Page 146 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

MODERNISM

realm of the repressed. This establishes the very possibility of gendered subjects
through entry into the symbolic order. Prior to the resolution of the Oedipus
complex, infants are said to be unable to differentiate themselves from the
surrounding world of objects, including other persons. Pre-Oedipal infants 123
experience the world in terms of sensory exploration and autoeroticism so that the
primary focus at this stage is the mother’s breast as a source of warmth, comfort and
food. This is a relationship that the child cannot control. Infants begin to regard
themselves as individuated persons during what Lacan calls the ‘mirror phase’. This
involves identification with another person, primarily the mother, as being ‘One’
and/or recognition of themselves in a mirror as ‘One’.
However, since Freud and Lacan argue that we are fragmented subjects, such
recognition of wholeness is understood by them to be a form of ‘misrecognition’
and part of the infant’s ‘imaginary relations’. The staging of the mirror phase thus
marks the manifestation of the lack that Lacan sees at the core of subjects.
Specifically, this is the lack of the mother as a result of separation at the mirror
phase. More generally, it is the lack that human subjects experience by virtue of the
prior existence of a symbolic order that they cannot control. Here language is
understood to be the symbolization of desire in a never-ending search for control
that has its source at the moment of the mirror phase.

Links Identification, Other, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, symbolic order, unconscious
Modernism There are three primary uses of the term modernism within cultural
studies: namely, (i) the cultural experience of modernity; (ii) an artistic style
associated with being modern; and (iii) a philosophical position that asserts the
possibility of universal knowledge.
The central cultural experience of modernism is that of change, ambiguity,
doubt, risk, uncertainty and fragmentation. The social and cultural processes of
individualization, differentiation, commodification, urbanization, rationalization
and bureaucratization underpin these characteristics. As industry, technology and
communications systems have transformed the human world at a breathless pace
so they have also dissolved the certainties of tradition so that, to paraphrase Marx,
‘All that is solid melts into air’. While such transformations hold out the promise
of the end of material scarcity, they also carry dangers of alienation, disaffection and
self-destruction.
The ambiguity, doubt, risk and continual change that are markers of modernism
are manifested in the constitution of the self. ‘Tradition’ values stability and the
place of persons in a normatively ordered and immutable cosmos, a firmness of
parameters in which things are as they are because that is how they should be. By
contrast, modernism values change, life planning and reflexivity. In the context of
tradition, self-identity is primarily a question of social position, while for the
modern person it is a ‘reflexive project’ wherein identity is not fixed but created. For
modernism, the self is not a question of surface appearance but of the workings of
deeper structures so that metaphors of depth predominate (e.g. the unconscious).
Faust is one of the emblematic modern figures because he was determined to