Ambiguity, The Artist, The Masses, And the "Double Nature" of Language (Critical Essay‪)‬

In 1992 two works were published which sought to cast light on the origins of the modernist aesthetic: John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 and Pierre Bourdieu's Les Regles de l'art. There has been little or no comparison of these two books, which nevertheless offer complementary perspectives on developments in the artistic project on the one hand in the United Kingdom, on the other in France, from the late nineteenth century onwards. In particular, both situate the modernist aesthetic in the problematic nature of the relationship of the artist to society. Taking as its starting-point the analyses offered by these two scholars, I explore the origins of the crisis of representation triggered as language became a stake in the struggle launched against the encroachment of mass culture by writers who, seeking to free language from its subordination to the ends of reason, materiality, utility, and practicality, advanced the claims of ambiguity, uncertainty, and even obscurity. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, Carey identifies the origin of the disparate movement known as modernism in the hostility of intellectuals towards the social changes resulting from industrialization and urbanization. In Great Britain, in the course of the nineteenth century, the social landscape was invaded by new demographic groups, notably the workers, who crowded into the cities, and the lower middle class, who increasingly populated the spreading suburbs. According to Carey, intellectuals and artists found the presence of these populations menacing and overwhelming, all the more so because it was accompanied by other developments which threatened the intellectuals' control over culture: mass education, almost universal literacy, and a popular press that addressed this new public. Analyzing the work mainly of English writers at the turn of the century, Carey traces what he represents as their preoccupation, indeed their obsession, with the looming presence of "the masses," a term which was widely used, although in Carey's view it is a highly problematic one: do "the masses" really exist, or are they the projection of the intellectuals who are unable to distinguish any individuality in what appears to be, from their critical perspective, an amorphous, undifferentiated crowd? Their reaction in any case was to seek to keep the masses at a distance by imposing barriers to their entry into the sphere of culture (Carey 16-17). They could not, of course, actually prevent them from attaining literacy, but they could place obstacles in the way of their access to literature and this, argues Carey, they sought to do. The early twentieth century saw a determined effort on the part of the European intelligentsia to exclude the masses from high culture.