Modernism After Postmodernity

Introduction: Modernism after Postmodernity

Andreas Huyssen

Ah the old questions, the old answers, Thereʼs nothing like them! —Hamm, in Samuel Beckettʼs Endgame

Since the waning of the debate about “postmodernism” and the rise of “globalization” as master signiﬁ er of our time, the discourses of modernity and modernism have staged a remarkable comeback. Jean-François Lyotardʼs provocative quip that any work of art has to be postmodern before it can become genuinely modern has come true in ways he could hardly have fore- seen. There is much talk these days of modernity at large, second modernity, liquid modernity, alternative modernity, countermodernity, and whatnot. Modernity and its complex and conﬂ icted relationship to modernism are being reassessed in architecture and urban studies as they are in literature, the visual arts, music, anthropology, and postcolonial studies. In a certain way, this is not so surprising. This journal has always argued against a sim- plistic linear chronology of the modern and the postmodern. Rather than oppose postmodernism to modernism in a reductive binary or as separate stages on a progressive time line, we saw North American postmodernism as an attempt to rewrite and to renegotiate key aspects of the early-twentieth- century European avant-gardes in an American context in which the rela- tions between high and low culture, as well as the role of art in society, were coded quite differently than they were in Europe, either in the interwar or in

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the post–World War II years. Analogously, most of the European theory that invaded the United States in the 1970s and 1980s and that led to a kind of American reeducation lamented by some as the closing of the American mind had more to do with the genealogy of European aesthetic modernism in relation to the modernity of the industrial and postindustrial ages than with any radical new American departure. This wave of French and German critical theory ended up modernizing the organization of knowledge in signifi - cant parts of the American humanities and social sciences, architecture, and critical legal studies, but its substantive links to the American understanding of the postmodern were tenuous at best. The prefi x post- that seemed to equate postmodernism with poststructuralism had many people fooled. Yet the prom- ises and limitations of what came to be called postmodernism in the 1970s were fundamentally tied to those two projects—the rediscovery of the historical avant-garde and the rise of poststructuralism. In retrospect, the whole debate about postmodernism—unruly, con- tested, riddled with contradictions, and vitally energizing as it once was— appears quite parochial today. Parochial in the geographic sense in that it remained limited to intellectual and historical developments in the northern transatlantic alone. But even there, European intellectuals from Jürgen Hab- ermas to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida never embraced the notion of the postmodern as it was embraced, even if often reluctantly, in the United States. With his book The Postmodern Condition Lyotard was an anomaly, but he, too, shared in the European reluctance to fall in line with a certain American triumphalism about the postmodern. Perhaps postmodernism was indeed nothing so much as a U.S. attempt to claim cultural leadership for what some have called the American century. The goal was a new cultural international at a time when such “internationals,” with their emphatic claims to avant- gardism on the model of the interwar decades, had already become obsolete. No surprise, then, that the terms postmodernism and postmodernity have largely disappeared from critical discourse today. But what do we make of the return of modernity in contemporary discussions of globalization? Is it just a euphemism for modernization in its narrowest ideological cast and just another cipher of economic neoliberal- ism, indistinguishable from globalization? Or can the term, given its historical and discursive depth, help us ask critical questions about the discourse of globalization that has remained all too presentist both among supporters and opponents? This issue of New German Critique is not meant to answer such huge questions in full, but it says, confi dently, “Welcome back” to an idea that, in the pages of this journal, has never been relegated to the dustbin of

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history as it has in so much recent academic discourse. As the following essays on architecture, literature, fi lm, photography, and the visual arts dem- onstrate, modernity and modernism in all their historical and geographic complexities remain key signifi ers for anyone trying to understand where we come from and where we may be going. Of course, it is a welcome back with a difference. It is palpable in professional architecture in the rejection of postmodern historicism and the return of glass walls and ideals of transparency; it is prevalent in Anglo- American criticism in the journal Modernism/Modernity, organ of a fast- growing professional association, the Modernist Studies Association, that is increasingly opening itself up to the study of modernisms in the “non-Western” world; in musicology in the increasing interest in Theodor W. Adornoʼs newly translated writings on music; in the visual arts in a whole series of major shows on the international museum circuit, including the recent MoMA cel- ebration of its modernist holdings in Berlin and the extensive dada show in Paris, Washington, and New York; and, perhaps most important, in history, anthropology, and sociology in the diverse concerns with alternative or mul- tiple modernities, concerns that have opened up vast new areas for research and theorizing to critics in the various cultural fi elds. The list could go on. In an even broader frame, issues of modernity are now invariably linked to globalization. It may well be a certain annoying triumphalism about globalization as the latest form of progress that has brought back the historical question of how globalization is to be distinguished from an earlier formation of modernity and its transnational movements, how it relates to nation, empire, and internationalism in earlier ages, and how its cultural manifestations still work with the legacies of both modernism and postmodernism. It also must be said that the contemporary return to a vastly more expanded notion of the modern owes a great deal to the interventions of postmodernism. Despite or perhaps because of its claims to radical innovation, postmodernism has made visible those dimensions of modernism itself that had been forgotten or repressed by the institutional and intellectual codifi ca- tions of the modernism dogma of the Cold War: issues related to the semiotic anarchism of the avant-garde, to fi guration and narrative, to gender and sexu- ality, race and migration, the uses of tradition, the tension between the polit- ical and the aesthetic, the mixing of media, and so forth. One salutary effect of postmodern discourse after the rise of postcolonial studies has been the geographic opening up of the question of other modernisms and alternative modernities across the world—modernism in other worlds as a mutant global reality rather than something limited to the northern transatlantic. Debate

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continues as to whether to see such alternate modernisms vertically as impo- sitions by the West or as lateral transfers, translations, and transformations of the Western with and into the local or regional culture. Some of the most inter- esting work on modernism is currently being done in this area. At any rate, modernity after postmodernism or modernism in postmodernity remains a central topic for cultural history and for any attempt to rethink the old questions of aesthetics and politics for our age. The issue leads with three essays on architecture. Architectural discourse was both central and symptomatic in the rise of postmodernism, and it remains so as we refl ect back on what earlier accounts of modernist architecture have left out. Esra Akcan focuses on the transnational reach of modernism as a result of exile, particularly in the work of Bruno Taut in Turkey. Daniel Purdy reads Adolf Loosʼs writings in terms of the cultural geography of the late nineteenth century as an earlier stage of a global cosmopolitan- ism. Reinhold Martin shows how post-1960s postmodernism itself was less a process of disembedding, as it was thought at the time, than a reterritorial- ization of corporate space that today casts a very different light on the battles in architectural theory during the last years of the Vietnam War. The essays on literary and fi lmic texts all open up surprisingly novel perspectives. Benno Wagner reads Franz Kafka as the “fi rst reader” of Fried- rich Nietzsche in relation to the biopolitics of risk and insurance, danger and uninsurability. Stefanie Harris explores Rainer Maria Rilkeʼs obsession with the visual in The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge by focusing, somewhat counterintuitively, on the textʼs relation to photography as a temporal medium of writing in light. Stefan Andriopoulos juxtaposes fi lmic and legal discourse by focusing on the appearance of doppelgänger and ghostly doubles in early fi lm and the simultaneous emergence of discussions about the right to oneʼs own image. By bringing Alfred Döblinʼs little-known early reportage novel into dialogue with Berlin Alexanderplatz and with Fritz Mauthnerʼs language theories, Devin Fore demonstrates Döblinʼs participation in the discourse of the documentary, arguably one of the major and still underresearched inven- tions of interwar modernism and avant-gardism in Germany and the Soviet Union. The issue ends, appropriately enough, with Douglas Brent McBrideʼs consideration of recently completed architectural museum expansions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and New Yorkʼs MoMA, the premier insti- tute of a canonized modernism, whose narrative of modernism continues to raise the hackles of those convinced that there must be alternative accounts of modernismʼs trajectory in the world. Drawing on modernismʼs museum critique and including projects from Taut and Paul Scheerbart to Miesʼs New

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National Gallery in Berlin, McBride advances the idea of the museum of modernism as a mass medium, a heterotopian space characteristic of a dem- ocratic society. This issue does not represent a fully coherent account of modernism revisited after postmodernity. If read together, however, the essays assembled here resonate with each other in remarkable and stimulating ways, and they encourage further research on the nexus between modernism and modernity in our time.

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