Modernism’s troublesome heritage

In a debate that took place in the spring of 2007, criticism was directed at a poetry that was based mechanically and systematically on the notion that any aesthetic that had a future needed to challenge the conceptions of earlier eras of what a literary text should look like. In the debate on cultural conservatism in the autumn of 2008, cultural radicalism – for obvious reasons – came to be presented as the ultimate enemy. The debate on figurative art in the summer of 2009, in turn, considered to what degree the pluralism and aesthetic openness that the contemporary art establishment maintained were their guiding light was in actuality illusory. This was done by excluding a number of artistic practices, including classical figurative painting based on traditional techniques.

What united my opponents’ arguments in all these debates was the fact that – despite their modern radical approach – they consistently turned to history to find support for their arguments, and then consistently referred to the history of modernism in the 20th century. They argued that figurative art demonstrates how the most effective way to make history is to break with all kinds of conventions, challenge normative systems and question authority. So anyone who does the opposite therefore sides with the norms and rules being challenged, which history books show belong to the losers in history. Anyone who wants to ensure that they will not be disparaged in the future would be advised to always applaud aesthetic rebels. With this issue of Axess, we have tried to produce a more complex picture.

We invited a number of writers with the aim of questioning this conception of modernism as an indisputable formula for success and a moral guide. The questions is what really makes us think that the future belongs to a modernist aesthetic rather than a classical aesthetic, when history has not infrequently shown the opposite – that the plays of Racine and Molière apply more readily to today, for instance, than those of Alfred Jarry, that it was modernist writers rather than their conservative colleagues who took up with Nazism and Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s.

But cultural radicalism’s unaltered position of power in the media and in education and academia has also had more profound social consequences.

According to a survey done by the Swedish TV4 television programme “Kalla fakta” [‘Hard facts’] in the autumn of 2009, an entire 18 per cent of the Swedish population under 30 believe that the US government is behind the 9/11 attacks. Only 51 per cent believe that it was al-Qaida. And a full 31 per cent do not know what to believe in the matter. How can one explain these figures – and how does this have anything to do with the hegemony of cultural radicalism? As I see it, people cannot close their eyes to those who question the “official” version of the terrorist attacks as obvious consequences of an educational system whose core has indeed long consisted of the slogans of cultural radicalism: defiance of authority, the questioning of general conceptions and prejudices passed down from generation to generation.

The actual basis of the conspiracy theories about September 11 in fact turns out to be the notion of critical thinking as an end in itself – the idea that critical thinking can be exercised without taking into consideration any detailed knowledge about what one aims to criticise or any detailed education in general. Prejudices, we have learnt, are harmful and should be resisted at any price. Old authorities and hierarchies of power are to be defied and provoked. Everyone is entitled to form their own view of things – of the nature of reality and thus also of what happened on 9/11.

If one takes to its ultimate conclusion this notion closely cherished nowadays of the importance of “critical thinking” (which of course is not really critical thinking but simply a kind of cosmetic questioning celebrated uncritically in our media day after day), one obviously winds up in the kind of narrow-mindedness that characterises this “truth” movement, which is of course also favoured by the anti-hierarchical structure that distinguishes the Internet culture in general, where everything tends to presented as being of equal value.

On YouTube, a Holocaust film by an amateur researcher can have higher status than a BBC production on the same topic because the first film had 324,657 comments and the second a mere 17. This, combined with the generally celebrated and uncritical defiance of authorities and prejudices, could well give rise to very serious problems in the future.