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modernization in Mars & Medak 2019

crisis of the university and the public library as two
modern institutions tasked with providing universal access to knowledge and education.
This crisis, precipitated by pushes to marketization, technological innovation and
financialization in universities and libraries, has prompted the emergence of shadow
libraries as collective disobedient practices of maintenance and custodianship. In their
illegal acts of reversing property into commons, commodification into care, we detect a
radical gesture comparable to that of the historical avant-garde. To better understand how
the university and the public library ended up in this crisis, we re-trace their development
starting with the capitalist modernization around the turn of the 20th century, a period of
accelerated technological innovation that also birthed historical avant-garde. Drawing on
Perry Anderson’s ‘Modernity and Revolution’, we interpret that uniquely creative period
as a period of ambivalence toward an ‘unpredictable political future’ that was open to
diverging routes of social development. We situate the later re-emergence of avant-garde
practices in the 1960s as an attempt to subvert the separations that a mature capitalism
imposes on social reality. In the present, we claim, the radicality equivalent to the avantgarde is to divest from the disruptive dynamic of innovation and focus on the repair,
maintenance and care

esses and crises of the capitalist
development of their time. While primarily an artistic and intellectual
phenomenon, the avant-gardes emerged from both an adversarial and a coconstitutive relation to the institutions of higher education and knowledge
production. By revisiting three epochal moments along the trajectory of the
avant-gardes – 1917, 1967 and 2017 – we now wish to establish how the
structural context for radical disruption and radical transformation were
historically changing, bringing us to the present conjuncture where the library
and the university can reclaim the legacy of the avant-gardes by seemingly doing
its exact opposite: refusing innovation.

1917 – Industrial modernization,
revolutionary subjectivity

accelerated

temporality

and

In his text on ‘Modernity and Revolution’ Perry Anderson (1984) provides an
unexpected, yet the cogent explanation of the immense explosion of artistic
creativity in the short span of time between the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century that is commonly periodized as modernism (or avant-garde,
which he uses sparsely yet interchangeably). Rather than collapsing these wildly
diverging movements and geographic variations of artistic practices into a
monolithic formation, he defines modernism as a broad field of singular
responses resulting from the larger socio-political conjuncture of industrial
modernity. The very differe

ntithetical currents of symbolism,
constructivism, futurism, expressionism or suprematism that emerge in
modernism’s fold were defined by three coordinates: 1) an opposition to the
academicism in the art of the ancien régime, which modernist art tendencies both
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Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak

Against innovation

draw from and position themselves against, 2) a transformative use of
technologies and means of communication that were still in their promising
infancy and not fully integrated into the exigencies of capitalist accumulation and
3) a fundamental ambivalence vis-à-vis the future social formation – capitalism or
socialism, state or soviet – that the process of modernization would eventually
lead to. As Anderson summarizes:
European modernism in the first years of this century thus flowered in the space
between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a
still unpredictable political future. Or, put another way, it arose at the intersection
between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy,
and a semi-emergent, or -insurgent, labour movement. (Anderson, 1984: 150)

Thus these different modernisms emerged operating within the coordinates of
their historical present, – committed to a substantive subversion of tradition or to
an acceleration of social development. In his influential theory of the

bureaucracy, mass society and technological revolutions.
Progress became the telos of social development. Productive forces and global
expansion of capitalist relations made the humanity and the world into a new

article | 351



horizon of both charitable and profitable endeavors, emancipatory and imperial.
The world became a project (Krajewski, 2014).
The avant-gardes around the turn of the 20th century integrated and critically
inflected these transformations. In the spirit of the October Revolution, its
revolutionary subjectivity approached social reality as eminently transformable.
And yet, a recurrent concern of artists was with the practical challenges and
innovations of accelerated modernization: how to control, coordinate and socially
integrate the immense expansionary forces of early industrialization. This was an
invitation to insert one’s own radical visions into life and create new forms of
standardization and rationality that would bring society out of its pre-industrial
backwardness. Central to the avant-garde was abolishing the old and creating the
new, while overcoming the separation of art and social practice. Unleashing
imaginary and constructive forces in a reality that has become rational, collective
and universal: that was its utopian promise; that was its radical innovation. Yet,
paradoxically, it is only once there is the new that the previously existing social
wor

dream of universal formalization of language
can be achieved through advances in mathematics and logic.

1967 – Mature capitalism, spectacle, resistant subjectivity
In this periodization, the central contention is that the radical gesture of
destruction of the old and creation of the new that was characteristic of the avantgarde has mutated as the historic coordinates of its emergence have mutated too.
Over the last century the avant-garde has divested from the radical gestures and
has assumed a relation to the transformation of social reality that is much more
complicated than its erstwhile cohort in disruptive change – technological
innovation – continues to offer. If technological modernization and the avantgarde were traveling companions at the turn of the twentieth century, after the
WWII they gradually parted their ways. While the avant-garde rather critically
inflects what capitalist modernity is doing at a particular moment of its
development, technological innovation remained in the same productivist pattern
of disruption and expansion. That technological innovation would remain
beholden to the cyclical nature of capitalist accumulation is, however, no mere
ideological blind-spot. Machinery and technology, as Karl Marx insists in The
Grundrisse, is after all ‘the most adequate form of capital’ (1857) and thus vital to
its dynamic. Hence it comes as no surprise that the tr

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from an enormous expansion of production, distribution and communication in
the 19th century, and necessitating the emergence of the capacity for
coordination of complex processes in the form of modern bureaucracy and
information technology, persists. As the post-WWII golden period of gains in
productivity, prosperity and growth draws to a close, automation and
computerization start to make their way from the war room to the shop floor.
Growing labor power at home and decolonization abroad make the leading
capitalist economies increasingly struggle to keep profits rates at levels of the
previous two decades. Socialist economies struggle to overcome the initial
disadvantages of belated modernization and instill the discipline over labor in
order to compete in the dual world-system. It is still a couple of years before the
first oil crisis will break out and the neo-liberal retrenchment begin.
The revolutionary subjectivity of 1917 is now replaced by resistant militancy.
Facing the monotony of continuous-flow production and the prospect of bullshit
jobs in service industries that start to expand through the surplus of labor time
created by technological advances (Graeber, 2013), the workers perfect the
ingenuity in shirking the intensity and dullness of work. The consumerist culture
instills boredom (Vaneigem, 2012), the social division of labor produces
gendered exploitation at home (Ja

ctor of 1.6 (Latouche, 2009),
some countries such as the US and the Gulf by a factor of 5 (Global Footprint
Network, 2013). And the environmental inequalities within countries are greater
than those between the countries (Piketty and Chancel, 2015). Unless by some
wonder almost non-existent negative emissions technologies do materialize
(Anderson and Peters, 2016), we are on a path of global destabilization of socioenvironmental metabolisms that no rate of technological change can realistically
mitigate (Loftus et al., 2015). Betting on settling on Mars is equally plausible.

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So, if the avant-garde has at the beginning of the 20th century responded to the
mutations of early modernization, in the 1960s to the integrated spectacle of the
mature capitalism, where is the avant-garde in the present?
Before we try to address the question, we need to return to our two public
institutions of mass education and research – the university and the library.
Where is their equalizing capacity in a historical conjuncture marked by the
rising levels of inequality? In the accelerating ‘race against the machine’
(Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2012), with the advances in big data, AI and
robotization threatening to obliterate almost half of the jobs in advanced
economies (Frey and Osborne, 2013; McKinsey Global Institute, 2018), the
university is no longer able to fulfill the promise that it

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