Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity

This book explores abstraction as a complex keyword in the intellectual life of modernity, and in artistic modernism. Collapsing the distinction between abstraction as thought and as art, it reveals that abstraction’s contradictory work is invariably concerned with mediating the relationship between the human and the inhuman. The book surveys this contradictory work in the discourses of critical Marxist thought and of modernist visual art. It then examines the fortunes of abstraction in the writing of three literary modernists: Stein, Stevens and Beckett. In these writers, it is argued, the challenge to humanistic norms is undertaken via a refashioning of abstraction. Abstraction becomes associated with the impossibilities confronted by this modernist experimentalism, but also with the pleasures of difficulty in a newly-democratic model of intellectual work. This new modernist abstraction accompanies a marked inversion of the philosophical orientation of abstraction, from the cold, distanced and general to the warm, living and particular. The change is traced, from a formula for involuntary memory in Proust, through the process and activist philosophies of James, Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze. In its constant revaluation of human and inhuman, this book concludes, abstraction can work to confront the forces of anti-intellectualism and to endorse a notion of intellectual and artistic equality beyond the boundaries of elitism, class and education, an ‘abstraction for all’ which is finally seen to be figured in Lee Hall’s 2008 play The Pitmen Painters.