Politics, literature, and the arts

Politics, Literature & the Arts: Modernism has been discussed as a reaction to modernity: from the following works, is this a fair description?

Modernism is often defined as a chaotic, pastiche-style of rendering the difficulties of modern, industrialized life. The attempted regimentation of modernity becomes, in modernism, exposed for the absurdity that it is through the surrealist and other modernist aesthetics, such as the improvised jazz riff. For example, in the 1928 film "The Andalusian Dog" by the surrealist artist Salvador Dali and the surrealist director Louis Bunuel the pace of the film's absurd depiction of life is harsh, fragmented and full of confusion. It seems to exist in no certain time, place, or within a conventionally identifiable range of historical or social images, and thus is coherent with the impersonal nature of modern life. It is like, to cite Ken Burn's documentary on music, a "jazz" riff on the modern mind through images rather than music.

Thus, the surrealist and modernist images of the modernist ethos suggested by the images of the film "The Andalusian Dog" were inspired by the social realities of the modern condition, although one can never reduce any work of art to a singular, narrow 'reason' for its state of being. Moreover, Walter Benjamin's essay on "Surrealism" stresses the confused psychological as well as social consciousness reflected in the surrealist aesthetic -- the constant jumping back and forth between present and past, for example, as images from old Europe such as priests of the cloth are transposed with a modern cyclist, but propelled by a man in a suit with a harlequin-like costume of old, suggests the angst-ridden reaction of the human mind and artist to the constant juxtapositions of modern life. Modern people, this suggests, are forever, not entirely unlike their forbearers but more so, betwixt and between a barrage of modalities or ways of seeing the world. Jazz is the music accompaniment of surrealism, a string of free associations of the individual, flung against an apparently regimented factory existence that has no real reason for existing, even false constructs created by the church or aristocracy of the previous century.

Thus Bunuel, Dali, Adorno, and Benjamin saw modern world, as existing between two different epochs. It stood between the old religious order and the new secular order of depersonalization and industrial science, neither of which were truly comforting or intellectually or emotionally sustaining. Although the surrealists, it is important to note, did not see their movement as an intellectual one, it is difficult to read the Dali-Bunuel cinematic collaboration other than as expressing that something about a perceived older order or form of comfort is gone, and only individual associations were left to allow one to psychologically survive.

Even the sureties of time and memory are gone in the nonsensically named "The Andalusian Dog." The integrity or lack of integrity of the body itself is reflected in the termination of the "Dog's" eye-splitting prologue. Then, in the next shot, nothing is retained from the old world of seven years ago in the prologue, as the unidentified woman with the razor-cut eye of the film's first moon-slicing images is whole and intact in what is defined as the film's tenuous present -- again, there is a sense that the past has no impact upon the present that is implicit in the 20th century notions of modernity.