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Whitney (the book is Francis Bacon and Modernity <\/em> , Yale, 1986) offers some additional meditations on the meaning of \u201cmodern\u201d particularly as it relates to Bacon. He defines modernity in terms of the tension between innovation and tradition, the frustration that arises from the revolutionary\u2019s effort to start afresh and his recognition (which he strives to conceal) that he is dependent on traditional sources for the innovation. Or, with respect to Bacon, \u201cthe subversiveness implicit in Bacon\u2019s demand for total novelty acts first on the vision of novelty itself, for that must find articulation in the cultural matrix that is the target of subversion.\u201d Modernity in Bacon thus emerges less as a stance than as \u201cthe incomplete or deferred attempt to fix a stance\u201d; Bacon\u2019s modernity is \u201cnot so much in his vision of revolution as in the very discontinuity between new and old ways of conceiving visions.\u201d <\/p>\n The tension Whitney identifies also helps explain, he thinks, the widely varying readings of Bacon: The \u201creformer and literary artist\u201d in Bacon is the fascination of literary historians, while \u201cthe call to a triumphant modernity of knowledge and power comprise the subject of a historian of ideas or science.\u201d His distinction between \u201cdisciplines that cultivate knowledge\u201d (humanities) and disciplines of discovery (sciences) contributes to the problem, since it is a distinction that he embodies in his calls to \u201crevolution\u201d (science) couched in traditional categories and making use of traditional rhetorical and allegorical resources. <\/p>\n From this perspective too, the various anti-modern movements of the modern world \u2013 Modernism, avant-gardism of various sorts, postmodernism \u2013 are shown to be \u201cgrounded in Western history\u201d and not quite \u201chorizons of absolute novelty: these movements find precedent as symptoms of our alienation and isolation expressed in successive cults of the new, or as (coopted) gestures of revolution.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whitney (the book is Francis Bacon and Modernity , Yale, 1986) offers some additional meditations on the meaning of \u201cmodern\u201d particularly as it relates to Bacon. He defines modernity in terms of the tension between innovation and tradition, the frustration that arises from the revolutionary\u2019s effort to start afresh and his recognition (which he strives […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"yoast_head":"\n
From this angle, \u201cthe most moern writer would not be the one who achieves the greatest independence and originality, but the one whose work offers the most breathtaking strain between vision and matrix, who, like certain hommes d\u2019avant-garde <\/em> , meets the greatest risks of incoherence.\u201d Bacon also appears in this context \u201cone of history\u2019s most modern figures, more so, perhaps, than a speeding Rimbaud or locomotive Descartes, the latter having both consolidated the revolutionary stance and repressed its contexts more fully than Bacon.\u201d <\/p>\n