nationalfonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung.

Thomas Keller, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universität Zürich, Zürich, Schweiz

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2761-6852

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24053/9783381108527

© 2024 · Thomas Keller Das Werk ist eine Open Access-Publikation. Es wird unter der Creative Commons Namensnennung – Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen | CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) veröffentlicht, welche die Nutzung, Vervielfältigung, Bearbeitung, Verbreitung und Wiedergabe in jeglichem Medium und Format erlaubt, solange Sie die/den ursprünglichen Autor/innen und die Quelle ordentlich nennen, einen Link zur Creative Commons-Lizenz anfügen und angeben, ob Änderungen vorgenommen wurden. Die in diesem Werk enthaltenen Bilder und sonstiges Drittmaterial unterliegen ebenfalls der genannten Creative Commons Lizenz, sofern sich aus der am Material vermerkten Legende nichts anderes ergibt. In diesen Fällen ist für die oben genannten Weiterverwendungen des Materials die Einwilligung des jeweiligen Rechteinhabers einzuholen.

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KGDischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen

Internet: www.narr.deeMail: [email protected]

ISSN 0080-7214

ISBN 978-3-381-10851-0 (Print)

ISBN 978-3-381-10853-4 (ePub)

Contents

Introduction: Modernism as an EthosI “Violent Structure of Adolescent Clearness”: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism and the Art-Punk of WireII The Demonology of Progress: Un-Radical Modernism and Non-Moral SatireIII An “Antynomy of Opposite Principles”: Englishness and the Practicological Approach in the Historiographies of British Art and PopIV How to Survive in an Artless World: From Wyndham Lewis’s Machine-Personae to David Bowie’s Artist-as-ArtificerV Personality as SurfaceConclusion: The Moronic Inferno of ModernityBibliographyIllustrationsIllustration CreditsIndex

“Infantile extremist sensationalism (as a by-product of self-seeking) is the curse of the pundit. What every artist should try to prevent is the car, in which is our civilized life, plunging over the side of the precipice — the exhibitionist extremist promoter driving the whole bag of tricks into a nihilistic nothingness or zero.”

Wyndham Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the ArtsLewis, WyndhamThe Demon of Progress in the Arts, 1955.

“I favour the clever con artist who remains intact to the committed Fine Artist who ends up with his arms cut off or even worse (in the case of that Austrian blockhead — he would be Austrian, wouldn’t he? — with his dick cut off). I mean this is so romantic, it’s ridiculous… “the artist must suffer for his art.””

Brian Eno, “Internet conversation with David BowieBowie, David”, January 1995.

Introduction: Modernism as an Ethos

I would like to preface this study with an example taken from what could perhaps be termed the “Great Global Vortex” of the twenty-first century: the internet. On YouTube, we can find two short clips, each starring an imposing and controversial figure in the history of British art and literature. The first is a less than minute long newsreel clip from 1938 in which British modernist painter, writer, critic, essayist, cultural theorist, self-appointed leader of the VorticistVorticism movement and self-described “‘Personal-AppearanceLewis, Wyndhamas personal-appearance artist’ Artist” (Lewis, Men Without ArtLewis, WyndhamMen Without Art 95) Wyndham Lewis is interviewed about his portrait of T. S. EliotEliot, T. S. (Fig. 1) (Lucas). The second clip was published online by the Tate in 2010 and consists of excerpts from an interview with Mark E. SmithSmith, Mark E., leader and only constant member of Mancunian post punkPost PunkPunk band The Fall, in which he talks about various British visual artists that influenced his own work as a rock (or post-punkPunk) performer (Tate).

The context and the content of the 1938 newsreel clip can be quickly summarized: Wyndham Lewis had submitted his portrait of T. S. EliotEliot, T. S. for the annual exhibition of the Royal AcademyRoyal Academy, but it was rejected by the latter’s selection committee. This was highly unusual. Though an outsider figure, Lewis was still a decidedly professional painter and artist. The rejection of the select committee, for which it was not obliged to offer any specific reasons, was thus an affront. It prompted, among other things, the resignation of Augustus JohnJohn, Augustus, one of Lewis’s mentors, from the Academy (O’Keeffe 382-3). The newsreel interview thus presented Lewis with an outlet to voice his contempt for the Royal Academy. After a few close ups of the portrait itself, Wyndham Lewis is asked by an off-screen interviewer whether the picture in question was a very “unorthodox piece of work”, which Lewis vehemently denies: “No, it is not unorthodox. Naturally, it does not conform to the standards of atrocious silliness of the Royal Academy.” A follow-up question about whether he believed that its rejection would affect the value of the portrait in the eye of the public is met with a resolute “I. Think. Not.” However, the incident did not result in the full-blown scandal that Lewis was hoping to mine in the wake of the select committee’s decision (O’Keeffe 384-6). The newsreel clip itself thus does not offer any valuable new information on this already well-documented episode of Wyndham Lewis’s career.

Lewis, Wyndhamas 'godfather of punk'More interesting than the clip itself, however, is the context of its reappearance more than 70 years later on YouTube. The clip was posted in 2011 by American virtuoso rock guitarist Gary Lucas. It was filed under the category “Music” and, in the description, the uploader characterized Wyndham Lewis as “the protean English painter/writer/polemicist, founder of the VorticistsVorticism and godfather of PunkPunk [author’s emphasis]”. This last attribute is, to say the least, a bit odd. On a subliminal level, one might be inclined to agree with this characterization, as there are certain aspects to Wyndham Lewis’s life and work that, in retrospect, seem in line with what today is commonly associated with a punkPunk attitude. There is, for example, his self-styling as a perpetual outsider, his polemical diatribes against the establishment, or his quasi-NietzscheanNietzsche, Friedrich pursuit of the artist as a purely self-shaped, self-driven, and self-contained artistic unit, which almost seems like a precursor to the do-it-yourself ethosModernismas ethos of punkPunk. At the same time, it is safe to say that Lewis himself would have balked at such a trivializing comparison. After all, he was also a staunch representative of learned high modernismModernismHigh modernism and would, as such, have recoiled at punkPunk’s blatant amateurism and its disregard for artistic complexity. Lewis’s sharply intellectualistIntellectualism approach to both his writing and his painting as well as his outspoken conviction that a proper artist needed to be a highly skilled professional (as opposed to a dabbling amateur or dilettante) certainly puts him at odds with a punkPunk ethosModernismas ethos and with popular (music) culture in general.

Still, this juxtaposition seems worth looking at in more detail, as Lewis makes another appearance in a punkPunk or at least punkPunk-related context in the aforementioned second clip. Mark E. SmithMark E. Smith is, of course, another highly idiosyncratic and similarly self-contained outsider figure of British cultural history. The AllMusic encyclopedia describes his primary creative outlet, The Fall, as “harsh, jagged experimentalists”, noting how Smith’s “snarling, nearly incomprehensible vocals and consuming, bitter cynicism” made him a “cult legend in indie and alternative rock” circles (Erlewine). It is thus perhaps not that much of a surprise to hear Smith speaking very appreciatively of Lewis, mentioning, among other aspects, that he liked him mainly “because he [Lewis] doesn’t seem to like any of his subjects”. Maybe even more Lewisian in its blatant display of an outsider’s disdain for the insiders of the cultural and art industries is the story he recounts immediately afterwards. According to Smith, one of the regular members of the audience at The Fall concerts in the 1980s was Damien HirstHirst, Damien, who usually placed himself directly in front of the stage. During one of these concerts, contemporary dance artist Michael Clark, who was performing with The Fall at the time, threw an implement into the audience and managed to hit Hirst straight on the forehead. Not hiding his disdain for Hirst, Smith mirthfully notes that he probably stopped being a fan after that incident, suggesting that it might have been that particular smack on the head which “made him [Hirst, ed.] more creative”.

My point of this short introductory episode is twofold. First, to take two YouTube clips as our present-day starting point seems strangely appropriate for an artist such as Wyndham Lewis. From his early works as a VorticistVorticism to his final publications in the 1950s, Lewis’s work was informed in part by a constant interest in and an ambivalent fascination for the palpable external realities of modernityModernity: for how the ever-accelerating technological progress of modernityModernity left its concrete and visible marks on society, politics, culture, and the arts. Far from the austere and idea-oriented ivory-tower seclusion and detachment normally associated with learned high modernismModernismHigh modernism, Lewis directly engaged with these outside developments and phenomena. It is certainly no coincidence that it was, of all people, (mass-)media philosopher Marshall McLuhanMcLuhan, Marshall who counted Lewis among his most important inspirations and influences.1 In that regard, it seems more befitting to see Lewis popping up on the most advanced, the most accelerated and aggressive — or, in other words, the most modern — media delivery network currently in existence (and being name-dropped there by, of all people, a rock musician), instead of encountering him in comparatively quaint places such as the walls of a museum or the bookshelves of a library. The half-joking reference at the beginning to Lewis’s 1914 proclamation of the “Great English Vortex” (Lewis, Blast1Lewis, WyndhamBlast 1 1) is thus precisely that: half-joking yet also half-serious.

More importantly, I am arguing that this re-imagination of Wyndham Lewis as a “godfather of punkPunk” is neither a coincidence nor a case of empty name-dropping. My claim — which is also the central claim of this thesis — is that this supposed connection between, on the one hand, an exponent of early twentieth century British high modernismModernismHigh modernismModernismBritish and, on the other hand, a segment of late twentieth century popular culturePopular Culture is to be understood as a genuine case of a cultural afterlifeCultural Afterlife and is deserving of a more detailed investigation. What I would like to suggest is that a comparative analysis of selected texts from both fields will provide us with new insights into the logic of both a particular strand of high modernismModernismHigh modernism and its popular offspring in a segment of British popular music culturePopular Music Culture. These parallels and similarities can be observed on a broader spectrum that ranges from relatively concrete and specific questions of form and formal aesthetics to less tangible matters of cultural politics and ideology. The overall gesture of my argument is thus one of pointing towards continuities instead of breaks. What I am arguing is that there is a tradition — or, to express it in less lofty terms, a particular way of approaching and practicing art — in modernityModernity and in modernismModernism that reaches beyond the narrow historical and social boundaries of high modernismModernismHigh modernism and well into the late twentieth century and beyond.

It seems therefore appropriate to stress that when I am using the term modernismModernism I am referring to what could best be described as an ethosModernismas ethos. I am not referring to it in a limited sense as a stylistic term, that is as a category that denotes a specific range of aesthetic styles in literature and/or the visual arts. Although the works discussed in this study will, as it is to be expected, share certain formal and stylistic similarities, it is not my intent to write a history of style. Rather, I would argue that such similarities should be read symptomatically as the product of an underlying shared modernist ethosModernismas ethos or attitude expressed in these works. In addition, I am not deploying the term modernismModernism as a historical term that delineates a specific period in literary, cultural, and/or art history. As my introductory example should have already made clear, this is not a study exclusively focused on selected works belonging to a specific field within literature or the visual and the performing arts during a period that roughly covers the time from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. Rather, I am primarily interested in the opposite, namely, how certain stances, ideas as well as approaches to writing texts or making art are disseminated into fields beyond the established (historical, cultural, national, etc.) boundaries of literary, cultural, and art historiography. My main interest lies, in other words, in the questions of how and especially why certain aesthetic modes manage to lead a kind of cultural afterlifeCultural Afterlife at different times and in different cultural spheres, which are normally not juxtaposed in this manner.

The notion of a common modernist ethosModernismas ethos informing the works to be discussed here acts as our point of departure. Instead of the term ethosModernismas ethos we could also say that these works are informed by similar attitudes and practices: they share a particular way of looking at the world and of doing things both in art and in life (two terms that cannot be separated as neatly as they might suggest in any case). The attribute modernist, however, is appropriate because these attitudes and practices are in turn informed by concerns and anxieties about what the authors and artists in question recognize as their present reality, as their present conditions of life, or, in other words, as modernityModernity. If I were thus asked to give the clearest and most concise definition of what I mean by the term modernist ethosModernismas ethos, I would do so as follows: A modernist ethosModernismas ethos is a way of both looking at and doing things that is primarily informed by two questions: “What are our current, that is, our modern conditions of lifeModernityconditions of life?” and “What is or what are the appropriate ways of dealing with and of living within these modern conditions of lifeModernityconditions of life?”. However, it is obvious that this attempt at providing a seemingly clear and concise definition only raises a plethora of additional questions. What, precisely, is meant by modern conditions of lifeModernityconditions of life? Are we, for example, referring to purely material conditions or do we refer to spiritual issues questions of epistemology? Are we thinking of politics, society, culture, or all of the above? Moreover, the question regarding the appropriate ways of living within these supposed conditions is even more difficult. For one, the second question is fully dependent on the answer to the first question. Furthermore, it is a normative (that is, a political) question and, thus, any answer to it will definitely be up for debate. It is therefore clearly necessary to provide a more precise outline of what I mean by a modernist ethosModernismas ethos and what specific kind of ethosModernismas ethos I am focusing on in this thesis. As the title of this thesis already suggests, I have chosen the term practicologicalPracticological to describe the kind of modernismModernism that is at stake here. It will become clear in the course of this introduction what I mean specifically with that term. However, before elaborating on that concept it is first necessary to outline the scope of this thesis and to provide an outline of its main theoretical points of departure.

First of all, this thesis takes a long-term view of modernismModernism, roughly corresponding with what Eric HobsbawmHobsbawm, Eric has termed the Age of Extremes: the period from the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. It will of course be necessary to refer to works and developments from before and after this period, but the core texts and artworks discussed fall within this time frame. Second, as already stated above, the geographical focus is on Great Britain. This is not to imply that the aim of this thesis is to define a modernismModernism or a modernist ethosModernismas ethos that is specifically ModernismBritishBritish. Modernism, after all, is characterized by strong trans- and internationalist perspectives. Rather, it is simply to say that the majority of the primary texts and works discussed was produced by people that were either British and/or working predominantly in Great Britain. Third and most importantly, the central premise behind this entire study is that modernityModernity as a condition of life is still relevant today. This thesis presupposes that the core concerns and anxieties of modernityModernity, which, in turn, informed most modernist cultural production, have not disappeared or been supplanted by a post-modern or even post-post-modern condition. Rather, they are by and large still in effect — hence, the aforementioned long-term view and an overall perspective that looks for continuities instead of breaks.

This third point also informs the non-originalist view taken in this thesis. It has to be stressed that this argument is not concerned with questions of origins but rather oriented towards the present moment. Of course, trying to pinpoint origins and lines of influence is inevitable to a certain degree whenever one is doing the kind of analyses that is, at the very least in part, informed by an interest in historical contexts and historical developments over an extended period of time. However, this thesis presupposes that any notion of a point of origin or a line of influence is always a belated textual construct within a respective historical narrative. My methodological perspective is thus non-essentialist in the sense that, because the very notion of an origin — a beginning — is itself not a natural but a fundamentally narrative category, it does not assume the existence of origins outside of the frameworks of concrete historical narratives. In addition, it is non-deterministic in the sense that such points of origins are not regarded as the hidden locus of an indisputable truth. Origins are not posited as self-evident grounds or explanations for whatever came afterwards. In other words, I am adopting a view of history without inherent necessity: a view that regards the unfolding of history as a fundamentally contingent process.

Thus, when I am invoking, as above, the notion of a cultural afterlifeCultural Afterlife, I am not referring to the term in its “strict” WarburgianWarburg, Aby sense, where specific instances of cultural after-living refer back to an originary lynchpin in classical antiquity (Becker 1-2). Rather, I am referring to the term in its poststructuralistPoststructuralism rethinking as posited by scholars such as Georges Didi-HubermanDidi-Huberman, Georges and Elisabeth BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth. It is the latter’s concept of crossmappingCrossmapping in particular that is useful to describe my methodolocial approach. Drawing on the WarburgianWarburg, Aby terminology, as well as on Mieke BalBal, Mieke’s notion of preposterous historyPreposterous History and Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of the circulation of social energiesSocial Energies, BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth posits crossmappingCrossmapping as a practice of productive reading that allows one to juxtapose “figures of thought and image formulas for which no simple or unequivocal intertextual relation can be determined” as a means “to draw our critical attention to similarities between aesthetic formalizations that have remained overlooked or uncharted” (BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth 4-5). As a practice of productive comparative reading, crossmappingCrossmapping strongly relies on the WarburgianWarburg, Aby method in its interest in the cultural afterlifeCultural Afterlife or the surival of specific aesthetic forms as pathos formulasPathos Formula — an after-living that transcends historical, geographical, and cultural boundaries. As Didi-HubermanDidi-Huberman, Georges writes,

Cultural Afterlifeas survivalthe term NachlebenCultural Afterlife refers to the survival (the continuity or afterlife and metamorphosis) of images and motifs — as opposed to their renascence after extinction, or, conversely, their replacement by innovations in image and motif. (273)

In the sense that, as BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth argues, “each artistic act thus attests to the affective effects (Nachwirken) of past image formulas” (1), these processes of after-living constitute what we could call the repository or memory of a collective cultural imaginary or unconscious. The task set by the WarburgianWarburg, Aby method is thus to “capture the spirit of past times in the way it came to inform notions of style, and to do so by offering an explicitly subjective comparison of one and the same object at different historical times and in different cultural arenas” (1). The practice of crossmappingCrossmapping takes up this task in the way it is similarly interested in “a comparative reading of the repeated return of cultural intensities at different historical moments and in different aesthetic media” (1).

It would be misleading, however, to mistake crossmappingCrossmapping for a straightforward history of styles or motifs. As BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth argues, crossmappingCrossmapping presents an approach “less interested in uncovering established influences between certain moments in different texts than in finding a similarity in the concerns they revolve around” (2). When I am thus saying that crossmappingCrossmapping presents a poststructuralistPoststructuralism rethinking of the WarburgianWarburg, Aby method, I am pointing out that it rejects the notion of history as a process that unfolds in a relatively orderly and rational manner and can thus be fully grasped by the equally rationalistic terms and categories of historiography practiced as a (quasi-)exact science. Rather, BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth argues that concrete instances of a cultural afterlifeCultural Afterlife are as much informed by an empathic and affective dimension as they are by rationalistic aspects of form, style, and direct influence. They emerge out of “the tension between being subjectively moved by the formal aesthetization of an emotion and grasping this affect conceptually” (1) — a tension that crossmappingCrossmapping as a practice of analytical reading should very much attempt to sustain. BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth thus essentially shifts the focus towards those affective aspects of history and life itself that appear to elude the grasp of a purely rationalistic explanation. Her theoretical claim thus shares a certain similarity with that of Didi-HubermanDidi-Huberman, Georges, who, with regard to his notion impure time, attempts to draw our attention to those blind spots ignored or repressed by straightforward and rationalistic retellings of history as well:

NachlebenCultural Afterlife is impure in much the way Leben itself is. Both are messy, cluttered, muddled, various, haphazard, retentive, protean, liquid, oceanic in scope and complexity, impervious to analytical organization. (282)

In other words, both the notions of affective history and of impure time present a criticism of history or “time conceived as a succession of direct relationships (“influences”) or conceived in the positivist way as a succession of facts” (275); the positivist fantasy of a purely objective or factual historiography being up to the task of accounting for the entire scope of history must remain precisely that: a fantasy. However, the aim of this shift of perspective away from a positivist view of history and towards a dialectical approach oscillating between the affective and the rational, is not to denounce all attempts at historical research and writing as a fallacious and pointless undertaking. CrossmappingCrossmapping is decidedly not an invitation to a kind of postmodernistPostmodernism free-for-all that aims to replace thorough and clear analysis with reckless and arbitrary free association. In fact, BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth stresses that she regards it as a fundamentally ethical undertaking when she notes how she has “come to understand pathos gesturesPathos Formula, whose intensities continue to reverberate in our contemporary culture, as both an inheritance and a responsibility” (1). This ethical dimension of crossmappingCrossmapping becomes even more clear in a later passage where she notes how

precisely because they inevitably have an afterlife, these image formulas and thought figures represent our ineluctable cultural heritage; an inheritance which obliges us in one way or another to engage with the images and stories that define us. An intervention in the cultural imaginary thus entails oscillating between a playful re-imagination and a critical deconstruction of pathos gesturesPathos Formula of the past. (5)

In short, to openly acknowledge and address the affective, irrational, or illegitimate elements within history does not mean to fall prey to them. Rather, it means to question the tendencies within historiographies of styles, influences, or ideas to come up with overly deterministic narratives and to try to locate an essential moment of historical truth at a singular, all-explaining point in the far past. Instead, it stresses the fundamentally overdetermined nature of most cultural products and utterances.

More importantly, to deploy the concept of a cultural afterlifeCultural Afterlife that does not hinge on a notion of a definite origin also means to draw our attention away from these mythical points of origin and towards the actual occurrences of after-living. The focus, in other words, shifts to a comparative reading of the actual, observable cultural material instead of an attempt to make that material fit into an abstract, linear, and deterministic overarching narrative, which purports to retrace every single line of influence, every stylistic trope, and every idea down to the smallest detail. Thus, the aim of this thesis is, first and foremost, simply to describe the works in question and, in the process, note how certain forms of expression, certain approaches to making art and writing texts seem to unexpectedly popPop up in different places and different times again, as if they were constantly lingering within a larger collective cultural unconscious.

To thus come back to my initial example, I would argue that we should see both Wyndham Lewis’s unexpected twenty-first century reappearance on Youtube as a “godfather of PunkPunk”Lewis, Wyndhamas 'godfather of punk' and Mark E. SmithMark E. Smith’s mentioning of Lewis as a role model as examples of after-living characterized to a significant part by affective connections. In the case of Gary Lucas, his own interest in Lewis goes back to the 1970s and led, among other things, to introducing Lewis’s works to Don Van Vliet, better known as rock performer Captain BeefheartCaptain Beefheart, who, then became another prominent fan of Lewis from the field of popular music culturePopular Music Culture (Stoker 11-2). However, these purely factual connections do not tell us anything about why an American rock guitarist would show an interest in one of the lesser known figures of ModernismBritishBritish high modernismModernismHigh modernism. Rather, it is the affective connection that seems to tell a more interesting story: Lucas’s off-the-cuff and markedly unacademic labeling of Lewis as a “godfather of Punk” points to an imagined kinship between, on the one hand, the modernist painter and writer and, on the other hand, the rock guitarist. It is a kinship that crosses the boundaries between social and cultural spheres, historical periods, and, above all, artistic media. It is a connection that is based more on affective or emotional investment than on direct formal aesthetic or intellectual influence: There is, on one side, Lewis as the recalcitrant outsider of British high modernismModernismHigh modernism and, on the other side, the punkPunk ethosModernismas ethos with its own valorization of fiercely antagonistic outsiderdom. It is the same affective kinship that we can also see with Mark E. SmithSmith, Mark E., a notoriously difficult and headstrong figure in British alternative music circles, infamous for a similarly antagonistic relationship with his peers and the wider public.

In both cases, however, a traditional narrative in the history of style or of influence would either not register connections of these kinds at all, or not deem them relevant, because any direct intertextual relationships between the works of these artists would be tenuous at best. It is at this point where the aforementioned poststructuralistPoststructuralism re-thinkings of the WarburgianWarburg, Aby method would offer a different approach. Whether we refer to Didi-HubermanDidi-Huberman, Georges’s notion of impure time or to BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth’s concept of crossmappingCrossmapping, the argument would be the same: Although these connections might appear trivial and mundane in the sense that they are largely motivated by an impure and affective investment instead of a puristic and rationalistic one, they do matter nevertheless, because they, too, represent an actual and genuine engagement with a cultural heritage. Even in their own unorthodox and illegitimate way, they thus provide a means for these pathos formulasPathos Formula of the past to survive and resonate in the present. For a crossmappingCrossmapping approach, the question of whether these particular types of resonance manage to pass a certain purityPurity test is largely irrelevant. After all, the normative categories of pure and impure are usually the product of belated analytical conventions and, thus, do not account for the haphazard ways in which cultural practices, motifs and ideas often circulate and survive over time.

Cultural Afterlifeas survivalNotions such as crossmappingCrossmapping, impure time, and the (affective) cultural afterlifeCultural Afterlife of aesthetic forms or pathos formulaePathos Formula thus provide a useful set of terms to describe how certain forms of aesthetic expression survive through different historical periods and how this survival is often an impure and haphazard process — one which does not respect the boundaries between different types of aesthetic genres and media, as well as between different cultural fields, social units, and intellectual strata. It will thus act as my point of departure for my argument that there is indeed a productive connection between the high modernismModernismHigh modernism of Wyndham Lewis and the popular modernismsPopular Modernism of late twentieth century British popular music culturePopular Music Culture, which I will subsume under the umbrella term of art rockArt Rock.2 Furthermore, these specific parallels or connections are themselves indicative of the survival or cultural afterlifeCultural Afterlife of a common modernist ethosModernismas ethos that informs them. To cross-map these formal, ideological, and affective parallels and similarities allows us to argue for the ongoing relevance of the material at hand while avoiding the questionable suggestion that these connections are the result of an underlying historical necessity.

There is, however, another reason why I am stressing the haphazard or affective aspects of these connections, namely the fundamental inconsistency of the materials themselves that are to be discussed here. If my core thesis is that these texts are informed by a shared modernist ethosModernismas ethos, which I would describe as a practicologicalPracticological modernismModernism, in how they represent a specific way of responding, aesthetically, to the modern conditions of lifeModernityconditions of life, then the lowest common denominator of these responses would be that they are all permeated — consciously so — by inherent contradictions and inconsistencies. Lewis is, of course, an inconsistent figure par excellence: an early figure of British avant-gardism who nevertheless remained highly skeptical of the revolutionary zeal of early twentieth century avant-gardeAvant-Garde movements; an ivory tower elitist whose writings nevertheless betray a deep fascination for mass culturalMass Culture phenomena; a modernist, though one who came to identify himself Lewis, Wyndhamas a classicistas a classicist; an intellectualistIntellectualism advocate of a detached, analytical, and sober rationalism who still, for a period in the 1930s, Lewis, Wyndhamand Fascismlet himself by duped by the irrational lures of German fascism; an artist who self-styled himself as a heroic outsider, yet nevertheless realized that this role seemed strangely anachronistic in the burgeoning mass societiesMass Society of the twentieth century. The list of contradictions that permeate Lewis’s life and work could go on, but what is arguably the most glaring and, at least from the reader’s point of view, often most frustrating inconsistency is how his body of work is so fraught with contradictions, yet, at the same time, speaks with a voice so thoroughly assertive and so lacking in self-criticism that it sometimes beggars belief.

I would argue that we can recognize, in late twentieth century popular music culturePopular Music Culture, particularly in the more intellectually-minded field of art rockArt Rock, a relationship with the modern conditionModern Condition that is conflicted and contradictory in many similar ways. The persona of the modern rock star is normally that of an assertive and heroic outsider as well, but his role as a focal point of celebrity culture (and also her role, of course, though it must be noted that, at least traditionally, rock stardom has been a mostly male-dominated cultural field) places him right at the center of mass cultureMass Culture and mass entertainment. This valorization of outsiderdom is usually tied to a vague notion of intrinsic psychological authenticity: the desire for expressing some true inner essence in opposition to the profane externality of modern life. This, however, contrasts with the fact that these expressions are themselves wholly dependent on an external system of modern (cultural) industrial mass production and distribution. Thus, these ostentatious gestures of critiquing or rejecting the vulgar realities of modern consumer cultureConsumer Culture, which are so prevalent in rock culture, often barely manage to conceal a deep fascination if not an outright infatuation for that very same object of loathing. If much of popular music culturePopular Music Culture thus acts as an outlet to give voice to what are arguably two of the central promises of modernityModernity, those of individual autonomy and authenticity, its very nature of being a mass phenomenon simultaneously represents a breach of that promise. We are essentially dealing with the paradox or problem already identified in the 1940s by Max HorkheimerHorkheimer, Max and Theodor W. AdornoAdorno, Theodor W. in their seminal essay on the fundamentally totalitarian logic of the cultural industryCultural Industry (HorkheimerHorkheimer, Max 128-76).

Far from chiming in with HorkheimerHorkheimer, Max and AdornoAdorno, Theodor W.’s crushing verdict, however, my overall point behind sketching these inconsistencies is to say that we should not read them as weaknesses or signs of artistic failure, but as a productive point of departure. We should, in other words, not expect from the texts to be discussed a coherent set of proposals or even a grand plan in how to deal with the challenges and anxieties of the modern conditionModern Condition. Rather, we should read this lack of a definite and universally applicable solution as a symptom. Instead of expecting these texts to constitute, as Frederic JamesonJameson, Fredric put it, “a symbolic act, whereby real social contradictions, insurmountable in their own terms, find a purely formal resolution in the aesthetic realm” (JamesonJameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious 64), I propose to read their inherent contradictions and inconsistencies as symptomatic of those real and insurmountable antagonisms themselves. I am, in other words, less interested in ascribing to these texts some modernist “utopianUtopianism gesture” (JamesonJameson, Fredric, Postmodernism 7) that offers some compensatory symbolic space in the puristic spheres of the aesthetic realm. Rather, my argument is that the aim of these texts is in general more grounded and immediate. They are akin to improvised, situational, or affective survival strategies against an external reality that cannot be sufficiently denied or pushed back to make room for that symbolic or utopianUtopianism space to establish itself.

Modernityconditions of lifeWe could also say that the approach of these texts more strongly veer towards the empiricalEmpiricism than the idealistic. They proceed from a general acceptance of what in German one would call Gegebenheiten: general conditions and facts of life that are either taken as absolute givens or as so thoroughly ingrained in society that any quick and decisive change is all but unimaginable. As a result of this comparatively sober perspective, the role of the imaginary space of the literary, visual, or aural text is not to provide an outright alternative or a symbolic resolution to those stubborn real conditions of existence by imagining some utopianUtopianism vanishing point. Instead, the less lofty and more practical approach is to come up with appropriate strategies of coping with and of surviving within these immovable external conditions of life. To put it in other words, the core question of the modernist ethosModernismas ethos I am interested in is not how to solve the issues and antagonisms that lie at the heart of modernityModernity. Rather, it is driven by a practicologicalPracticological concern about how to endure and survive in them: how to come up, in an often impromptu manner, with concrete artistic practices that do not point to some ideal or better world beyond the boundaries of the given conditions of life, but that at least allow one, for the time being, to survive in these conditions. It is obvious that, if measured against the view that literature or the arts have to provide some sort of transcendental utopianUtopianism impulse, the resulting texts will necessarily disappoint and come across as flawed, muddled, and inconsistent. Yet that is because — to refer back to Didi-HubermanDidi-Huberman, Georges — the practice of survival is, as life itself, muddled, messy, and haphazard.

One of the major challenges in dealing with these texts is thus to negotiate the inherent discrepancy between style and content. As I have pointed out, the tone of the texts in question is usually one that is highly assertive, even aggressively so, in a way that appears to allow no room for any ambiguity at all. However, looking past that characteristic style often reveals an underlying skepticism and a deliberately muddled and impure way of thinking, which, in its commitment to messy survivalism over puristic utopianism, seems unexpectedly anti-radical, anti-avant-gardistic, and perhaps even ideologically moderate and restrained. To get a better grasp of this ambivalent and hard to pin down nature of the texts to be discussed, a second main theoretical point of reference is therefore needed. If I am claiming that one of the defining features of the texts to be discussed is that they either explicitly or implicitly have a practicologicalPracticological stance, then I mean that they constantly reflect their own inextricable embroilment in a messy external and, as such, practical social reality. They are, in other words, aware that, as cultural utterances performed as part of a concrete external reality, they cannot hope to effectively represent or even realize a puristic space beyond or outside this altogether messy field of practical reality. It thus makes sense to introduce, in a manner complementary to the concept of crossmappingCrossmapping outlined above, a theoretical perspective that is itself practicologicalPracticological in how it describes the modern conditionModern Condition not primarily as an idea or a set of values, but as concrete ways of doing things. In a manner not unlike the texts to be discussed, this perspective regards the everyday social, political, cultural etc. realities of modern life not as mere manifestations of an abstract theoretical a priori, but, on the contrary, sees modernityModernity as something constituted — that is, realized — daily through and as a set of messy, impure, and often contradictory practices. Consequently, its belated theorizations are themselves merely one part of a much wider ensemble of concrete practices that constitute the entire scope of human activity.

Modernityas ensemble of practicesIn his 1993 book We Have Never Been ModernLatour, BrunoWe Have Never Been Modern, Bruno LatourLatour, Bruno makes a convincing effort to describe modernityModernity or the modern conditionModern Condition from a practicologicalPracticological point of view. Furthermore, he also offers a neat set of terms to understand the paradoxical nature of modernityModernity as being simultaneously clear-cut and muddled. LatourLatour, Bruno proposes to see modernityModernity as driven by two contradictory processes that are nevertheless mutually dependent. On the one side, there are processes of purificationPurification: various ensembles of practices dedicated to separating and organizing the world into distinct and (semi-)autonomous spheres (10-1). As a sociologist of science, LatourLatour, Bruno’s main focus lies on how the emergence and the ever increasing differentiation of the various fields of scientific knowledge embodies this modernizing process of purification. He puts at its heart the fundamental distinction between the subject and the object (or, with regard to the scientific method, that between the observing scientist and the observed object), from which all the distinct areas of modern science are ultimately derived. However, it is clear that this model can be extrapolated from the field of the sciences to modern society at large — how the latter is organized into discrete, professionalized spheres such as politics, the economy, culture (and its counterpart, nature), media, the public and the personal spheres, and so forth. In fact, it is reasonable to expect some significant overlap in the way the sphere of the sciences and society at large draw these distinctions. Following LatourLatour, Bruno’s model, a dogmatic or radical modernist would be someone who equates those processes of purification with civilizational progress per se and who puts an unwavering belief into the validity and eventual success of the modern project as a gradual purification of the world itself (11).

Latour, Brunoon purification and hybridizationHowever, these processes of purificationPurification are simultaneously counteracted, accompanied, and determined by incessant processes of translation or hybridizationHybridization (10). LatourLatour, Bruno points out that despite modernityModernity's drive — especially within the spheres of the modern sciences — towards ever more specialized and compartmentalized fields of knowledge, modern daily life does tend to show little regard for the artificial boundaries erected by those processes of purification. Rather, there are different ensembles of practices promoting the constant spreading of hybridsHybridity through the everyday reality of modern life: formations of knowledge where the various fields of scientific knowledge delineated by the aforementioned purification processes bleed into each other or, as LatourLatour, Bruno puts it, are translated from one field into the other. Paradoxically, these hybridsHybridity fulfill a strange double role: On the one hand, they represent a syncretic type of knowledge that, in several productive ways, complements the purified types of knowledge with their neatly separated ontological fields. On the other hand, the mere presence of these alternative syncretic formations of knowledge also amount to a countermovement that always threatens to infringe on, disrupt, and besmirch those carefully cleansed ontological fields. It is thus important not to see the process of hybridization as a regressive moment outside of modernityModernity, but as an integral part of its structural logic; it is, however, an integral part which nevertheless constantly acts as a regressive counterpart to purification as that other integral part of modernityModernity. Conversely, we can say that the opposite holds true as well: purification as the other integral part of modernityModernity constantly acts as a regressive counterpart to hybridization.

LatourLatour, Bruno uses the vivid example of an ordinary newspaper to illustrate this precarious relationship between purificationPurification and hybridizationHybridization as the two complementary-yet-opposed main driving forces of modernityModernity. His description of the daily act of reading the newspaper as “modern man’s form of prayer” (2) equates it, not without irony, with that of a religious cleansing ritual — an act normally associated with pre-enlightenment superstitions. On the surface, to read the daily newspaper means to receive the world in a form that has been purified of its inherent hybridityHybridity. The newspaper presents us with a world that has been separated into individual stories along the lines of the conventional categories of journalistic reporting: The economy, politics, science, culture, sports etc. As LatourLatour, Bruno notes, however, this daily act of purification is tainted from the very beginning, as most articles seem, in fact, to move seamlessly from one sphere into the other, creating a network of interlinked and very much impure hybrid knowledge:

[…] hybrid articles that sketch out imbroglios of science, politics, economy, law, religion, technology, fiction. If reading the daily paper is modern man’s form of prayer, then it is a very strange man indeed. […] All of culture and all of nature get churned up again ever day. […] The smallest AIDS virus takes you from sex to the unconscious, then to Africa, tissue cultures, DNA and San Francisco […] Press the most innocent aerosol button and you’ll be heading for the Antarctic, and from there to Lyon, the chemistry of inert gases, and then maybe to the United Nations. (2)

The purifying impulse of modernityModernity is thus constantly accompanied or undercut by an incessant growth of impure hybridsHybridity. As his newspaper example shows, even individual acts of purificationPurification appear to be, on closer examination, a strange fusion of purifying and hybridizing acts. In a puzzling interplay, purification simultaneously begets the formation of hybridsHybridity, which, in turn, asks for ever-renewed efforts of purification. Yet LatourLatour, Bruno also notes that this spreading of hybridityHybridity right at the center of the newspaper — one of modernityModernity’s fundamental institutions devoted to purifying the world — is either conveniently ignored or repressed:

Yet no one seems to find this troubling. Headings like Economy, Politics, Science, Books, Culture, Religion and Local Events remain in place as if there were nothing odd going on. […] By all means, they seem to say, let us not mix up knowledge, interest, justice and power. Let us not mix up heaven and earth, the global stage and the local scene, the human and the nonhuman. ‘But these imbroglios do the mixing,’ you’ll say, ‘they weave our world together!’ ‘Act as if they didn’t exist,’ the analysts reply. They have cut the Gordian knot with a well-honed sword. The shaft is broken: on the left, they have put knowledge of things; on the right, power and human politics. (2-3)

LatourLatour, Bruno’s theoretical model of modernityModernity as driven by two conflicting yet complementary impulses locked in an irresolvable dialectical struggle thus exposes the aforementioned promise of the dogmatic or pure modernist as a myth. The latter would like to repress this co-dependency of hybridizationHybridization and purificationPurification and see the logic of modernityModernity as one that must solely be driven by a purifying impulse (“let us not mix up knowledge, interest, justice and power”). However, this grand, idealistic vision of modernityModernity as an ever progressing project of purifying the world is at odds with the fact that, as LatourLatour, Bruno notes, hybridityHybridity is constantly spreading all around us and constitutes our modern reality as much as purification does (“But these imbroglios do the mixing, […] they weave our world together!”).

It should be made clear, however, that LatourLatour, Bruno is neither an anti-modernistAnti-Modernism, nor a deconstructionistDeconstruction or a postmodernistPostmodernism. The aim of his critical intervention is not to contribute another denouncement of modernityModernity’s core values as arbitrary, socially and/or discursively constructed conventions. On the contrary, LatourLatour, Bruno positively highlights the innovative forces generated by the interplay of purifying and hybridizing impulses within modernityModernity. It is, as he argues, what gave modernityModernity its competitive edge over pre-modern modes of knowledge (12). The tremendous civilizatory force of modernityModernity must not be frivolously dismissed — if only for the reason that it led to an overall increase of survivability. In that sense, LatourLatour, Bruno’s position is perhaps closer to that of Max HorkheimerHorkheimer, Max and Theodor W. AdornoAdorno, Theodor W. in their Dialectics of Enlightenment. They, in a similar way, argue that there can be no alternative to enlightened (that is, modern) thinking despite it also being the foundation of modern totalitarian forms of oppression (3). Where LatourLatour, Bruno differs, however, is how he appears to resist HorkheimerHorkheimer, Max and AdornoAdorno, Theodor W.’s apocalyptic gesture of locating a regressive, self-destructive tendency at the very core of the Enlightenment — a kind of modernityModernity’s very own death drive. Coming from a background of the sociology of science, LatourLatour, Bruno is less fixated by the analysis of abstract theoretical paradigms and more in search of a practicologicalPracticological response to the issues of modernityModernity. His main criticism lies with a sacralized and puristic view of modernityModernity: the dogmatic view that only acknowledges the purifying impulse of modernityModernity but represses that necessary aspect of hybridizationHybridization. LatourLatour, Bruno’s claim that We Have Never Been ModernLatour, BrunoWe Have Never Been Modern is thus to be understood only in the sense that we have never been modern in the way proclaimed by the dogmatic prophets of modernityModernity. His alternative proposal is a view that openly acknowledges hybridization as an equally indispensable part of modernityModernity. Yet this plea for hybridityHybridity — and this is where he so strongly deviates from postmodernistPostmodernism positions — does not come with a denouncement of those practices falling on the side of purificationPurification. Rather, his argument is for an acknowledgement of both on equal terms — not despite, but rather because of their mutually exclusive nature:

As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purificationPurification and the work of hybridizationHybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change. At the same time we stop having been modern, because we become retrospectively aware that the two sets of practices have always already been at work in the historical period that is ending. Our past begins to change. Finally, if we have never been modern — at least in the way criticism tells the story — the tortuous relations that we have maintained with the other nature-cultures would also be transformed. Relativism, domination, imperialism, false consciousness, syncretism — all the problems that anthropologists summarize under the loose expression of ‘Great Divide’ — would be explained differently, thereby modifying comparative anthropology. (11-12)

LatourLatour, Bruno’s argument is thus one that is not against the modern project, but for a concerted readjustment of it. The result should be a reaffirmed modernityModernity — not the puristic and sacralized modernityModernity of old, but one that is aware and accepting of its own fundamental impurity, which LatourLatour, Bruno describes as a complementary-yet-contradictory interplay between forces of purificationPurification and hybridizationHybridization. As a matter of fact, LatourLatour, Bruno’s text is not only a theoretical proposal. By resorting to an idiosyncratic style of writing that merges the puristic of scientific discourses with the more loose and essayistic style of argument from the humanities, LatourLatour, Bruno simultaneously realizes his hybrid view of modernityModernity on a performative level.

Modernityas impureIt should be fairly clear how this notion of an impure modernityModernity provides a productive theoretical point of reference for the texts to be discussed in this thesis. LatourLatour, Bruno’s theory of the modern is useful, because it manages to account for the two opposite ensembles of practices within modernityModernity without falling on either side. Furthermore, despite placing an irresolvable dialectical antagonism at the heart of his theory of modernityModernity, he does not paint it in an overly dramatic way. In contrast to, for example, Sigmund FreudFreud, Sigmund’s portrayal of civilization as an eternal battle between Eros and Thanatos (FreudFreud, Sigmund, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur 108) or HorkheimerHorkheimer, Max and AdornoAdorno, Theodor W.’s view of the precarious relationship between enlightenment and its toxic underbelly, there is a certain prosaic pragmatism to LatourLatour, Bruno’s dialectics of modernityModernity. It is these points in particular, I would argue, that connect with the aforementioned modernist ethosModernismas ethos that I am interested in. If I am saying that this ethosModernismas ethos veers towards the empiricalEmpiricism instead of the idealist or that is more about survival strategies than utopianUtopianism plans, I am claiming that it expresses similar view of modernityModernity as an impure matter of external fact(s) constantly oscillating between practices of purificationPurification and hybridizationHybridization.

Modernismas purificationIf we want to imagine these two modes as representing the two ends of a scale on where to put the various aesthetic genres and styles generally collected under the umbrella term of modernismModernism, it would look roughly as follows: On one end we would find a modern mode entirely devoted to purifying and tidying up the world. It is modernismModernism interpreted as a giant cleanup operation and we can observe it, for example, in the stern rationalism of the international style of modern architectureModern Architecture. With its functionalist formal language based on clear shapes, a limited and utilitarian choice of materials, and an overall lack of ornamentation, the concrete housing units of Le CorbusierLe Corbusier and the glass and steel skyscrapers and pavilions of Mies van der RoheMies van der Rohe, Ludwig have, over time, become universal signifiers for this decidedly rationalist response to the modern conditionModern Condition. They remain as the physical manifestation of the myth of the modern architect-as-artist: a heroic, masculine Übermensch whose grand architectural designs were aimed at no less than resolving, in one fell swoop, the various social tensions and issues that had emerged from the new realities of modern urban life (Miller, Ross 87). Modernismas hybridizationOn the other end we find those approaches where the accents firmly falls on the side of the hybridizing aspects within modernityModernity: the revolutionary impulses bent on questioning established systems of knowledge, social structures, cultural practices, and power relations. These forms of aesthetic interventions can take both the form of a critical counter reaction to and an open embrace of modernityModernity. We can thus find on this side, for example, both the PrimitivismPrimitivism’s fascination for the syncretic formal languages of pre-modern cultures and FuturismFuturism’s radical affirmation of industrial modernityModernity as a violent maelstrom where man and machine, as well as matter and movement (time) ultimately become one.

The caveat to this illustration is that, ultimately, the idea of placing the various ensembles of modernist practices on a linear spectrum that ranges from maximum purificationPurification to maximum hybridizationHybridization is inadequate. After all, those hybrid aesthetics such as PrimitivismPrimitivism or FuturismFuturism likewise express a purifying thrust in how they put forth and establish a set of new or alternative values and ideas. In the same way, the puristic ideology of the Neues Bauen simultaneously represents a syncretic or hybrid form of knowledge in its questioning or outright rejection of architectural classicism, as well as its liberal appropriation of aspects of pre-modern architectureModern Architecture and city planning (Le CorbusierLe Corbusier taking inspiration from forms and the layout of the Algerian desert city of Ghardaïa comes to mind, for [Gerber 372-5]). As actual practice thus always comes as an impure compound of both purifying and hybridizing elements, the spectrum metaphor only works insofar as we use it to determine the ideological accent of a particular modernist practice. We can, in other words, use it to at least determine the inclination of the stated or manifested intent behind a particular aesthetic practice, regardless of whether this statement of intent withstands a close scrutiny of the actual texts or not. With regard to the aforementioned examples, we can then safely say that the inclination of Futurism veers towards hybridization whereas that of modern architectureModern Architecture towards purification.

Modernismas survival strategyI would now argue that in the case of the practicologicalPracticological modernist ethosModernismas ethos that is the topic of this thesis, this inclination is constantly shifting between the two poles, which makes it so difficult, if not impossible to pin down for good. One could say, of course, that this inherent ideological inconsistency or indeterminateness, the muddled and impure approaches that characterize these texts, would place them firmly on the side of hybridityHybridity. We would then read them in a similar way as we could read Dadaism as a rebellion against logic and language: a critical and contrarian intervention against the prevalent and dogmatic view of a “pure” modernityModernity. This claim, however, does not withstand close scrutiny, because the very same texts also express, either explicitly or implicitly, a valorization of a strict aesthetic order that favors clear lines, direct language, and distinct formal structures. Also, there is the aforementioned matter of the assertive voice. It is difficult to argue that these texts represent a revolt against the authoritarian nature of the puristic mode of modernityModernity, if they express themselves in an equally authoritarian and, thus, puristic voice. For these reasons, a LatourianLatour, Bruno perspective provides a useful way of approaching them. His impure notion of modernityModernity — impure not in the sense that it is characterized by hybridityHybridity, but that it is driven by the contradictory-yet-complementary impulses of purificationPurification and hybridizationHybridization — can account for the fact that these texts seem to approach modernityModernity with a similarly impure perspective. Furthermore, his point that the modern ultimately emerges from what he calls ensembles of practices (and not as mere manifestations of preexisting ideas or ideals) coincides with the practicologicalPracticological approach that characterizes the modernist ethosModernismas ethos in question. Consequently, an impure and practicologicalPracticological view of modernityModernity also changes our view of what it means to be modern: It means not to strive to resolve some fundamental antagonism; it means simply to survive.3

In that sense, we could argue that the texts in question express an ethosModernismas ethos that, at least according to the LatourianLatour, Bruno terminology, is “properly modern” by proceeding from the notion that we have, in fact, never been modern. If some of these texts might then come across as strangely muddled and lacking a consistent ideology (which can make for a vaguely unsatisfying or downright frustrating reading), we should at least partly read this symptomatically as very palpable acts of surviving within the impure realities of modern life. Survival strategies are, after all, not supposed to be graceful and flawless; they are supposed to work. At their best, however, they manage to turn that rough-hewn struggle into a productive and vibrant engagement with modern life that nevertheless corresponds with a LatourianLatour, Bruno view of modernityModernity by resisting finality and choosing to aesthetically not resolve but uphold its inherent and uncomfortable tensions and impurities.

Before addressing a few necessary methodological points and providing an outline of the individual chapters, it seems reasonable to quickly sum up, at this stage, the core points made so far in this introduction. I have outlined two theoretical perspectives that will constitute the two cornerstones of the actual analyses in the following chapters. The first reference is to Elisabeth BronfenBronfen, Elisabeth’s notion of crossmappingCrossmapping as a rethinking of the WarburgianWarburg, Aby notion of the cultural afterlifeCultural Afterlife of pathos formulaePathos Formula and to Didi-HubermanDidi-Huberman, Georges’s concept of impure time or history. Crossmapping is my primary methodological reference. It provides me with a method of juxtaposing texts from different and sometimes disparate cultural fields and historical periods even when conventional wisdom does not suggest there to be a strong and verifiable link between the two (that is on the levels of biography, direct cultural or stylistic influence and/or relation, etc.). However, crossmappingCrossmapping is more than a mere methodological tool. Its underlying notion of affective or impure history also provides it with an ethical trust: If cultural history as the ongoing survival of aesthetic forms of expression is as much driven by affective as it is by cognitive or rational impulses, then it becomes our task devote our attention to both instead of only the latter. Therefore, tracing these connections requires us to move beyond a pure fact-oriented or objectivist idiom and towards a more proactive and g productive strategy of reading. Crossmapping offers a model to do exactly that. This dialectic of affect and cognition is where crossmappingCrossmapping coincides with our second main theoretical reference, the LatourianLatour, Bruno view of modernityModernity as a fundamentally impure condition driven by a contradictory yet complementary interplay of (affective) hybridizing and (rationalist) purifying ensembles of practices. If crossmappingCrossmapping thus provides us with a methodological foundation, LatourLatour, Bruno’s notion of the modern supplements it with a clear theoretical vantage point on the material itself.

There are, however, several methodological concerns and challenges that come with such an approach to analyzing cultural artifacts and these need to be addressed now. The first of these questions pertains to my choice of texts. Bluntly put, why should one do a crossmappingCrossmapping of, on the one hand, a (still) marginalized figure of ModernismBritishBritish high modernismModernismHigh modernism and, on the other hand, artists belonging to a seemingly unrelated field of popular music culturePopular Music Culture of the 1970s and beyond? If Lewis stood for a practicologicalPracticological modernismModernism in how his aesthetic approaches were very much informed by a view of modernityModernity