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PARTISAN REVIEW
thought that this wave of resistance is fundamentally reactionary: a
revolt against modernity as a whole. I see it, rather, as a rejection of one
mode of modernism in the name of another, a mode that is half a
century older but just as authentically modern in its sensibility and its
ideals. Baudelaire's modernism, as I have portrayed it here, may turn
out to be even more relevant in our time than it was in his own.
All this suggests that modernism contains its own inner contradic–
tions and dialectics; that forms of modernist thought and feeling may
be long submerged, without ever being superseded; and that the deepest
social and psychic wounds of modernity may be repeatedly sealed,
without ever being really healed. The contemporary desire for a city
that is chaotic, troublesome, impossible, but intensely
alive,
is a desire
to open up old but distinctively modern wounds once more;
to
live
openly with the split and unreconciled character of our lives, and to
draw energy from our inner struggles, wherever they may lead us in the
end.
If
we learned through one modernism
to
construct haloes around
our spaces and ourselves, we can learn from another modernism-one
of the oldest, but also, we can see now, one of the newest-to lose our
haloes and find ourselves anew.
