Tensions of Modernity

Whitney (the book is Francis Bacon and Modernity , Yale, 1986) offers some additional meditations on the meaning of “modern” particularly as it relates to Bacon. He defines modernity in terms of the tension between innovation and tradition, the frustration that arises from the revolutionary’s effort to start afresh and his recognition (which he strives to conceal) that he is dependent on traditional sources for the innovation. Or, with respect to Bacon, “the subversiveness implicit in Bacon’s demand for total novelty acts first on the vision of novelty itself, for that must find articulation in the cultural matrix that is the target of subversion.” Modernity in Bacon thus emerges less as a stance than as “the incomplete or deferred attempt to fix a stance”; Bacon’s modernity is “not so much in his vision of revolution as in the very discontinuity between new and old ways of conceiving visions.”

From this angle, “the most moern writer would not be the one who achieves the greatest independence and originality, but the one whose work offers the most breathtaking strain between vision and matrix, who, like certain hommes d’avant-garde , meets the greatest risks of incoherence.” Bacon also appears in this context “one of history’s most modern figures, more so, perhaps, than a speeding Rimbaud or locomotive Descartes, the latter having both consolidated the revolutionary stance and repressed its contexts more fully than Bacon.”

The tension Whitney identifies also helps explain, he thinks, the widely varying readings of Bacon: The “reformer and literary artist” in Bacon is the fascination of literary historians, while “the call to a triumphant modernity of knowledge and power comprise the subject of a historian of ideas or science.” His distinction between “disciplines that cultivate knowledge” (humanities) and disciplines of discovery (sciences) contributes to the problem, since it is a distinction that he embodies in his calls to “revolution” (science) couched in traditional categories and making use of traditional rhetorical and allegorical resources.

From this perspective too, the various anti-modern movements of the modern world – Modernism, avant-gardism of various sorts, postmodernism – are shown to be “grounded in Western history” and not quite “horizons of absolute novelty: these movements find precedent as symptoms of our alienation and isolation expressed in successive cults of the new, or as (coopted) gestures of revolution.”