The Modern-Traditional Contrast within Modernism

I’ve been thinking about the contrast, in Modernism (not just art but also philosophy) between the Modern and the Traditional, and the various ways in which this contrast is internal and vital. Fredric Jameson’s point is that whereas post-modernism has forgotten or moved beyond this contrast, Modernism is not only aware of but also creatively preoccupied with it either as an explicit theme or implicit framework. That is, without this contrast, Modernism wouldn't be Modernism. 

Two poles of this contrast can be marked by the names Baudelaire and Heidegger. In Heidegger, the premodern immersion of the peasant life world is very much the ‘starting point’, in relation to which other modes of being can be judged defective or inauthentic; by contrast, with Baudelaire, it is the utterly artificial, kaleidoscopic and hurried city, an environ of speeds and simulacra, which is the inaugural and default life-world. (Nature, we remember, is in Baudelaire typically repellent).

Much Modernist thought and literature is a balance and dialogue between these two worlds, something like what Walter Benjamin called a “dialectical image”. Emblematically, Yeats’s poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree – evoking the 'remote' West of Ireland - is inspired by a cheap window display in a London shop.What this also involves is a distinction between two corresponding forms of “immersion”. One the one hand:

A premodern artisan or farmer, following his traditional way of life, is immersed in his daily involvement with ready-at-hand objects that are included in his world (Zizek)

 

One the other hand the ‘immersion’ of the modern city dweller. The latter of course is ‘immersed’ in an alienated and phantasmagorical world - it has been fabricated by powers not his own, he possesses no ‘know-how’ of the objects which surround him, and where shop signs and advertising hang like magical regalia.

The former immersion is poetic or epic, whereas the latter is represented as the inauthentic “flow of das Mann”.  The latter – in much Modernist thought and literature - requires a hyper ‘proud and apart’ individual, who must rebuff the surrounding world if he is to retain any subjective freedom. Simultaneously, the “immersion” of the traditional artisan or farmer is coveted or at least invoked with nostalgia.

I wonder, then, if there are at least two types of Modernist, two different directions of thought and feeling: those who have come from a traditional mode of life to the city and experienced the shattering existential and experiential corollaries; and those who, starting out in the modern and metropolitan, then gravitate to the pre-modern, the traditional?