Modernism and the Sign

“Modernism had two great wishes. It wanted its audience to be led toward a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism, was the claim); but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed.” (T. J. Clark)

Modernity precipitated modernism, which sought to cast off the illusions of tradition and modernity itself. As Clark recognises, modern was defined by a turning ‘away from the comforts of narrative and illusion’, whilst ‘turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity’, eroded by capital, yet ultimately, these wishes were irreconcilable, due to their antagonism, but more fundamentally, the illusion of the originary ‘World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity’.

Bell’s portrait of Woolf | Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett. Photo credit: © National Trust

Modernity marks the becoming of capital, its alienation, illusion of its ladder, which modernism sought to cast away, evoking recalls to nature. As Polanyi recognises, ‘In all earlier societies, ‘economic’ relations and practices were ‘embedded’ … in non-economic … relationships’, yet the obverse in capitalism: social relations embedded in economic relations. For Woolf: ‘All human relations have shifted- those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.’ Capitalism imbibes Weber’s Protestant ethic, making it the standard by which Protestantism disintegrates (Jameson), becoming so universally imbibed that Protestantism disintegrates, by which capitalist participation exists as disavowed religion, universalised, yet emptied of content. Thus, money is the new Master-Signifier, replacing God/nation, empty of value, yet provides a point de capiton: ‘Money refers to value as such, and all other commodities are thought of in terms of how much money one can get for them’. Captured by this logic of capital, one becomes alienation from one’s product, the production-act, Gattungswesen, other workers, evoking the recall to nature. Bloom fails to sell his advertisement, wants to become a politician; wanders around Dublin; contemplates the nature of humanity; has few friends; there is no fraternity between workers, culminating in existential alienation: ‘From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received: existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.’ Likewise, Stephen wants to write; he is moody at his job; resents his family and questions the notion of family; there is animosity with Deasy; and nobody takes him seriously. Bloom struggles with non-belonging, haunted by death, and Stephen loses his mother, and resents his irresponsible father, interrogating fatherhood through allusions to Hamlet: ‘Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. … Paternity may be a legal fiction.’ Stephen and Bloom leave home without their keys, finding that other men, Buck and Boylan, have usurped their houses, rendering them exiles in their own homes; Bloom as an Irish-Jew, Stephen as an impoverished Irishman; part-of-no-part. Whilst the ‘corridor’, which holds together the sections of To the Lighthouse, is fixed upon the maid. Amidst death and war, Woolf asks, ‘What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature?’, to which the answer is not art, but labour delivers the house from entropy and ruin, so that Lily’s art is made possible. McNab is disjunct from others; endures in alienation, in the pains of her labour; the part-of-no-part which sustains the middle-class illusions. However, alienation, and illusion are not reserved to modernity, but the linguistic-symbolic order altogether, a deadlock, represented according to gender. Between the ‘propositional discourse of the philosopher’, and ‘symbolic language of art’,Woolf’s man is calculating, factual, whilst woman is creative, emotional: ‘She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, … and the worst … was between men and women.’ Mr. Ramsay resides in the linguistic structure, whilst Mrs. Ramsay transgresses, feeling rather than articulating, by which woman ‘is a ‘constantly flowing chain of signifiers that occurs with the use of language and never settles upon a single fixed ‘meaning’’. Woman approaches meaning, ‘through flashes of artistic representation, yet has trouble expressing this feeling in words’. Meaning is destabilised by this semiosis, producing a ‘pleasurable creative excess over precise meaning’, whereas patriarchal class-society is sustained by fixed signs: ‘The feminine … signifies a force within society which opposes it’. Mr. Ramsay is a ‘master of language’, yet his speech is devoid of meaning, like the Master-Signifier to which he maintains allegiance. This deadlock springs out when discussing the trip, in which Mr. Ramsay warns of a storm, postponing trip, whilst Mrs. Ramsay cares more for her son’s feelings, for she does not succumb to the the sign, as ‘wind’, ‘rain’ for her do not necessarily imply ‘storm’, unravelling signification, whilst Mr. Ramsay’s methodology is typified in his alphabetical yardstick for philosophy: ‘whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all’ As seen in Deasy, Mr. Ramsay and Tansley, ‘In the period of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps the most important disaster was the enormous increase of scientific arrogance’. Lily sees natural beauty, but Ramsay is bound to the sign, by which ‘this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table’. The woman recognises that one signifier implies another, and so forth, by which ‘[a]long this metonymic chain of signifiers, meanings, or signifieds, will be produced, but no object or person can ever be fully ‘present’ in this chain’. Thus, meaning is never guaranteed- ‘always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure’- which Lily explicitly recognises: ‘One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. … For how could one express in words these emotions of the body?’ Lily fantasies of a place in which emotion is portrayed through art, not the endless signification of the present: ‘‘Oh, good-morning, Mrs. Beckwith! What a lovely day’, and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak at all.’’ Woman, and Bloom, struggle to enter into the masculine Symbolic, for it only inhibits speech, and thus they often retreat to imagination, looking for the lost objet petit a’ They face a double-bind, by which to enter into the Symbolic is to surrender to rules and structures, yet to abandon it is traumatically alienating, whilst one does not know the uncomfortable truth that the objet petit a is unattainable. Bloom faces this deadlock qua Gerty: she allows her biological drives to persist outside of language yet within the symbolic rules of seduction, letting her hair down, raising her skirt, but Bloom remains in his failure to integrate, hidden behind the rock, masturbating. One cannot escape the ‘masculine universal’, nor the demands of the id, which cannot be properly transposed through linguistic structures, for desire is ultimately a fixed lack. Thus, language is a ‘likeness’ of the Real: the movement between signifiers is desire, and as desire strives to self-fill, to enter language, is to become ‘prey to desire’, to ‘be severed’ from the Real, ‘that unaccessible realm which is always beyond the reach of signification, always outside the symbolic order’. Only woman liminally encounters the Real- ‘there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark’- for Mrs. Ramsay recognises her inability to communicate her love for Mr. Ramsay: ‘He found talking so much easier than she did. He could say things she never could … It was only that she never could say what she felt.’ Mrs. Ramsay’s love for Mr. Ramsay is only accessible in the moment in which they fail to speak: ‘And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he knew.’

However, this anti-illusionist, anti-capitalist project ends in failure, lacking a coherent basis, and the illusions of the project itself. As Spiteri recognises, ‘At the heart of the modernist enterprise is the peculiar status of the sign, suspended between convention and motivation’. Clark relates the representational crises to contingent political events, in which there is ‘an intimate connection between art and society, when … art was forced to participate in the process of revolutionary renovation’. In Cortázar’s ‘Continuity of Parks’, the artifice remains illusory, representational, evoking or representing a ‘world that is seemingly outside the artefact, which therefore appears to refer to something other than itself’- only through this illusion of omniscient narrative does it function. The modernists took this gap to be an illusion to be corrected, like the communists’ egalitarianism against the illusion of capital: why should one be sedated by the ‘artifice’, the ‘opium of the masses’? Modernism aimed to extract this artifice through abstraction. The narrative is relegated to debased consciousness; a self-consciousness which is aware of language as unable to mediate, nor describe consciousness and meaning, yet creates consciousness and meaning, by which Lily turns the canvas around toward the woman-subject, and Bloom brings Matcham’s Masterstroke into the toilet, wiping with the story, relating Beaufoy’s language to Bloom’s excrement. This self-consciousness erodes narrative authority, whereby traditional descriptions from the transcendent author erode into fragmented consciousness. Joyce and Woolf produce a novel in which authorial intention becomes absent from the language of the text, and through the Homeric structural conceit, this develops from the language itself. They are aware of the structural methodology, ‘comprised of three key ideas: the idea of wholeness, the idea of transformation, and the idea of self-regulation’. Wholeness, the ‘elements arranged according to laws of combination rather than merely lumped together as an aggregate’, is present in all literary works. Transformation, the ‘ ability of parts of a structure to be interchanged or modified according to certain rules’, is seen in the ‘metempsychotic way in which Bloom [and the Ramsays] and Odysseus are related’. Self-regulation is in the ‘interplay of anticipation and correction’, whereby the ‘Homeric parallels function as a kind of feed-back loop, operating to correct imbalance and brake any tendency of the work to run away in the direction of merely random recitations [… and] provide a diachronic scheme’. In ‘Oxen of the Sun’, the narrative is transformed according to a series of rules and narrative-materials, by which the ‘selection of what comes when, in the necessarily linear sequence of prose narrative, is thus the result of [this] complex interaction’. The drunken conversation, following the birth, serves as a microcosm of this ‘linguistic transformation of the anti-structural randomisation of an afterbirth: a melange of entropic noise’- Joyce’s reluctance to succumb to the illusion of narrative, returning to the ‘bedrock’ of birth. The semiotic language, ‘instead of being said to present itself as an illusion, … present[s] itself as transparent and unmediated, as unstaged, as natural or as the ‘voice of impersonal, and anonymous authority’ which ‘precludes the possibility of anything but affirmation’’. This is the product of the intrusion of Master-Signifier, which closes off any imagined originary subject/nature, producing the Spaltung, the subject of statement-enunciation, by which Lacan thus extrapolates the sign into algorithm, and Miller traces Master-Signifier to desire. Lacan destabilises the sign, subjugating the signified, for there is some order of ‘pure signifiers’, which exist prior. This structures the unconscious, such that language is not composed of the sign, but signifiers, by which perception becomes language- this is ‘the resistance inherent in signification’, and whilst meaning is traditionally constituted by the syntagmatic-paradigmatic, Joyce is reluctant to follow the syntagmatic progression ‘as if he cannot bear to part with many of the paradigmatic possibilities that have occurred to him’. Joyce follows the paradigmatic chain, in the lists of ‘Cyclops’, ‘in which displaced possibilities are allowed to sport themselves and form syntagmatic chains of their own’, by which the lists ‘become syntagmatic in themselves, and they further relate to other lists and other parts of the whole narrative in a syntagmatic way’. These lists ‘tend to follow some basic cosmic laws which depend on syntagmatic expectation’, such as repetition: ‘Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch’, in which Joyce parodically intervenes, ‘Miss Timidity Aspenall, … Miss Grace Poplar’. Accordingly, for Miller, there can be no proper modern tragedy, for we cannot integrate their inundation, imbibing the tragic event with some comic aspect, paradoxically making it ‘all the more horrifying’, for it cannot be ‘sublimated’ into ‘tragic dignity’. Joyce’s parody interrogates meaning, destabilises the sign, subverts tradition. Joyce parodises revivalist literature, in its runs, whereby ‘he lists eleven types of fish before concluding that the fish he is listing are ‘too numerous to be enumerated’’.

Miller’s transition produces a modern subject by which the sign is not returned to subjectivity, but the illusion of subjectivity erodes in place of desire. This new language brings abstraction: the window, the concrete manifestation of the abstract idea that Mrs. Ramsay is the centre of the household; Joyce employs a script style in ‘Circe’, and sheet music in ‘Ithaca’. However, at some point, abstraction brings the reader out of the work, yet the work is most effective when it manipulates the viewer into immersion. Through abstraction, narrative becomes impotent, just as Joyce makes the reader aware of the medium through the script style in Circe, and Modernism purposefully evokes this response, but it is difficult to turn to nature if aiming for absolute abstraction, as illuminated by Lily, and it becomes impossible to construct anti-capitalist narratives. Thus, ultimately, ‘Modernism lacked the basis, social and epistemological, on which its two wishes might be reconciled’. But more fundamentally, the idea of returning to nature is itself an illusion: Stephen thinks of monks who aim at an experience of the world in-itself; that there is some experience which cannot be linguistically mediated, in some nature sealed off from us, by which he ‘stares into his navel’, but imagines the umbilical cord as a telephone cord that can return him to Eden: ‘Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one’. The symbolic order is the means of participation in society, what it means to be a ‘person’, but withholding the fundamental dimension of personhood, yet that which one thinks they are withholding does not exist. As soon as one speaks, they are acting on enunciation, the subject of the unconscious. The idea that one has an original thought which is not in any way pre-mediated is Stephen’s illusion, as the thought is only retroactively generated through enunciation. As one believes that there’s the ‘true self’ under the Symbolic, one believes that there is an Imaginary ‘true thought’. The disjunct between Imaginary and Symbolic self is the precondition for the ‘true self’- this the sublime void which anticipates subjectivity. The aforementioned transition from Master-Signifier is due to the fact that ideology cannot be ‘stepped out of’, and there is nothing originally true ‘underneath’, and thus an egalitarian Master-Signifier cannot be posited. The only ‘truth’ comes ‘above’ the false universal; the Hegelian path from abstract to concrete reality; the structuralist dialectic: the abstract materialises itself through its perceived fall into the concrete, and the perceived concrete materialises itself through its fall into the abstract, producing the ‘retroactive illusion of subjectivity’. This is the recognition of the ‘part of no-part’: simultaneously in society, whilst excommunicated, by which the illusion of the ladder is sustained. Whether it be the working-woman, the downtrodden, the Jew, there is an excess which cannot be integrated, despite being fixed within this order, for they also represent the negation of such. Thus, the anti-capitalist project is not to struggle against the ladder, but recognise that there is no ladder, nor originary subject/nature. Thus, Miller does not turns to objet petit a, where ‘there is the slippery-shifting subject who lacks any stable support in the Master-Signifier, and whose consistency is sustained by relationship to the pure-remainder/trash/excess, to some ‘undignified’, inherently comic, little bit of the Real’. This identification introduces the moque-comique, the parodic ‘subversion of all firm symbolic identifications’, accepting the subjective lack. This is shown in Woolf’s woman, and Bloom, who transforms though accepting the loss of son, supplanting Stephen’s lost father, ‘coming to accept the void of subjectivity that the subject encounters when mourning lost objects of love’. Bloom does not reject the void, but accepts the impossibility of overcoming it, expressing his repressed desire, accepting the loss, becoming semiotic-woman: ‘lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom’.

Modernism, amidst the communist promises, the toppling of tradition and illusion, naturally strove for the unveiling of the illusions of literature, yet maintaining an antagonism toward capitalist modernity. Miller recognises that one cannot go down endless signification, nor employ an egalitarian Master-Signifier, for we cannot intervene from outside ideology, nor can we return to the sign of subject/nature, but transition to desire, which for Joyce and Woolf is semiotic-woman, the part-of-no-part, who draws out flashes of the Real, and recognise the ladder, narrative, subject, for what it is, an illusion to be cast away.

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