Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Andreas Huyssen
A shorter version of this essay appeared in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., Geographies
of Modernism (London: Routledge, 2005), 6–18.
New German Critique 100, Vol. 34, No. 1, Winter 2007
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2006-023 © 2007 by New German Critique, Inc.
189
In the decades after the apex of the North American postmodernism eupho-
ria in the mid-1980s a new debate about modernity has resurfaced. What once
seemed to have been relegated to the dustbin of scholarly archives has returned
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
one-dimensional postmodern and postcolonial understanding of enlightened
modernity as original sin of the West has held sway. To get beyond such reduc-
tive views does not mean that we return to some triumphalism of moderniza-
tion. Given the problematic aspect of “modernity” as a “North Atlantic uni-
versal,” as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called it, we must also realize that the
discursive return of modernity captures something in the dialectics of glo-
balization, whose aporetic mix of destruction and creation, so reminiscent of
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
all the more appropriate as we have come to understand colonialism and
conquest as the very condition of possibility for modernity and for aesthetic
modernism. A case in point is the fascination with primitivism in the visual
arts or the embrace of the premodern and the barbaric, the mythic and the
archaic in such modernist writers as Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger, T. S.
Eliot, Ezra Pound, or Georges Bataille. It was in classical modernism that
the modern was first linked to the nonmodern, often in appropriative terms,
but never without criticizing bourgeois civilization and its ideology of prog-
ress. Clearly, the new interest in twentieth-century spaces of modernity out-
side the northern transatlantic must be part of the debate about globalization,
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
poststructuralism and from a narrowly understood postcolonial approach.3
The issue is rather what Arjun Appadurai has identified as “modernity at
large” and what others have described as alternative modernities.4 As Dilip
Gaonkar writes: “It [modernity] has arrived not suddenly but slowly, bit by
bit, over the longue durée—awakened by contact; transported through com-
merce; administered by empires, bearing colonial inscriptions; propelled by
nationalism; and now increasingly steered by global media, migration, and
capital.”5 Indeed, the critical focus on alternative modernities with their deep
histories and local contingencies now seems to offer a better approach than
the imposed notion, say, of postmodernism in Asia or in Latin America. It
also permits us to critique current globalization theories in the social sci-
ences, which in their reductive modeling and lack of historical depth often
do little more than recycle the earlier U.S.-generated modernization theory
of the Cold War years. Even if the West remains a power broker and “clear-
inghouse” of worldwide modernities, as Gaonkar puts it, it does not offer the
sole model of cultural development, as both cyberutopians and the dystopian
McDonaldization theorists seem to believe. Especially since the tale of the two
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.
It is enough to think about “Shanghai modern” in the 1930s as the space of
3. For a more sophisticated historical and theoretical account of the issue of modernity see
Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000). For a critique of reductive versions of postcolonialism see Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Post-
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.
6. See Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China,
1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
7. The phrasing modernism at large owes an obvious debt to Appadurai (see n. 4). Other pos-
sible terms for the phenomenon are alternative modernisms and multiple modernisms. The former
term still suggests, at least implicitly, a hierarchy of a real or original modernism and its alterna-
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 Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: 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. López (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
8. Trouillot, “Otherwise Modern,” 222.
9. Mitchell, Questions of Modernity, 1–34.
ply appropriated to prove the universality of the modern as form. The Troca-
déro in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York are the symptom-
atic and much-discussed sites of this appropriation.10 We know much less about
the geography of imagination in the non-Western world and its transforma-
tive negotiation with the modern of the metropolis.
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
simply on the basis of the backshadowing argument that Goethe suffered
from Eurocentrism. The Goethean concept of Weltliteratur, with its shades
of eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism, was itself made possible by a major
national project of translation and appropriation within German Romanti-
cism.12 Paradoxically, the Romantic project of appropriation and translation
into German gave rise to Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur, which at the same
time aimed to counter the increasing nationalization of literature and culture
that was to dominate the nineteenth century and has since then become insti-
tutionally ossified. In that post-Romantic age of nation building, Goethe’s pro-
posal was obviously less than successful. It remains doubtful whether our now
popular commitment to a global literature as somehow postnational will fare
any better.
Nevertheless, the concept of Weltliteratur has remained a touchstone for
discussions especially of comparative literature, even though until recently
this discipline has remained safely centered on a triad of European languages
and literatures (French, English, German), with a few masters from other
national contexts thrown into the mix. More important than this geographic
limitation, which could after all be corrected, is a theoretical one. To celebrate
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 frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und Aneignung:
Studien zur frühromantischen Utopie einer deutschen Weltliteratur (Zürich: Atlantis, 1969).
13. Theodor W. Adorno, “Kunst und die Künste,” in Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 159.
14. Erich Auerbach, “Philologie und Weltliteratur,” in Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich
zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Walter Muschg and Emil Staiger (Bern: Franke, 1952), 39–50; “Philology
and Weltliteratur,” trans. Edward W. Said and Maire Janus, Centennial Review 13 (1969): 1–17.
15. Ronald Robertson, “Globalization or Glocalization?” Journal of International Communi-
cation 1 (1994): 33–52.
tional cultural exchange. Is not global a far too global term to capture cultural
intermingling, appropriations, and reciprocal mimicry and citation? Espe-
cially if we consider that global literature is all too often taken primarily as
literature written in English and for a “world market.” This is precisely where
a focus on alternative modernisms could add some historical depth and theo-
retical rigor to the discussion.
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).
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).
other roads taken within modernity. In other words, the discourse about alter-
native modernities in India or in Latin America can profitably be expanded to
include the assessment of alternative developments in the relations and cross-
currents between indigenous popular culture, minority cultures, high culture
(both traditional and modern), and mass-mediated culture. Historically alter-
native modernities have existed all along, and their trajectories continue into
the age of globalization.18
But why focus on this issue at all, one might ask? First, the reinscrip-
tion of the high-low problematic in all its complex and multilayered dimen-
sions into the discussions of cultural modernity in transnational contexts and
across borders can counteract the widespread notion that the culture of the
East or the West, Islam or Christianity, the United States or Latin America is
as unitary as writers such as Alan Bloom, Benjamin Barber, and Samuel Hunt-
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 clichés 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
out that despite the best of intentions, such de-Westernization of modernism
and modernity will remain limited because of the Western genealogy of the
18. By now there is a vast literature on “alternative modernities.” Apart from the still-challenging
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.
19. For thoughtful discussions of the inherent dangers in the recent reemergence of modernity
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
Huyssen, “Memories of Modernism—Archeology of the Future,” Harvard Design Magazine,
Spring 2004, 90–95.
20. For collections of the major texts see Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London:
Verso, 1977), and, much more extensively, Hans-Jürgen Schmitt, ed., Die Expressionismusdebatte:
Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973).
21. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 227.
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:
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).
ernism the boundaries were always more fluid than post–World War II codi-
fications have led us to believe. Certainly today, we do not face a totalitarian
culture industry and its autonomous high other, as suggested in the writings
of Adorno or Clement Greenberg in the age of national socialism and Stalin-
ism, but a differentiated mass and niche marketing for all kinds of cultural
consumption at diverging levels of demand, expectation, and complexity.
2. The issue of hierarchy, however, must not disappear entirely from analysis.
Hierarchical value relations remain inscribed into all cultural practices, but
they operate more subtly depending on stratifications of production and
reception, of genres, and of media. Cultural hierarchy is a key issue for
alternative modernisms, which are inevitably shaped by the power relations
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-
parison with local classical traditions (e.g., India in the postliberation
period), and Western mass culture is often resisted not because it is “low”
but because it is Western (e.g., China today). Western hierarchies are thus
multiply refracted and transformed by local hierarchies of value. It remains
to be analyzed how such refractions affected the various alternative mod-
ernisms, where they found fertile ground as in Latin America and where
they were resisted either by nativism or by official cultural policies as in the
Soviet Union.
3. We should raise the issue of medium specificity (oral-aural, written, visual)
in all its historical, technical, and theoretical complexity rather than con-
tinue to rely on the intellectually lazy notion of media culture per se as low.
As if print, the paramount support system of modern literary culture, was
not a medium itself. While print of course exists worldwide, levels of literacy
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
a discussion of alternative modernisms, since it would also allow us to go
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).
is obviously key: rather than privilege the radically new in Western avant-
gardist fashion, we may want to focus on the complexity of repetition and
rewriting, bricolage and translation, thus expanding our understanding of
innovation. The focus might then be on intertextuality, creative mimicry,
the power of a text to question ingrained habits through visual or narrative
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-
native modernisms are deeply embedded in colonial and postcolonial con-
texts, in which notions such as elite, tradition, popularity assume codings
quite different from those in the northern transatlantic then or now.
Whatever geography of modernism we analyze, we must carefully
explore to what extent a given culture is organized according to habitus and
social distinction, as Bourdieu has called it. Whatever their undeniable ben-
efits, modern consumer societies seem to block the imagination of alterna-
tive futures. When everything becomes available (though not always acces-
sible) to the consumer’s choice, it becomes that much harder to find a place
for an effective political critique. The critique of consumption per se, apart
from being disingenuous, is no substitute for political vision. Thus we may
also want to ask whether the once plausible equation of the cultural with the
political has not led to a politically disabling culturalism.
6. To get beyond the ingrown parochialism of American cultural studies and
the universalizing gesture of the American global, we must engage in seri-
ous transnational work in many different languages and on different ter-
rains. Transnational phenomena rarely if ever encompass the whole globe.
The traveling and distribution of cultural products is always specific and
particular, never homogeneously global. To study such transnational
exchanges, we require new forms of practical cooperation with scholars
worldwide. Only then can an intensified focus on the promises and vicissi-
tudes of translation bear results. At stake is the translation not just of lan-
25. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
a new relationship between high culture and mass-media culture that reso-
nates, however differently, in other cultures of the world.
In a global context, then, the question about the relationship among high
culture (both traditional or indigenous and modern), indigenous and national
popular culture, minority or subaltern cultures, and transnational mass-media
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.
A number of interesting theoretical questions emerge in this context. We may
ask, for instance, whether and how postcolonial theory applies unproblemati-
cally to Latin American countries, whose colonial and postcolonial history
is significantly different from that of India or African countries;26 whether the
notion of the subaltern can be transferred unproblematically and without medi-
ations from one geographic context to another; whether notions of hybridity
and diaspora—the latest master signifiers, it seems—are sufficiently rigorous
to describe the complex racial, ethnic, and linguistic mixings in different parts
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
easily. It has also become transnational in new geographic ways, especially
in the music industry,27 but also in certain sectors of film and television (e.g.,
Indian cinema in Africa, the export of Brazilian telenovelas).
Hybridization of whatever kind now happens increasingly under the
sign of the market. But markets, even elite niche markets, as Néstor Canclini
has pointed out in his recent book La globalización 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
mass-mediated product. Big mergers in the publishing industry shrink the
26. Here it might be useful to distinguish historically and theoretically between very different
notions of the hybrid, say, between Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge,
1994), and the earlier work by Canclini, Culturas híbridas.
27. See Veit Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the
West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
28. Néstor García Canclini, La globalización imaginada (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1999).
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.