Modernism, Media, and the Politics of Common Life

'I am half in love with the typewriter and the telephone' says one of Virginia Woolf's characters. British modernism had a polyamorous affair with media—crowds and wireless, soil and fog. Aleksandr Prigozhin brilliantly cultivates a neglected source for figuring media as the elemental materials of our common life. Visionary and revisionist.

Aleksandr Prighozin has written a book that is both remarkably timely, and scrupulously historical. In brilliant readings of modernist fiction, he shows how British writers imagined the fraught worlds they created as expressions of the media—from the most primordial to the radically contemporary—with which they argued, desired, and, just like us, did their best to make livable. 

Aleksandr Prigozhin draws something between an atlas and a blueprint of minor, ambivalent, and intimate media—the substances and technologies that are insistently central to a vision of common life through the first half of the twentieth century, and that prefigure the forms to come. This powerful vision is instructive not only for the robust historical account of media and common life, but also for its potential to offer a renewed pedagogy for understanding our own ambivalent mediations.

As the public modernism of our infrastructure fails or is dismantled, Aleksandr Prigozhin looks to the moment of its emergence—to the decades when infrastructure became ubiquitous, environmental, both a means toward and an image of the common life to come. The lesson: if you want to reimagine the collective, historicize the connective.