As art and aesthetics, modernism suffered a strange history in the 20th century. The modern began primarily with the visual arts, particularly painting. Literature had produced harbingers, but the painters established the modern with the group force endorsing the radical changes. The French poets almost immediately followed suit. And, to a certain extent, modernism emerged from the first critical reflections of the French artists and poets. But, perhaps paradoxically, 20th century modernism, as critical theory and self-understanding pivots, not on a French figure, but on the Anglo-American poet and critic, T. S. Eliot.
            I say 'paradoxically' for a number of reasons. While Eliot's criticism was extremely influential among English speaking critics for the first half of the 20th century, during the latter half of the century not only the most important figures but also the sudden proliferation of 'isms' were largely French. But T. S. Eliot himself was a paradoxical figure, explicitly in terms of his poetry versus his critical theories. While Eliot's poetry was not only hailed as a paradigm of modernism, thematically both his poetry and his criticism were essentially anti-modernist.
            And his poetry itself was also a paradoxical blend. Undoubtedly, the eclectic mix of fragments, scholarly and prosaic, momentous and banal, within the relatively cogent, if surreal, narrative is peculiarly 'modernist'. But Eliot had more or less simultaneously studied English Elizabethan and modern French poetry. And the prosodic ground is dependent on the peculiar melding of these two 'voices'. The Elizabethans constitute the epitome of the Anglo-Saxon stress system as it comes to rest in the first full wave of the new 'classicism', the reclamation of Greek and Latin models as ideals. It incorporated the 'common speech' ideal of Dante and Petrarch as received through the Petrarchan translations of Wyatt and Surrey. But the rhythmic base remained the Anglo-Saxon foot inflated into a bold pentameter through imitation, primarily, of the epic line of Latin hexameter. French poetry, of course, has always been quantitative rather than stressed. And modernist French poetry flattened it further in its relative disregard of its own 'classical' strictures concerning quantitative measure.
            Thus Eliot alternates between the high seriousness of the Elizabethan pentameter and the ironic and flattened run-on voice that, in English, reproduces the casual and arch tone of French modernism. This peculiar dialectic parallels the struggle that Eliot himself is engaged in. 'The Waste Land' is essentially a diatribe against both the modern and modernism itself, the radical fragmentation of the culture in the face of whatever forces are producing modernistic consciousness. On the one hand, the poem catalogues those forces directly and indirectly. And, on the other, it offers images of an ideal world of culture represented in historic moments of grandeur.
            The upshot, of course, is Eliot's conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, as well as an exchange of his American for British citizenship. But it is also the basis for his assertion of the principle of Unity as the ground of Art. That is, he arrives at a critical orientation based on the presumption that Art and Unity are essentially synonymous. He would have the Unity be culturally embracing. That is, he harks back to a nearly medieval conception of the unity of culture as a function of religion, a creedal synthesis in which culture and religion become fully coextensive and mutually pervasive. But he applies the principle to the work of art as the epitome expression of culture. Ultimately, he sees the unity as impersonal, and in fact defines a new classicism in an art which is the abnegation of individualism and personality.

            At this point, of course, and taken by itself, the assertion of aesthetic unity as the grounding principle for the work of art might seem not only self-evident, but also unassailably the historic basis of criticism from the beginning. But such is not the case. Perhaps we could cite passages from Sam Johnson that seem to support this view, without unduly torturing context and values. But an honest reading of Johnson's critical work would show not only his intentionally personal quirks but also the wide loopholes he leaves when one tries to assign such a theory to him. And this would be true, more or less, for almost all pre-twentieth century criticism.
            It is only with the disjunctive explosion of unity at the core of the modernist aesthetic itself that the concept of unity becomes a formal necessity. Unity has always been a tacit element against which an organic work of art travels its dialectical or dialogical arc. But the unity, because of its presumptive association over against the work, remains essentially peripheral. It is neither the purpose nor the functional ground for the work itself. It is an informing condition, a prior assumed dimension which the developing piece can work with at will, approaching or departing, embracing or denying, with relative aesthetic impunity. Tristram Shandy sets it at defiance; although I suppose one could say that its unity is precisely its denial of unity.

            In other words, the isolation of Unity as the ultimate principle of Art is both a necessary, if backhanded, condition of modernism, but also essentially anti-modernist. The desire for unity is the indigenous nostalgia as well as the unanswered question in modernism. How and where shall we recover the unity? Ancient myths and archetypes become the dominating theme. The Odyssey, originally a 'recovered' classic for the west, established at the center of western anti-theological culture by the Renaissance humanists, becomes the new bible of the modernist movement. Both Pound's Cantos and Joyce's Ulysses attempt to render it into the modernist idiom, as a synthesizing principle at the base of the new cultural compound. Eliot's reversion to Catholicism as well as a catholic, as opposed to individualist, concept of art, defies modernism, although modernism itself also eventuates in a tacit elevation of the impersonal, since the nihil becomes the anti-theistic god. And the nihil is finally as impersonal as Eliot's hierarchical and hierophantic concept of synthetic high culture, which he holds as the true source of highest aesthetic work, in conscious contradistinction to the 'romantic' notion of genius. Culture, not individuals, produces the 'classics'.

            The modern, like the pre-modern, took unity for granted, not as the core, but as a conditioning moment in the act of creation. Precisely the self-conscious explosion of unity is the distinguishing mark of modernism, as opposed to the modern, as well as the pre-modern. So I suppose finally we could say that Unity, in this respect, becomes very much a modernist concern. But its emergence into this light is precisely the result of a critical, and not necessarily an aesthetic, preoccupation. Unity becomes a critical concern precisely because, in modernism, unity is intentionally lost. The fact that this critical concern is also pervasive in the 'aesthetic' literature itself, while absolutely natural and necessary, is neither here nor there. It simply defines the elemental weakness of modernism as an aesthetic, pointing out that modernism has always been precisely where it began, as an attempt to intellectualize the aesthetic of the modern.
            Therefore, what happens with this emergent critical concern for Unity is in fact an analytical deconstruction of criticism, and not of art or aesthetics. Specifically, it is a deconstruction of the aesthetic assertion of Unity, that is, the deconstruction precisely of the assertion that Unity is not only the necessary condition for Art, but also its functional basis. Since the proposition is new - in spite of its apparently 'intuitive' ground in the history of criticism - the analysis takes on all the force, for the contemporaries involved in it, of a holistic determination of art itself. But, of course, such is not the case.
            Art has always been about value, and not about Unity. Value, precisely, is prior to Unity. Even chipmunks make choices. That is, they make value determinations. Unity is the human function of self-awareness. Conscious art emerges from self-awareness. But its basis is value, which is the prior condition for self-awareness. In fact, the highest generic definition of art might be, 'the representation of value that points back through the reflective process to the pre-reflective ground of value'. This, of course, would tend to involve religion and philosophy in the old sense in the range of art. But since these are finally empirical rather than formal, they are not ultimately alien to art.
            In any case, what the 'new criticism' instigated by Eliot provokes is a deconstructive analysis of the possibility that criticism, as the corollary of the aesthetic impulse, is grounded in Unity. The conclusive result is the denial of Unity as a core principle. But the modernist dialectic involved in the modernist navel gazing leads to the false conclusion that all that remains is the nihil. What remains, of course, is everything except the assertion that Art is entirely based in Unity, in other words, not only the whole range of empirical and imaginative values, but also unity itself as the corded twin of the value process in our everyday experience of the external world and the world of imaginative consciousness, which includes the realms of thought. The unifying principle is self-awareness. But since self-awareness is grounded in value, which is prior to self-awareness, unity is a tangential function.

            Of course, I am using the concept of 'deconstruction' here in a basic, generic sense, although it relates to the specific 'philosophical' concept of deconstruction. In my language, because of the nature of modernism, painting itself 'deconstructs' through the first half of the 20th century, eventuating in the break between the abstract expressionists and pop and op. Abstract expressionists were still largely 'painters' in the classical sense, artists of the brush. But, with op and pop, the value of the brush essentially disappeared, and the impersonal nature of the new 'art' was asserted in theory as well as practice, theoretically breaking down the 'barriers' between high and low, graphic and fine and finally between art and non-art.
            But the process from the new criticism to structuralism, deconstructionism and post-modernism is essentially the critical involution around the question of Unity. Granted, that this process was not simply a genetic outgrowth of Eliot's critical turn, its application within the frame of literary criticism largely depended from his initial critical forays. And the linguistic and philosophical influences that came to bear on the trend were emerging from parallel lines of development culturally. The analysis of logic in the first half of the 20th century grew out of much the same concern for unity, although the philosophers, in a sense, fell into it backwards.
            The new criticism and structuralism seek to consider form in terms of the immediate system which is the object in view, whether a language or a work of art. Hence the formal concern for unity. Deconstruction teases out the necessary dualism indigenous in the oneness or unity. Unity is meaningless without divergent and therefore necessarily contradictory elements, and these contradictions are either synthesized under the unity or leave their residual traces as fault lines within the unity. In both cases, their markers remain.
            But the necessity of contradiction finally means that the unity is necessarily an artifice. Apparently, no unity can encompass the whole. Therefore, unity is not an appropriate model for function itself. The nature of existence stands beyond unity.

            As a consequence, the post-modernists deny not only unity, but value as well. But, clearly, the argument itself shows that unity and value are not synonymous. What we have proven is that unity cannot define value. Unity is derived. Value is not. Value is the immediate nature of experience.
            The philosophers had followed a similar route, if perhaps somehow the photographic negative to this relatively 'positive' image. The analysis of logic showed both that logic as unity could not equate with value as experience and that unity itself was a substantive or empirical value and therefore could not appertain to logic as such. While this should have resulted, simply, in the conviction that logic cannot assimilate value, what it convinced the philosophers, in their addiction to logic, is that value is a subsidiary and therefore essentially fictive 'creation'. But logic is dependent on value and not the reverse. Without value, there would be no analysis, much less its derivative function, namely, logic.