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Daniel Tiffany Rhapsodic Measures
The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back. Enigmatography The term modernism calls to mind, justifiably, a complex program of experimentation in the arts, yet the decades of the 1930s and 1940s—the period of so-called late modernism—saw the emergence of critical and aesthetic categories which have resisted historical and theoretical analysis, in part because of their uncertain relation to the formalist legacy of modernism. I am referring to the aesthetic ideology of kitsch and to the poetic or philosophical principle of the enigma (or riddle)—an aesthetic model which, unlike kitsch, has entirely escaped the purview of critical assessments aimed at producing a new modernism. Although the submerged correspondences between kitsch and enigmatic expression remain beyond the scope of this essay, it is essential to note that both concepts emerged in response to the gradual dissolution of the historical avant-garde and to the development of fascism in Europe. The idea of kitsch, on the one hand, first appeared in the writings of Hermann Broch and Clement Greenberg as a countersign of fascism and, more polemically, in opposition to avant-garde practice—an opposition that is deeply unstable. The figure of the riddle, on the other hand, functions in the writings of Heidegger, Benjamin, and Adorno (among others) as a means of addressing the broader implications of obscurity, whether in modern art and literature, or in traditions (Presocratic philosophy, baroque allegory) associated obliquely by these authors with modernity. Daniel Tiffany is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Toy Medium (2000) and Radio Corpse (2005). Critical Inquiry Volume 34, Number S2, Winter© 2008 by The University of Chicago.
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