Aesthetic modernism as a macro-epoch. Part 2

Our current concept of the modern generally stretches back to the epochal threshold around 1800. In political history, this break is marked by the French Revolution; in aesthetic history it is to be found at the end of early-modern Classicism in the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” which led Schiller to his analysis of the contemporary mentality (“sentimental consciousness”) and Schlegel to a new guiding category in the realm of aesthetics (“the interesting” rather than the “beautiful”). This created an autonomy for modernism insofar as it defined itself with reference to the contemporary present and no longer on the basis of its relationship to the old pre-modern era. At the same time, the temporal horizon undergoes a shift: programmatic modern aesthetics understand themselves as a genetic principle that will only be redeemed in the future. There is nonetheless a deeply embedded oscillation in the modern, shifting between theory-constructing reflexivity and deconstructing reflexion. In literary artistic characters, the new self-image of the genius (as opposed to the old “poeta doctus”) is celebrated emphatically, whilst at the same time the possibility of this model being nothing more than an illusion of vain self-love is also postulated. Insofar as the typical modern reflexion of the reflexion repeatedly deconstructs its own constructions, modernism also wins a typically modern - which is to say “sentimental” - relationship to itself. Whilst the sciences free themselves completely from their obligation to older authorities and replace traditional practices with tradition-free experiential sciences based on empiricism and experiment, the relationship of aesthetic modernism to tradition is more complex. Premodern is the obligation to tradition; modern is the freedom to select a tradition which first manifests itself in the anti-classical counter-canon of the Sturm und Drang and Romanticism, thereafter in an entirely free playing field as far as references to tradition are concerned, developing into complicated forms of intertextuality.