Modernism and Historicism: Figure/Ground

The terrorizing naïveté of the modernist gesture can be almost point by point opposed to the historicist consciousness of our own moment. 

According to the modernist logic, it is pointless to think that the historical present, the historicity, of a phenomenon could be explained from the perspective of its “surroundings”--i.e. by contextualizing, historicizing the phenomenon--since it is only the cut, which separates a phenomenon from its context, that discloses the context in the first place. It is not the ground that shapes the figure, but the figure of the historical present that, on the contrary, gives shape to, or makes an outline of, the contextual ground from which it is divided by its own tracing.

If one is to grasp a phenomenon in its historical present, one must therefore start from the discontinuity of this present itself and only then proceed to the context or the situation. 

Not the other way around, which describes the method of a historicist approach: beginning with the historical situation as the contextual ground, which is supposed to disclose something essential about the historical present (the historicity) of this or that figure. For a historicist, the essence of the present never arrives: time is essentially the past, it is the ground: not as something in becoming, but rather as that dead weight which is meant to exhaust and consume the present of a figure through the supposition of its indistinction. 

While in the case of a modernist time is the figure of the present, which outlines--presupposes by positing--the ground of the past, against which it stands.