Professors, Pimps, and Performers

Modernity disenchants because modernity disconnects. The novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici concludes his 2010 book Whatever Happened to Modernism? with a definition and a question: “Modernism … may be the product of a general European rootlessness in the wake of the French and Industrial revolutions. All will then depend on whether we see such rootlessness as pathological or as giving those who are imbued with it a certain vantage point, allowing them to see things which might otherwise have remained hidden. In other words, are we see to see our own history, that which makes us what we are, as something which blinkers us or which sharpens our vision? This is, of course, a very modernist question.” It is a shame that Josipovici’s otherwise wonderful book fails to provide an answer.