92 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
Left. On the other hand, the debate is hitched to a psychology of obsolescence so that any alternative, from naturalism to punk art, is hailed indiscriminately.
Realism deploys the methods of dynamic psychology and historical materialism to go beyond the static appearance of things and to perceive and release social forces that overcome a corresponding intertia in the consciousness.1 The difference between literature and visual art must, of course, be recognized. Only figurative art can be considered in the debate on realism, and more specifically figurative-narrative art. Secondly, while the image achieves emotional effect and meaning, the artist does not have at his command the dimension of time, and the developmental stages along which a simple act of comprehension transforms itself into a concrete possibility are not evident. In (Hher words, the process by which future is inducted into history does not become available to the viewer. On the other hand, since the image conveys its meaning through its gestalt and through the simultaneous relationship / of the signifiers in the space of the picture, its overlapping density, even as the tangibility of the medium itself, gives the image the quality of a realised vision. This constitutes the enduring quality of realism.
Controversy over Realism and Modernism
As the direct heir to romanticism, modernism fits into a psychic, confessional aspect with the experimental philosophies of the scientific age and presses up a revolution of forms. Renewed modes of expression are linked discernibly with the quest for meaning in a rapidly changing world. Connected as it w^s with the limits and functions of language in the earlier stages, this revolutionism extends spirally into the very process of self-definition. This establishes the over-arching metaphysics on modernism: "What forces our interest is Cezanne's anxiety . . . "2 Picasso expresses Cezanne's quest for language quite precisely as an existential quest for identity.
Although realism and modernism separately lead on to dead-ends, there is a justification for retaining the terms. The body of ideas they have accumulated yield a quality which none of the more recently contrived categories can claim. The point which needs to be emphasized here is that realism and modernism are historical counterparts and can be brought alive only in dialectical operations.
It is useful to recall the salient points of the protracted polemic over realism and modernism (originally between realism