High and popular culture from the viewpoints of psychology and cultural studies 429the crisis brought on by a sense of lost identity as roof �of the very identity modern experience is bringing into question! Thus an aesthetic strategy delimits experience in order to shore up an eroding sense of elf � In a similar way, the notion of veryday�reality, which has already been cited as a feature of modernist art, is also more a strategy of delimitation than a description of objective reality. verydayness� and its accompanying notion, ifestyle� is a way to select, edit, and organize the objectively real into a supposedly elf entered reality, a reality where Descartes belief in an identity coherent across space and time can still be maintained. But the shift in the experiential paradigm brought on by modernity is brilliantly captured by Beckett (1986) deliberate recasting of Descartes cogito from think therefore I am�to su�r, therefore I may be�(Beckett 1986: 117). Where Descartes posits an apriori integrated consciousness which proves its internal coherence by discerning various patterns in the apparently random world, Beckett admits only an unpleasant awareness of being acted upon as proof of existence, but not of an existence that can be objectively conmed as having any intrinsic coherency. In other words, a retroactive aesthetic rearrangement of experience (the epiphany, the everyday, one lifestyle) is misrecognized as proof of an dentity�that somehow transcends and pre-exists the sequence of experiences that, in fact, constitute it. In modernity, reality and experience seem equally random, and modernism, under the guise of iscovering�a way to represent modernity, struggles to preserve a Cartesian sense that consciousness precedes and akes sense�of reality. tream of consciousness� another famous nvention�of modernism, takes us inside the very process just outlined. The narrative perspective is presented as nside�the mind of a character who is, for example, walking down the street. But this apparently apriori identity that organizes what there is to see is generated after the act�of the experience, indeed, is generated by the experience, and only then presented as somehow prior to it. t is not art that imitates life� Oscar Wilde noted, ut life that imitates art�(Wilde 1995: 92). To paraphrase this, it is not the aesthetic strategies of modernism that imitate modern experience, but modern experience which organizes itself through the aesthetic strategies of modernism. Looking at this same phenomenon from a historical point of view, modernism records the struggle of converting from an earlier sense of transcendent certitude, where we declare our faith through ritual, tradition, and community, to a modern world of the veryday� where we reconstitute our faith individually, and secularly, on a day by day basis, often in relation to the mass media and mass produced objects of commodity culture. As the modernist poet Wallace Stevens put it, t is the belief, and not the god, that counts�(in Geddes 1996: 910). In other words, the loss of a belief in transcendental certitude �God �does not also eliminate the need to believe in the presumed individual coherency of identity. The continued need for this belief, even in
