From the universal to the particular, from unity to fragment, a shift in emphasis is one of the most telling signs of modernity. Where the ancient world constantly acknowledged fragmentation, it also emphasized contexts to heal it. The role of the particular becomes more pronounced as modernity develops, until a romantic like Friedrich Schlegel could observe that “many works of the ancients have become fragments.
Many modern works are fragments at the moment of their inception.” In ancient Egypt, one could harm an enemy by writing their name on a bowl and then smashing it, but by the eighteenth century, attitudes were changing radically toward fragmented forms; indeed, incomplete sentimental novels, unfinished poems, ruins, fauxruins called follies, would all take the form of fragments.
Yet while fragments become more and more frequent in all sorts of art, like the ancients, artists and audiences still look for larger totalities to endow them with meaning. Elizabeth Harries brilliantly explains this deeply ironic impulse in The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in The Later Eighteenth Century: “We tend to think of fragmentary forms as radically discontinuous, reflecting a discontinuous, unstable, uncentered universe. The world is in chaos, and we represent that chaos in fragments. In the eighteenth century, however, and even into the nineteenth, fragments were not necessarily signs of a broken reality.”
Rather than a fallen particular, the fragment becomes synecdoche for an impossibly beautiful whole. The fragmented works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are never stitched together out of myriad pieces. William Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn gesture toward a totality that is beyond the scope of the poems, their incomplete status a memorial to a beauty the works invite us to imagine but cannot embody.
The fragments are perfect to the extent that the whole could never sustain, and so the fragment becomes the mirror out of which we conjure the perfect but unattainable ideal. Thus the folly must be the ruin of a single temple, the poem a fragment of one great epic.
To stitch together fragments of chance materials that all make widely different gestures would crush the sublime effect that depends so implicitly on the fantasy of a single, impossible totality reduced to one particular. The fragment recognizes our fallen and decaying world, but like the ancient myths it calls out for the redemption in a beautiful whole.
The pastoral follies and epic gestures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are so melancholy, perhaps, because they reach out toward beautiful wholes at a time of profound and violent fragmentation of lifeworlds by an ever more emphatic change in capitalism.
They seize on the broken and the unfinished but look in it for redemption from the shattering forces blossoming everywhere. These forces of technology and capitalism made it more and more difficult to emphasize psychic or mythic unities. Indeed, for Marshall McLuhan, the trajectory of Western experience is at one with its technologies of fragmentation.
The hot mediums of movable type, clocks, assembly lines, railroads, shipping networks, typewriters, phonographs, photographs, film, and more are all mechanical technologies that destroy our sense of unity and totality: “[T]he principle of mechanization excludes the very possibility of growth or the understanding of change. For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series. Yet as David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing.”
Though for McLuhan alphabetic writing culminating in movable type is the origin and explosion of individuation in the West, the truly cataclysmic transformations of life will develop with unprecedented speed at the turn of the nineteenth century as all life is quickly industrialized. It is as if the social bodies of the nineteenth century are vivisected in this unrelenting process:
“[T]he breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) has been the secret of Western power of man and nature alike. This is the reason why our Western industrial programs have quite involuntarily been so militant, and our military programs have been so industrial” (85).
McLuhan’s insight perfectly captures the paradox of massproduction technologies and rising consumption, in which more and more readymades create both literal and psychic fragmentation precipitated by the rise of urban mediascapes and cultures of vast consumption and waste.
The romantic reverence for the fragment with its kabbalistic hopes of a divine beauty did not survive this paradox. The role of the fragment and the aesthetic of modernism would be rewritten in a world of unprecedented mechanization, production, and speed. While myths and desires for unity and wholeness coordinating the ancient world might have been embodied in collage, the brute reality of scarcity made it unpracticable.
The materials of modern collage are themselves the detritus of vast mechanical operations of fragmentation–scraps, buttons, tickets, magazine pages, photographs, book pages, packaging, and more–in the ancient world such were simply not ready to hand.
Collage is the art of overproduction and the unprecedented fragmenting wastes of consumerism. Its aesthetic celebrates the incomplete; its willingness to find beauty in irresolvable contractions or monstrous wholes is a mirror of the self created by the fragmentation of working the assembly line, wandering through the department store, or reading the newspaper and gleaning in the streets for industrial objects rather than in pastoral fields for grain.