Modernity in Everyday Life - Essay Example

? Modernity in everyday life number Modernity in everyday life Modernity as a phenomenon and a movement is a much discussed and much studied topic. The complexity of the subject and the range of effects that the subject has on the everyday lives of people make it an extremely important and challenging area of study. The importance of an analysis of modernity also lies in the implications that it has for a world that has gone through a century that saw two of the most devastating wars that the world has ever seen. An analysis of modernity as it affects the lives of ordinary people needs to be start with an analysis of the works of literature that led to the beginning of a study of modernity. This paper shall analyse modernity through the works of Charles Baudelaire and Karl Marx, two thinkers who were deeply concerned with what constitutes the modern and what did not. Their ideas regarding the modern revamped ideas of tradition and modernity and also other ideas that were prevalent and dominated the fields of art, literature and other aspects of the daily lives of people. Marx’s definition of the commodity in his work, Capital and especially in “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” gives one an understanding of the way in which modern life operates. The intricate maze of manipulations that lead to a devaluation of the force of labor that is behind the commodities that we see in the world is part of the modern world. Unearthing the fallacies that are given rise to by capitalist economies so as to keep the real nature of the order of things under wraps, Marx seeks to create in workers a consciousness of their work and a consciousness of their work as the driving force behind the production of commodities. Marx critiques the forms of economy that impoverish the worker and keep him or her out of the perception that people have regarding a commodity even though it is the worker who is directly responsible for the production of it. Modernity for Marx thus lay in the recognition of the past and effecting a break from it. This break begins with an awareness of the oppressive nature of the past and a desire to break away from such oppressive structures. The importance of this theory lies in its revolutionary understanding of modernity and its possibilities. Marx seeks to remedy the disconnect between the commodity and the labor that produces it by exposing the “mystical character of commodities” (Marx) that are a result of the techniques that are employed by capitalist economies to keep the workers at the lowest rung of the hierarchy. For Baudelaire, a poet who wrote about the development of the city and the characteristics of it, the modern was always an interesting aspect of art. In The Painter of Modern Life, he talks of the need to capture the essence of the modern and the beauty of it. Castigating artists who merely imitate the conventions of the past, Baudelaire locates true art in the articulation of the present. This is what he refers to as the ‘modern’. The artist that he talks of is great according to him as a result of his commitment to representing the beauty of the modern. This according to Baudelaire is a painstaking process as the extraction of beauty from a scene for a person who is present at the scene is a difficult process. Talking of the art of the end of the nineteenth century that he feels is disappointing as a result of its tendency to imitate models of the Renaissance and other periods of history, Baudelaire remarks upon the living quality of art that can be captured only through representations of the modern. The modern, in turn is the living scene of the present form which good art can be produced through an extraction of the beauty of the present. The impulses that drive the artist should be geared towards capturing the modern. The modern, thus, for Baudelaire, is not a monolithic entity that is ahistorical but something that changes from time to time. What is modern for a certain age would not be so for another. The modern of the age of the Renaissance would not be modern for his own times, he feels. The changing character of the modern is an important aspect of the theory that Baudelaire lays down. Modernity is thus a characteristic of every age that needs to be extracted for the production of art and beauty in art. Such definitions of art are not divorced from the daily lives of people. Conceptions of the modern and modernity affect the lives of people in profound ways. What is considered modern affects the social and economic behavior of people to a great extent. What people perceive as artistic affects every aspect of their life, including what they listen to, what they wear and what words they use in their daily conversations with other people. Modernity has a crucial role in shaping culture and the very language that one speaks. Language is not only modified by culture, culture also modifies language. The very modes of articulation between people are affected by what is modern or what is perceived to be modern, by a particular age. Artistic creations affect the understanding of everyday life in a manner that is similar to the mirroring of reality that is considered to be a traditional function of art. The everyday life of a person is described in terms that make it sound to be full of life and enchanting moments that are filled with opportunities to capture fleeting articles of beauty. The importance of beauty cannot be overemphasized in the works of Baudelaire and other fin-de-siecle poets who believed that the purpose of art was the creation of beauty and not the social functions that writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot associated with it. The break from realism that Baudelaire seeks to effect in his poetry is evident in the tenets that he lays down for the creation of art, which he feels has to capture the beauty of an age. The modern, for Baudelaire, in the lives of people has to be the beauty that needs to be distilled from the mundane and that which is not beautiful. He seeks to capture the eternal as opposed to the ephemeral from the daily lives of people. The capture of the eternal, however, according to Baudelaire does not come with a capture of what has already come to be accepted as the eternal but what is present in modern society as the modern. The artist is the person who is able to perform this task of seeing the beauty in the modern as opposed to the common man who on most occasions is unable to perceive the very sights that he sees. To understand the modern, one needs to accept the new and make an effort to understand it. The modern, because of its break from the past, can be difficult to understand, but it is this very quality which makes it accessible to the good artist who is then able to put together its beauty like a child does when it receives new information. A child-like curiosity is thus needed for the understanding of the modern (Baudelaire). The modern is an area of study that has attracted scholars from various fields of research. The fact that it affects every aspect of a person’s life and is essentially a study of the present is what makes it all the more interesting. Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life”. Modernism och postmodernism. http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/pm/baudelaire-painter.htm Accessed on 6th February, 2012. Marx, Karl. “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof”. Capital, Volume One. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm Accessed on 6th February, 2012. Read More