Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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Andreas Huyssen
colonial countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the most interest
ing ways, modernism cut across imperial and postimperial, colonial and
decolonizing cultures. It was often the encounter of colonial artists and intel
lectuals with the metropolis's modernist culture that supported the desire for
liberation and independence. And it was the reciprocal though asymmetrical
encounter of the European artist with the colonial world that fed into the turn
A shorter version of this essay appeared in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., Geographies
189
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not operate in sync (French modernism precedes the German variant), and
different artistic media turn to modernism in different sequence (painting
and the novel come first in France, music and philosophy in Germany, and
modernist architecture is last to arrive everywhere). Such uneven develop
ments, to use Marx's term, depended on national traditions as much as they
reflected different stages of urbanization and industrialization. In addition,
modernisms in Europe diverged politically in significant ways. Before World
phase right after the October Revolution. In those decades the metropolis was
still an island of modernization in national cultures dominated by traditional
country or small-town life. In other words, European modernism arrived at
the threshold of a not yet fully modernized world in which old and new were
violently knocked against each other, striking the sparks of that astounding
eruption of creativity that came to be known only much later as "modernism."
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with a vengeance. Far from condemning this return (as does Jameson) as a
regression, I see it as a breath of fresh air blowing through the human and
social sciences, dispelling the fog of the postmodern.1 For too many years, a
modernity in the classical age of empire, has become ever more palpable in
recent years.2
Then and now, modernity is never one. The new narrative of alterna
tive modernities in postcolonial studies and anthropology makes us revisit
varieties of modernism formerly excluded from the Euro-American canon as
derivative and imitative, and therefore inauthentic. The shift in perspective is
2. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot,"
in Critically Modern, ed. B. M. Knauft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 220.
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especially if one is interested in the genealogy of the global, which did not
spring from the head of post-Cold War capitalism.
The issue in this new critical debate about modernity is no longer its
opposition to postmodernity, even though this inevitably reductive binary
underlies much of the still-popular antimodernity thinking that emerged from
modernities, the good and the bad, now appears to be very place- and time
specific. The standard account of aesthetic modernism and avant-gardism in
Europe as a progressive and adversary culture directed against the social and
economic modernity of bourgeois society may not easily apply outside Europe.
colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
5. Dilip Gaonkar, "Alternative Modernities," Public Culture 11 (1999): 1.
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inquiry. The debate about globalization offers a prism for assessing alterna
tive modernisms and their complex embeddedness in colonial and postcolo
nial forms of cultural and social modernization. But globalization poses prac
tical and theoretical challenges to modernism studies that still have not been
fully acknowledged. More significant, it also represents a major challenge to
various traditional and current notions of culture itself.
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Sure, the canon has been expanded in recent years, for instance, by including
effects remain insufficiently theorized and are studied mostly within local
specializations.
Thus we lack a workable model of comparative studies able to go beyond
the traditional approaches that still take national cultures as the units to be
compared and rarely pay attention to the uneven flows of translation, transmis
in relation to which the modern takes its full meaning."8 Trouillot goes on to
posit two intertwined yet distinct geographies: one of imagination and one of
management, both of which produced what he calls "the otherwise modern."
Timothy Mitchell in turn has argued that Western modernity has always seen
itself as a stage both of history and for historiography against the temporally
tives, whereas the latter term strikes me as too pluralistic. It also lacks the sense of an expanded
geography of modernism that modernism at large conveys. On the issue of hybridity as I use it here
in relation to "non-Western" modernisms see N?stor Garc?a Canclini, Culturas h?bridas: Estrate
gias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1989); Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for
Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chippari and Silvia L. L?pez (Minneapo
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
8. Trouillot, "Otherwise Modern," 222.
9. Mitchell, Questions of Modernity, 1-34.
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The debate about modernity and modernism is closely linked to the recently
much-discussed notion of world literature.11 As if on automatic pilot, such dis
cussions quickly turn to the promised land of Weltliteratur, a notion Goethe
first articulated in 1827 in a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann. I
think that we should resist such a facile appropriation of Goethe, though not
10. The Museum of Modern Art's 1984 exhibit "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art triggered
a substantive critical debate on this issue that was then carried further at the occasion of the Centre
George Pompidou's 1989 exhibit Les magiciens de la terre. See the discussion published in Third
Text, especially Rasheed Araeen, "Our Bauhaus, Others' Mudhouse," Third Text 6 (1989): 3-14.
11. See the two special issues "Globalizing Literary Studies," PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001), and "Lit
erature at Large," PMLA 119, no. 1 (2004). See also Franco Moretti, "Conjectures on World Litera
ture," New Left Review, n.s., 1 (2000): 54-68; Richard Maxwell, Joshua Scodel, and Katie Trumpener,
"Editors' Preface," in "Toward World Literature," special issue, Modern Philology 100, no. 4 (2003):
505-11; and Christopher Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004).
12. See Andreas Huyssen, Die fr?hromantische Konzeption von ?bersetzung und Aneignung:
Studien zur fr?hromantischen Utopie einer deutschen Weltliteratur (Z?rich: Atlantis, 1969).
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die K?nste" ("Art and the Arts") has described as the large-scale Verfran
sungsprozess, the fraying of the specificity of artistic media and their multi
ple crossover effects, has forever changed the nature and function of litera
ture itself.13 Since literature as a medium no longer occupies center stage in
global culture, and if so, how does one conceptualize it and do justice to its
local, national, and ever more transnational variants?
Clearly, the local will always inflect the global in cultural matters, and
nothing was further from Goethe's mind than the kind of homogenized world
literature that Erich Auerbach feared in an influential essay of 1952, first trans
lated into English by Edward W. Said and Maire Janus in the late 1960s.14 It
is easy to agree that there can be no purely global culture totally separate
from local traditions. Nor can there be any longer a purely local culture insu
lated from the effects of the global. The national metropolis of a hundred and
more years ago was already a place for such transnational encounters and
their spectacular mise-en-sc?ne in universal expositions and world's fairs.
But which cultural forms can be labeled global today; how are they deter
mined by market forces, by translation practices, and by the media; and how
do they circulate nationally and transnational^? What, if anything, was global
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a focus on alternative modernisms could add some historical depth and theo
retical rigor to the discussion.
that opened up Utopian horizons of social and political change. Much work has
been done since the 1980s on how modernist and avant-garde artists appropri
ated forms and contents of popular and mass culture, reworking them for their
own purposes. By the 1920s and the avant-garde's embrace of new media and
technology, there were even utopias of an alternative kind of mass culture that
are anything but binary. This model, once freed from its earlier parochial
ism, stemming from its embeddedness in U.S.-European constellations, may
well serve as a template for looking comparatively at phenomena of cultural
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longer acceptable.
The high-low distinction is not only germane to a certain post-1945
codification of modernism. It also extends deeply into the realm of tradition
and its modernized transmissions in the present. At the risk of overstepping
the boundaries of my knowledge, I suggest a few examples. If you think of the
political role that such classical Brahmin epics as the Mahabharatha and
the Ramayana play in contemporary India, epics written in Sanskrit ages
ago but endlessly displayed on television and circulated in many languages
in South Asian oral culture today; or if you think of the renewed struggle in
China over Confucianism, which in Mao's times was relegated to the margin
because it belonged to feudal culture; or if you consider the recent turn to tra
It is not just that the borders between high and low have begun to blur
significantly after high modernism in the West (bringing some critics to mis
Such different pasts have shaped how specific cultures have negotiated the
16. Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of
Mourning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the
Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
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part of such negotiations. Even while media and consumerism may spread
everywhere in the world, though with different intensities and widely diver
gent access, the imaginarles they produce are nowhere near as homogeneous
as a new kind of global Kulturkritik laments.
Comparatists, however, do have a problem. At a time when modernism
studies are asked to cover ever more territory both geographically and his
torically, thus overloading any individual critic's circuits, the danger is that
the discipline will lose its coherence as a field of investigation, get bogged
down in ever more local case studies, or become superficial, neglecting the
need to maintain a methodological and theoretical project. The U.S. model
of cultural studies in particular?in its reductive focus on thematics and cul
tural ethnographies, its privileging of consumption over production, its lack
of historical depth and knowledge of languages, its abandonment of aesthetic
and formal issues coupled with its unquestioned privileging of popular and
mass culture?is not an adequate model to face the new challenges.17
A major task then is to create sets of conceptual parameters for such
comparisons to give some coherence to a field of study in danger of becoming
either too amorphous or remaining simply too parochial. My tentative reflec
tions are meant to move us into that crucial cultural space that feeds off the
local, the national, and the global and that encompasses all three as the space
of modernity and its imaginative geography.
The model of high versus low, known primarily from the modernism debates,
can indeed be productively rethought and related to cultural developments in
"peripheral," postcolonial, or postcommunist societies. To the extent that it
captures aspects of cultural hierarchies and social class, race and religion,
gender relations and codifications of sexuality, colonial cultural transfers, the
relation between cultural tradition and modernity, the role of memory and
the past in the contemporary world, and the relation of print media to visual
mass media, it can be made productive for the comparative analyses of cul
tural globalization today as well as for a new understanding of earlier and
17. For a succinct critique of American cultural studies see Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland,
eds., Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age (New York: Nor
ton, 1997).
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ington have suggested. In other words, it can counteract the bad heritage
from cultural anthropology and a Spenglerian kind of American-style Kultur
kritik. It can problematize the all-too-evident need to create an inside-outside
myth to maintain a Feindbild (enemy image), an absolute other, which can be
read itself as a heritage of the Cold War in current theories about clashing
civilizations. Second, it can also counteract and complicate the equally limited
argument that only local culture or culture as local is good, authentic, and
resistant, whereas global cultural forms must be condemned as manifesta
tions of cultural imperialism, that is, Americanization.
Every culture, as we know from Pierre Bourdieu's work, has its hier
archies and social stratifications, and these differ greatly according to local
circumstances and histories. Unpacking such temporal and spatial differentia
tions might be a good way to arrive at new kinds of comparisons that would
go beyond the clich?s of colonial versus postcolonial, modern versus postmod
ern, Western versus Eastern, center versus periphery, global versus local, the
West versus the rest. To de-Westernize notions such as modernity and modern
ism, we need a lot more theoretically informed descriptive work about mod
ernisms at large, their interaction or noninteraction with Western modern
isms, their relationship to different forms of colonialism (different in Latin
America from South Asia and again from Africa), their codings of the role of
art and culture in relation to state and nationhood. In the end, it may well turn
earlier work by Appadurai, see the special issue "Multiple Modernities," Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000),
esp. the essays by Stanley J. Tambiah and S. N. Eisenstadt; see also Knauft, Critically Modern.
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historically altered relationship between the aesthetic and the political for
our age in ways that must surely go beyond the debates of the 1930s, but also
poral axis (modernism vs. realism, later postmodernism vs. modernism) and
focused on media of high culture such as literature and painting, the condi
as a central category in social and cultural theory see the essays by Bruce M. Knauft, Donald L.
Donham, John D. Kelly, and Jonathan Friedman in Knauft, Critically Modern. For a rather dismis
sive approach see Jameson, A Singular Modernity. For further discussion of Jameson see Andreas
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the museum, the concert hall and the opera house, the tourist site and the
shopping mall.
My main point, however, is that reconsidering high-low inevitably brings
back the issue of aesthetics and form, which cultural studies in the United
States (as opposed to cultural studies in Brazil or Argentina) has all but aban
doned in its move against the alleged elitism of aesthetics.22 Of course, the
attack on aesthetics goes hand in hand with an attack on modernism, but both
How then do we get out of this double dead end of "global literature" and
of a self-limiting cultural studies? In a very preliminary way, I suggest the
following:
1. We abandon the high-low distinction in its traditional configuration that
radically opposes serious literature and art to the mass media and popular
culture, and replace this strictly hierarchical or vertical value relation with a
primarily lateral or horizontal configuration, appropriate to the cultural real
ities of our time. This would deflate the notion of high and acknowledge that
22. It must be noted that the anti-aesthetic habitus of U.S.-style cultural studies is quite different
from the earlier anti-aesthetic proposed by Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post
modern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay, 1983), even though both anti-aesthetics took aim at the
canon of high modernism.
23. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1984).
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Hierarchical value relations remain inscribed into all cultural practices, but
they operate more subtly depending on stratifications of production and
between the metropolis and the periphery. In the colonial world, the influx
of Western modernism did not automatically gain the status of high in com
Soviet Union.
vary, and not all cultures privilege print to the same degree. For example, in
a country like Brazil, where musical and visual traditions of the popular
realm shape culture more than what Angel Rama has called "the lettered
city," such a focus on mediality would be more pertinent than the European
high-low distinction itself.24 The notion of medium is especially pertinent to
beyond language and image and include nonverbal media such as architec
ture and built urban space. Architecture and urban planning, after all, have
been among the main transmitters of modernism in the non-Western world.
4. We should reintroduce issues of aesthetic quality and form into our analysis
of any and all cultural practices and products. Here the question of criteria
24. Angel Rama, The Lettered City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
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strategies, the ability to transform media usage, and so on. With this sug
gestion, I argue for an artistic practice in the Brechtian sense, but it is a
version of modernism with a difference: politically more modest and aes
thetically more open to past practices than the Utopian rhetoric of the his
torical avant-garde allowed for. Many of the writers usually described as
representing contemporary global literature can be read in this light.
5. We should abandon the notion that a successful attack on elite culture can
play a major role in a political and social transformation. This was the sig
nature of European avant-gardism in its heroic age, and it still lingers in
certain academic-populist outposts in the United States. Instead, we should
pay close attention to how cultural practices and products are linked to the
discourses of the political and the social in specific local and national con
stellations as they develop in transnational exchange. The politics of alter
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new forms of cultural studies. As I have argued, it also reveals the underly
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culture may still provide the impetus for a new kind of comparative work
that would draw our attention to the very different forms such constellations
take, say, in India or China as compared with Latin America or Eastern Europe.
of the world today. Of course, postmodern practices in literature and the arts
have rejected the choice between high-low all along, producing all kinds of
fascinating hybridizations of high and low that seemed to open up new hori
zons for aesthetic experimentation. But the celebration of a postmodern hybrid
ity of high and low may itself have lost its once critical edge. Cultural produc
tion today crosses the imaginary spatial borders between high and low rather
has pointed out in his recent book La globalizaci?n imaginada {The Imag
ined Globalization), tend to domesticate and to equalize the rough and inno
vative edges of cultural production.28 They will go for the successful formula
rather than encourage the not-yet-known or experimental modes of aesthetic
expression. Most of high culture is as much subject to market forces as any
27. See Veit Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the
West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
28. N?stor Garc?a Canclini, La globalizaci?n imaginada (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1999).
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and imaginative writing that can reorient us in the world. We need to ask
whether the market can secure new traditions, new forms of transnational
communications and connectivities. But we would abandon our role as critical
intellectuals if we were prematurely to exclude from such considerations the
question of the complex relations between aesthetic value and political effect,
which is fundamentally posed by the traditions of modernism and needs to
be rescued for contemporary analyses of all culture under the spell of global
ization. The legacies of modernism at large still have a lot to teach us as we
are trying to understand the challenges of cultural globalization. Kafka once
said the book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.29 The effect of
and political asymmetries prevalent then did not preclude creative exchange
29. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (New York: Schocken, 1977), 14.
30. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (New York: Vintage, 1995), 10.
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