1 - Introduction

Summary

“Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!” To the depths of the unknown to find something new: is this the battle cry of modernism or an advertising slogan? Could it be both? What reading procedures would distinguish absolutely between the two? – And what would be the cost to our historical understanding of Baudelaire and modernism, were such procedures to succeed?

However scandalous the alleged identity of high and low, of elite and mass culture may once have seemed, it has by now become commonplace. The modernist attempt to salvage or forge some domain of authenticity over and against the wasteland of commercial culture has been swallowed whole by commercialism itself: “defamiliarization,” as the Russian Formalists termed the renewal of perception through aesthetic innovation and willed distance from the ordinary, is now a well-worn advertising technique, used to confer an aura of novelty and exoticism on the most familiar and banal of commodities, from standard-brand beer to haute couture perfume. For us (and this realization surely counts as one signal of our postmodern condition), the techniques of modernism and advertising are one and the same.

But can the same be said for Baudelaire himself? In one sense, no: advertising and modernism were only in their infancy in Baudelaire's day; their merger presupposes a degree of commercial oversaturation and sophistication on the part of consumers, a measure of sophistication and sheer desperation on the part of advertisers, the assimilation of modernism itself into mainstream culture – conditions that were not met in mid nineteenth-century France.