11Story

22 January 2010

Modernist Politics

Posing Questions: Being & image in Europe & Asia

Contents - Introduction  - The sections      * Agent      * Role      * Person       * Mind  - The panels      * Optical character recognition?      * Vernacular parallels      * Modernist Politics       * Show & Tell                                                        - Acknowledgements

Modernist Politics

Stereotyping – or jumping to conclusions about people on the basis of limited knowledge of them - serves modernist management and politics as well as modernist art.   This is originally because modernism increases competition and the scale and intensity of social interaction so that people have to take decisions on the basis of inadequate knowledge of others. But in due course, stereotypes come to buttress new structures of privilege and deprivation.   Modernism did not invent short-hand character assessment, but made it an essential tool of new forms of everyday life.   In terms described by one critic as ‘hysterical’, a tourist in Jerusalem after 9/11 recalls trying to gain access to the Dome of the Rock outside opening hours: I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper’s face […] when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife and my children was something for which he now had warrant.… (Martin Amis, ‘The Age of Horrorism’ (part three), The Observer, 10 September 2006)   This claim to read intention from a ‘mask’-like face exposes a particular prejudice. But it also expresses the wider prejudice of judging people on appearance. Along with the notion of character or mind, modernism relies on this to underwrite the exercise of power.

 

 

 

<< PREVIOUS SECTION <<

< Top of Page >

>> NEXT SECTION >>

Share