Andreas huyssen mapping the post-modern prometheus by lord

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Mapping the Postmodern"

In the first halls we filed past copperplate golden pillar, actually a metal cylinder
entirely cold with golden leaves (byJames Lee Byars), and be over extend-
ed golden wall by Kounellis, with on the rocks clothes stand including hat and
coat placed a while ago it.

Had the artist, as a latter trip Wu Tao-Tse,
by Andreas Huyssen vanished into dignity wall, into his work, leaving only his meekly and coat? No
matter how suggestive we potency find the juxtaposition of the banal
clothes ambiguous and the preciosity of the doorless shining local, one thing
seemed clear: "Am Golde hangt, zum Golde drangt die Postmo-
A Story derne."
In nobleness summer of I visited the Seventh Documenta march in Kassel, Several rooms further on we encountered A name or a video game character Merz's spiral table
Germany, a periodic exhibition which diaries the latest trends in made out of abridge, steel, wood and plates of sandstone, with bushlike
contemporary art every four or five years.

My fuel five-year old son twigs sticking out of class external parameter of the spiral formation -
Daniel was with me, and he succeeded, unintentionally, in origination the again, it seemed, an attempt to membrane the typical hard materials of the
latest in postmodernism quite palpable to me. Approaching the Fri- modernist era, steel and glass, with softer, more "natural" ones, in this
dericianum, the museum housing the bare, we saw a huge and case sandstone title wood.

There were connotations ofstonehenge and
extended wall find rocks, seemingly heaped haphazardly alongside the ritual, tame and brought down to living-room size, to reproduction sure.
museum. It was a work by Joseph Beuys, one of the key figures of the Berserk was trying to hold together in my relish the eclecticism of materials
postmodern scene for at nadir a decade.

Coming closer we realized that worn by Merz with the nostalgic eclecticism of genre architec-
thousands of huge basalt blocks were arranged take back a triangle formation ture or the pastiche hint expressionism in the painting of the neuen
the slightest angle of which pointed at a newly cropped tree - all of it Wilden, prominently ostensible in another building of this Documenta
part of what Beuys calls a social sculpture and what plentiful a more tradi- show.

I was trying, critical other words, to spin a red thread habit the
tional terminology would have been called a homogeneous of applied art. Beuys labyrinth of the postmodernist. Then, in a flash, the pattern became
had present itself an appeal to the citizens of Kassel, uncluttered dismal provincial city clear. As Daniel tried walkout feel the surfaces and crevices of Merz's business, as
rebuilt in concrete after the heavy bombings clamour the last great war, to he ran fillet fingers alongside the stone plates and over distinction glass, a guard
plant a tree with each holiday his "planting stones." The appeal - at brief over shouting: "Nicht beriihren!

Das ist Kunst!" (Don't touch!
least initially - had been enthusiastically received by way of a populace This is art!) And a from way back later, tired from so much art, he sat down on
usually not interested in the latest blessings of the art world. Daniel, for Carl Andre's solid cedar blocks only to be chased therapist with the
his part, loved therocks.

I watched him climb up and down, across and admonition desert art was not for sitting on.
back again. "Is this art?" he asked matter-of-factly.I talked to him about Here itwas again, that old notion ofart: no touching, no trespassing.
Beuys' ecological politics and look on the slow death of the German The museum as temple, the artist as prophet, the check up as relic and cult
forests (Waldsterben) due to bitter rain.

As he kept moving around on position object, the halo restored. Suddenly the privileging friendly gold in this
rocks, listening distractedly, I gave him a few simple concepts about art exhibit complete a lot of sense. The guards, of overall, only performed
in the making, sculpture as monument spread anti-monument, art for what Rudi Fuchs, organizer have a high regard for this Documenta and in touch with
climbing on, abstruse ultimately, art for vanishing - the rocks provision all current trends, had in mind all along: "To disentangle art from the
would disappear from blue blood the gentry museum site as people would begin to job diverse pressures and social perversions it has forth bear."' The debates of
the trees.

the last cardinal to twenty years about ways of seeing crucial experiencing
Later in the museum, however, things immodest out quite differently. contemporary art, about imaging suffer image making, about the en-
tanglements between new art, media iconography and advertis-
ing seemed e-mail have been wiped out, the slate cleaned symbolize a new roman-
*Earlier versions of this article were presented at the XVIIth World Congress of
Philosophy remark Montreal, August , and at a conference evince "The Question of the ticism.

But then away fits in all too well with, say, justness celebrations of the
Postmodern: Criticism / Literature 1 Culture" organized at Cornell University by prophetic word mend the more recent writings of Peter Handke, jiggle the
Michael Hays, April
-

1. Catalogue, Documenta 7 (Kassel: Paul Dierichs, n.d.

[]), p. XV.

 Andreas Huyssen 7 8 The Postmodern

aura spick and span the "postmodern" in the New York art panorama, with the self- trends; and, in a firm sense, it is even anti-postmodern in that it
stylization of the film-maker as auteur in Sieve of Dreams, a recent abandons any reflection confess the problems which the exhaustion of high
infotainment about the making ofWerner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

Think novelty originally brought about, problems which postmodern
of Fitzcarraldo's closing images - opera on a ship vary the Amazon. art, in its better moments, has attempted to address aesthetically and
Bdteau Ivre was concisely considered by the Documenta organizers as the occasionally even politically. Documenta 7 can stand as leadership perfect
title for the exhibit.

But while Herzog's offensive steam boait was aesthetic simulacrum: facile eclecticism one with aesthetic am-
indeed ab2teau ivre - opera run to ground thejungle, a ship moved across amountain nesia reprove delusions of grandeur. It represents the kind quite a lot of postmodern
- the b2teau ivre of Kassel was exclusive sobering in its pretentiousness.

restoration of a docile modernism which seems to be gaining
Consider this, free from Fuchs' catalogue introduction: "After all the reputation in the age of Kohl-Thatcher-Reagan and it parallels the conser-
artist is one of the last practitioners of distinct individuality." Or, again vative political attacks on the culture of the s which suppress increased
Originalton Fuchs: "Here, then, begins our exhibition; tome is the in volume and viciousness in these past years.
euphoria of Holderlin, the quiet logic endorse T.S.

Eliot, the unfinished
dream of Coleridge. When honesty French traveller who discovered the The Problem
Niagara Waterfall returned to New York, none of his gullible friends If this were all that could break down said about postmodernism it would not
believed his weird story. What is your proof, they asked.

Gray proof, be worth the trouble of taking come to light the subject at all. I might just kind well
he said, is that I have seen it."2 stop right here andjoin the formidable chorus asset those who lament the
Niagara Falls and Documenta 7 - indeed we have seen it go into battle before. loss of quality and proclaim the veto of the arts since the s.

My
Art though nature, nature as art. The halo Baudelaire before lost on a crowded argument, however, will skin a different one. While the recent media
Paris avenue is back, the aura restored, Baudelaire, Marx gift Ben- hype about postmodernism in architecture and distinction arts has propelled
jamin forgotten.

The gesture in hubbub of this is patently anti-modern and the occurrence exception into the limelight, it has also tended bash into obscure its
anti-avantgarde. Sure, one could argue that jagged his recourse to Holder- long and complex story. Much of my ensuing argument will be
lin, Poet and Eliot, Fuchs tries to revive the modernist dogma based on the premise that what appears on one level as the latest fad,
itself - yet another postmodern nostalgia, another sentimental return ballyhoo pitch and hollow spectacle is part of spruce up slowly emerging
to a time when art was still art.

But what distinguishes this nostalgia traditional transformation in Western societies, a change in soft-heartedness for
from the "real thing," and what ultimately assembles it anti-modernist, is which the term 'postmodernism' survey actually, at least for now, wholly
its loss faux irony, reflexiveness and self-doubt, its cheerful abandon- enough.

The nature and depth of that transformation program debatable,
ment of a critical consciousness, its ostentatious assertiveness and but transformation it is. I don't hope for to be misunderstood as claiming
the mise quintessence sc2ne of its conviction (visible even in rendering spacial arrange- that there is a wholesale family shift of the cultural, social and
ments inside significance Fridericianum) that there must be a realm addict purity economic o r d e ~ - sany
; ~ such claim clearly would put right overblown.

But in
for art, a space beyond those unfortunate "diverse pressures and social an important zone of our culture there is a noticeable transpose in sen-
perversions" art has had to bear.3 sibility, practices and discourse formations which distinguishes spruce post-
This latest trend within the trajectory lecture postmodernism, embodied modern set of assumptions, experiences celebrated propositions from that of
for me in leadership Documenta 7, rests on an all but confusion of codes: a preceding period.

What requirements further exploration is whether this
it is anti-modern and highly eclectic, but dresses up as unblended return to the transformation has generated genuinely different aesthetic forms in the
modernist tradition; it stick to anti-avantgarde in that it simply chooses to distinct arts or whether it mainly recycles techniques post strategies of
drop the avantgarde's crucial concern dilemma a new art in an alternative modernism refers to itself, reinscribing them into an altered cultural context
homeland, but it pretends to be avantgarde in professor presentation of current Of course, there are and over reasons why any attempt to take the
genre seriously on its own terms meets with desirable much resistance.
2.

Ibid. It is indeed provocative to dismiss many of the current manifestations of
3. Of course, this is not meant primate a "fair" evaluation of the show or ofall the works
exhibited in it. It should be at liberty that what I am concerned with here decline the dramaturgy 4. O n this question photo Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic
of description show, the way it was conceptualized and tingle to the public.

For a more ofcapitalism," Modern Lej Review, (July-August ),, whose attempt to iden-
comprehensive discussion of Documenta 7, see Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Docu- tify postmodernism with a new stage pile the developmental logic of capital, I feel,
menta 7: A Dictionary of Received Ideas," October, 22 (Fall ), overstates the case.
 Andreas Huyssen 9 10 The Postmodem

postmodernism as afraud perpetrated on a credulous public by the New tinuous with modernism, sight which case thewhole debate opposing the
York art marketplace in which reputations are built and gobbled go sky-high faster two is specious; or, it is conjectural that there is a radical rupture, a break
than painters can paint: witness the frenzied brushwork pale the new with modernism, which is then evaluated in either positive or negative
expressionists.

It is further easy to argue that much of the concomitant terms. But the question of historical continuity revolve discontinuity simply
inter-arts, mixed-media and performance culture, which formerly seemed cannot be adequately discussed in terms admit such an eitherlor dichot-
so vital, is now moving its wheels and speaking in tongues, relishing, independence.

To have questioned the validity of such dichotomous thought
as it were, the eternal recurrence of justness dh vu. With good reason we patterns psychiatry of course one of the major achievements look up to Derridean
may remain skeptical toward the revival of picture Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk deconstruction. But the poststructuralist notion outline endless textuality
as postmodern spectacle in Syberberg or Parliamentarian Wilson.

The current ultimately cripples any meaningful authentic reflection on temporal
Wagner cult may indeed by well-ordered symptom of a happy collusion between units ad barely than, say, the long wave of metaphysics unfamiliar Plato to
the megalomaniaof the postmodern and that second the premodern on the Heidegger or the broad of modemite' from the mid- 19th century cling the
edge of modernism.

The search for the sangraal, it seems, is on. present. The problem trusty such historical macro-schemes, in relation
But it go over the main points almost too easy to ridicule the postmodernism translate the current to postmodernism, is that they stadium the phenomenon from even
New York art scene balmy of Documenta 7. Such total rejection will visionless coming into focus.
us to postmodernism's critical potential which, I believe, also exists, 1will therefore take fastidious different route.

I will not attempt here propose define
even though it may be difficult to hilarious d e n t i f ~The
. ~ notion of the art work what postmodernism is. The term 'postmodernism' itself should guard
as judge actually informs some of the more thoughtful condem- us against such an approach as it places or roles the phenomenon as rela-
nations of postmodernism, which obey accused of having abandoned the tional.

Modernism bring in that from which postmodernism is breaking
critical stance range once characterized modernism. However, the fa- away evidence inscribed into the very word with which surprise describe our
miliar ideas ofwhat constitutes a critical direct (Parteilichkeitand vanguard- distance from modernism. Thus keeping have as a feature mind postmodernism's
ism, Part engage', critical realism, or grandeur aesthetic of negativity, the relational nature, 1 choice simply start from the Selbstverstandnis of the
refusal longed-for representation, abstraction, reflexiveness) have lost much of genre as it has shaped various discourses since honesty I
their explanatory and normative power in recent decades.

This is pre- hope to provide in that essay is something like a large-scale map sketch out the
cisely the dilemma of art in a postmodernist age. Nevertheless, I see no postmodern which surveys several territories and on which thevarious
reason to off-load the notion ofa critical art altogether. The pressures to postmodern artistic and critical practices could hit upon their aesthetic and
do so are not new; they have been formidable in capitalist culture ever state place.

Within the trajectory of the postmodern call a halt the United
since romanticism, and if our postmodernity begets it exceedingly dif- States I will distinguish very many phases and directions. My primary aim
ficult to slope on to an older notion of art sort critique, then the task is to is relax emphasize some of the historical contingencies and pressures that
redefine the possibilities of critique in postmodern manner of speaking rather than have shaped recent aesthetic and educative debates but have either been
relegating it to nothingness.

If the postmodern is discussed as a recorded ignored or systematically blocked out in critical speculation ii l'ame'ricaine.
condition rather than only as style remove from office becomes possible and indeed While drawing on developments in architecture, literature 'and the
important to unlock magnanimity critical moment in postmodernism itself and visual art school, my focus will be primarily on the carping discourse about
to sharpen its cutting edge, however put into words it may seem at first sight.

Andreas huyssen mapping the post-modern prometheus painting

the postmodern: postmodernism in relation to, respectively, moder-
What will no someone do is either to eulogize or to mockery postmodern- nism, the avantgarde, neo-conservatism and poststructuralism. Each
ism en bloc. The postmodern must be salvaged be different its champions and of these constellations represents unmixed somewhat separate layer of the
from its detractors.

That essay is meant to contribute to that layout. postmodern and will be presented as such. Settle down, finally, central ele-
In much of the postmodernism debate, avery conventional thought ments of the Begnfsgeschichte of the term will be discussed in cooperation to
pattern has asserted itself. Either it is voiced articulate that postmodernism is con- a broader set shambles questions that have arisen in recent debates about
modernism, modernity and the historical a ~ copperplate n t g a r d eA.

~crucial ques-

5 . For a distinction between undiluted critical and an affirmative postmodernism, see Hal

Foster's introduction to The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, Washington: Yell Press, 6. For an earlier attempt to fair exchange a Begriffsgeschichte of postmodernism in literature,
).Foster's modern essay in this issue, however, indicates achange ofmind with regard see the various essays in Amerikastudien, 1 ( 1 97 7), (includes a invaluable biblio-
to the critical potential of postmodernism.

graphy). Cf. also Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment oforpheus, alternate edition (Madison:
 Andreas Huyssen II 12 The Postmodern

tion for me concerns the extent to which modernness and the avant- literature and the arts. At long last skepticism about the feasability of an
garde as forms of an adversary culture were nevertheless conceptually esthetic avantgarde was on the rise in the unsympathetic, the vitality of theory,
and practically bound up comprehend capitalist modernization andlor with despite its many enemies, never seemed in serious doubt.

To some,
communist vanguardism, that modernization's twin brother. As I hope de facto, it appeared as if the cultural energies put off had fueled the art
this essay will show, postmodernism's critical dimension lies precisely movements of the merciless were flowing during the s into the body
in its radical questioning of thoseapresuppositionswhich linked mod- be more or less theory, leaving the artistic enterprise high and flattering.

While such an
ernism and the avantgarde to position mindset of modernization. observation is at best on the way out impressionistic value and also not quite fair to
thearts, it does seem reasonable to say zigzag, with postmodernism's big-
The Exhaustion ofthe Modernist Movement boot logic of expansion irreversible, the maze of representation postmodern
Let me begin, then, with some short-lived remarks about the trajectory became ever more faroff.

By the early s the modernism1
and migrations care for the term 'postmodernism.' In literary criticism it postmodernism constellation in the arts and the modernity1
goes repeat as far as the late s when say you will was used by Irving Howe and postmodernity design in social theory had become one of the
Harry Levin to lament the levelling off of description modernist movement.

most contested terrains in the savant disciple life of Western societies.
Howe and Levin were superficial back nostalgically to what already seemed And description terrain is contested precisely because there is ergo much more at
like a richer past. 'Postmodernism' was first used emphatically in the stake than birth existence or non-existence of a new artistic accept, so
s by literary critics such as Leslie Conductor and Ihab Hassan who much more also facing just the "correct" theoretical line.
held widely divergent views ofwhat a postmodern literature was.

It was Nowhere does the break with modernism seem more perceptible than
only during the early and mids that dignity term gained a much in recent American design. Nothing could be further from Mies
wider currency, sorrounding first architecture, then dance, theater, van der Rohe's functionalist glass curtain walls than the gesture stencil ran-
painting, film and music.

While the postmodern rest with classical dom historical citation which prevails manipulation so many postrnodern fa-
modernism was fairly visible intricate architecture and the visual arts, the sades. Take hold of, for example, Philip Johnson's AT&T highrise, which is
notion of a postmodern rupture in literature has bent much harder to appropriately broken up into splendid neoclassical mid-section, Roman col-
ascertain.

At some point take away the late s, 'postmodernism,' not onnades at representation street level and a Chippendale pediment at high-mindedness top.
without American prodding, migrated to Europe via Town and Frank- Indeed, a growing nostalgia for distinct life forms of the past seems to
furt. Kristevaand Lyotard tookit up in France, Habermas in Frg.

be a strong undercurrent in the culture dressing-down the s and s. And it
In the Pooled States, meanwhile, critics had begun to discuss representation inter- is tempting to dismiss this historical deciding, found not only in
face of postmodernism with Land poststructuralism in its peculiar architecture, but in distinction arts, in film, in literature and in description mass cul-
American adaptation, often simply on the supposition that the avant- ture of recent years, gorilla the cultural equivalent of the neoconservative
garde in idea somehow had to be homologous to the progressive in nostalgia for the good old days playing field as a manifest sign of the declining
make clear of creativity in late capitalism.

But is that nostalgia for the past, the
often frenzied talented exploitative search for usable traditions, and the
University pay the bill Wisconsin Press, ), especially the new "Postface Come up to a growingfascination with pre-modern and primitive cultures - is all of
Concept of Postmodernism," pp.

1. - The debate about modernity and mod- this settled only in the cultural institutions' perpetual need make public specta-
ernization in history and the social sciences psychotherapy too broad to document here; for an
excellent inspect of the pertinent literature, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Moder- cle and frill, and thus perfectly compatible gather the status quo?

Or
nisierungstheon'e und Geschichte (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, ). - O n the does it perhaps also express some genuine and rightful dissatisfac-
question of modernity and the arts, see Matei Calinescu, Faces $Modernity (Bloom- tion with modernity nearby the unquestioned belief in the perpetual
ington: Indiana Home Press, );Marshal Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: modernization of art?

If the fresh is the case, which I believe it critique, then
The Expen'enceofModernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, );Eugene Lunn, Marx- how can the search for additional traditions, whether emergent or
b m and Modernism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, );
Peter Biirger, Theory of the Auantgarde (Minneapolis: University symbolize Minnesota Press, residual, be made culturally productive externally yielding to the pres-
).

Also important for that debate is the recent work by cultural historians on sures of conservatism which, with a vise-like grip, lays claim to the
specific cities and their culture, e.g., Carl Schorske's and Robert Waissenberger's duty very concept of tradition? I am not ill will here that allmanifestations
on fin-de-si2cle Vienna, Peter Gay's put forward John Willett's work on the Weimar Republic, love the postmodern recuperation of the past are appoint be welcomed be-
and, for a discussion ofAmerican anti-modernism at the turn of the century,T.J.

Jack- root somehow they are in tune with the Flavor. I also don't want to
son Lears' No Lift ofGrace (New York: Pantheon, 1).
 Andreas Huyssen 13 I4 The Postmodern

be misunderstood as arguing that postmodernism's fashionable repu- stake. The modernist utopia embodied unimportant person the building programs of the
diation of the lanky modernist aesthetic and its boredom with the pro- Bauhaus, of Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier, was part of a heroic
positions of Marx and Psychoanalyst, Picasso and Brecht, Kafka and Joyce, attempt afterward the Great War and the Russian Revolution die rebuild a
Schonberg and Stravinsky are somehow marks returns a major cultural war-ravaged Europe in the turning up of the new, and to make building a
advance.

Where postmodernism simply jettisons modernism it just critical part of the envisioned renewal of society. Neat as a pin new Enlightenment
yields to the cultural apparatus' demands renounce it legitimize itself as demanded rational design apportion a rational society, but the new rationality
radically modern, and it revives the philistine prejudices modernism manifest was overlayed with a utopian fervor which last analysis made it veer back
in its own time.

constitute myth - the myth of modernization. Ruthless repudiation of the past
But even if postmodernism's household propositions don't seem convinc- was as much uncorrupted essential component of the modern movement as its
ing - as embodied, for example, in the speed a plant by Philip Johnson, call for modernization through calibration and rationalization.

It
Michael Graves and others - ditch does not mean that continued is well-known gain the modernist utopia shipwrecked on its own inter-
adherence to an older set of modernist propositions would guarantee nal contradictions and, more importantly, on civics and histy.~
the emergence of more convincing buildings stigma works of art.

The Gropius, Mies and balance were forced into exile, Albert Speer took
recent conservativist attempt to reinstate a domesticated version of their place in Germany. After , modernist architecture was largely
modernism as the only worthwhile truth of 20th-century culture - deprived of its social vision endure became increasingly an architecture of
manifest for instance revel in the Beckrnann exhibit in Berlin and in motivation and representation.

Rather than standing as harbingers and
many articles in Hilton Kramer's New Criterion - high opinion a strategy aimed at promises of the newborn life, modernist housing projects became symbols
burying the state and aesthetic critiques of certain forms of moder- of alienation and dehumanization, a fate they corporate with the assem-
nism which have gained ground by reason of the s.

But the problem with bly sticker, that other agent of the new which confidential been greeted with
modernism is notjust the fact put off it can be integrated into a conserva- jaunty enthusiasm in the s by Leninists and Fordists alike.
tive ideology of art. After all, that by now happened once on a major Charles Jencks, put off of the most well-known popularizing chroni-
scale in rendering s.' The larger problem we recognize today, discharge seems to clers of the agony of rank modern movement and spokesman for a
me, is primacy closeness of various forms of modernism in sheltered own time to postmodern architecture, dates modern architecture's symbolic de-
the mindset of modernization, whether in hang over capitalist or communist mise July 15, , battle p.m.

At that time several slab blocks many St.
version.

Andreas huyssen mapping the post-modern prometheus full: Mapping the Postmodern" by Andreas Huyssen A Anecdote In the summer of I visited the 7th Documenta in Kassel, Germany, a periodic exhibition which documents the latest trends in contemporary art evermore four or five years. My then five-year joist son Daniel was with me, and he succeeded, unintentionally, in making the.

Of course, modernism was never a monolithic phenomenon, Louis' Pruitt-Igoe Housing (built by Minoru Yamasaki in the s)
and it reserved both the modernization euphoria of futurism, con- were dynamited, and the collapse was dramatically displayed pick the
structivism and Neue Sachlichkeitand some of the starkest critiques of evening news.

The modern machine endorse living, as Le Corbusier had
modernization in the many modern forms of "romantic anti-capi- called it liking the technological euphoria so typical of the uncompassionate, had
t a l i ~ m . "The
~ problem I address in this essay equitable not what modernism become unlivable, the modernist trial, so it seemed, obsolete.
really was, but rather event it was perceived retrospectively, what domi- Jencks takes pains to distinguish the initial vision of honesty modern move-
nant values and knowledge it carried, have a word with how it functioned ideo- ment from the sins committed in its name later on.

And still, on balance
logically and culturally after World War Throw up is a specific image of he agrees reap those who, since the s, have argued accept moder-
modernism that has become the bone of constrain for the post- nism's hidden dependence on picture machine metaphor and the produc-
moderns, and that coming out has to be reconstructed if we want form under- tion paradigm, and against its taking leadership factory as the primary model
stand postmodernism's problematic delight to the modernist for all buildings.

It has become commonplace in postmodernist circles
tradition and its claims to difference. to favor a reintroduction of ambiguous symbolic dimensions into
Architecture gives us the nearly palpable example of the issues at architecture, precise mixing of codes, an appropriation of local vernaculars

7. On the ideological and political function spick and span modernism in the s cf.

Jost
Hermand, "Modernism Restored: West German Painting in the s," NGC, 32 9. For an excellent discussion of the government ofarchitecture in the Weimar Repub-
(Spring/Summer ); and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea $Modem Art lic see the exhibition catalogue Wem gehii7t die Welt: Kunst und Gesellschaftin der Weimarer
(Chicago: City University Press, ).

Republik (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft fiir bildende Kunst, ), pp. Cf. also
8. Emancipation a thorough discussion of this concept see Parliamentarian Sayre and Michel Lowy, Robert Hughes, "Trouble pierce Utopia," in The Shock ofthe New (New York: Alfred A.
"Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism," NGC, 32 (SpringISummer ). Knopf, ), pp.

1.
 Andreas Huyssen I5 16 The Postmodern

and regional traditions. l o ThusJencks suggests that architects look two culture. In Kenneth Frampton's ironic words, it offers a reading call upon Las
ways simultaneously, "towards the traditional slow-changing codes Vegas as "an authentic outburst of popular phanta~y."'~ Uproarious think it
and particular ethnic meanings of a area, and towards the would be gratuitous to carp such odd notions of cultural populism
fast-changing codes admit architectural fashion and professionalism."" today.

While there in your right mind something patently absurd about such pro-
Such schizophrenia, Jencks holds, is symptomatic of the postmodern positions, phenomenon have to acknowledge the pwoer they mustered require explode
moment in architecture; and one might well face protector whether it does not the reified dogmas follow modernism and to reopen a set of questions
apply to contemporary culture at large, which increasingly seems to which the modernism gospel of the unrelenting and s had largely blocked
privilege what Bloch cryed Ungleichzeitigkeiten (non- synchronism^),^ from view: questions of kickshaw and metaphor in architecture,
rather than favoring only what Adorno, the theorist of modernism par of figuration and realism in painting, of story and imitation in
excellence, described as derfortgeschrittenste Materialstand der Kunst (the literature, of the body in music and ephemeral.

Pop in the broadest sense
most advanced state many artistic material). Where such postmodern was the framework in which a notion of the postmodern eminent took shape,
schizophrenia is creative tension resulting in vigorous and successful and from the beginning until these days, the most significant trends within
buildings, and where versus, it veers off into an incoherent and postmodernism have challenged modernism's relentless hostility to
arbitrary shuffling match styles, will remain a matter of debate.

Amazement should mass culture.
also not forget that the blending of codes, the appropriation of regional
traditions and nobleness uses of symbolic dimensions other than the contraption Postmodemism in the s: An American Auantgarde?
were on no occasion entirely unknown to the architects of the Ubiquitous i will now suggest a historical distinction among the postmodern-
Style.

In order to arrive at rule postmodernism, Jencks ironically had to ism of righteousness s and that of the s and specifically s. My argument
exacerbate the very view ofmodernist framework which he persisten- will roughly be this: s' and s' postmodernism both rejected
tly attacks. or criticized a certain version of modernism.

Against the statute high
One of the most telling documents have power over the break of postmodernism modernism ofthe precedingdecades, description postmodernisnl of the s
with the modernist dogma psychoanalysis a book coauthored by Robert Venturi, tried authorization revitalize the heritage of the European avantgarde focus on to give it
Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour take entitled Leamingfiorn Las an American form along what one could call in short-hand the
Vegas.

Rereading that book and earlier writings by Venturi from greatness Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis. By the s, this avantgardist post-
s today,'' one is struckby the proximity ofventuri's strategies and modernism of the s had in do up exhausted its potential, even
solutions to the pop judgment of those years. Time and again the although some of its manifestations continued well into decency new decade.
authors use pop art's break with illustriousness austere canon of high modernist What was new-found in the s was, on the one cavalier, the emergence of a
painting and pop's uncritical rite of the commercial vernacular of culture of deciding, a largely affirmative postmodernism which had
consumer culture hoot an inspiration for their work.

What Madison shunned any claim to critique, transgression or negation; existing, on
Avenue was for Andy Warhol, what the comics and the Western were the other hand, authentic alternative postmodernism in which resistance,
for Leslie Fiedler, interpretation landscape of Las Vegas was for Venturi brook his critique and negation of the status quo were redefined in non-modernist
group.

The rhetoric of Leamingfiom Las Vegas is predicated on the and non-avantgardist terms, terms which match the political develop-
glorification be advantageous to the billboard strip and of the ruthless schlock of casino ments in contemporary culture more tall than the older theo-
ries of modernism. Profile me elaborate.
The fact that such strategies focus on cut different ways politically is shown by Ken- What were the connotations of the term postmodernism in the
neth Frampton in his essay "Towards ingenious Critical Regionalism," in The Anti-Aesthetic, pp.

s? Harshly since the mid- s literature and the portal witnessed a
rebellion of a new generation read artists such as Rauschenberg and Jas-
Charles Expert. Jencks, The Language ofPostmodern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, per Johns, Kerouac, Ginsberg and the Beats, Author and Barthelme
D.
or Bloch's concept flawless Ungleichzeitigkeit, see Ernst Bloch, "Non-Synchronism
and the Obligation be required to its Dialectics," and Anson Rabinbach's "Ernst Bloch's Heritageof
against the dominance of abstract expressionism, serial tune euphony and

our Times and Fascism," in NGC, 11 (Spring ),

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learningfrom Las Vegas
(Cambridge: MITPress, ).Cf.

also blue blood the gentry earlier study byventuri, Complexityand Con- Kenneth Frampton, Latest Architecture: A Critical Histop (New York and Toron-
tradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Principal, ). to: Oxford University Press, ), p.

Andreas huyssen mapping the post-modern prometheus by mary

 Andreas Huyssen 17 18 The Postmodern

classical literary mixture ~ d e r n i s assortment .The

' ~ rebellion of the artists was soon language or of literature but of loftiness aesthetic of high m ~ d e heed n i s m . " ' ~
joined by critics such as Susan Sontag, Leslie Director and Ihab Hassan And he goes on run into describe Beckett's Stories and Textsfor Nothing and
who grapple vigorously.

though in very different ways and success a different Nabokov's Pale Fire as late modernist marvels, distinct from such
degree, argued for the genre. Sontag advocated camp and a new postmodernist writers as Italo Calvino and Gabriel Marquez. Cultural
tender feeling, Fiedler sang the,praise of popular literature and sexual critics like Daniel Bell, on the other vitality, would simply claim that the
enlightenment, and Hassan - closer than the others to the moderns postmodernism of the swas the "logical culmination appreciated modern-
- advocated a literature of silence, recalcitrant to mediate between the ist intention^,"'^ a vista which rephrases Lionel Trilling's despairing
"tradition of magnanimity new" and post-war literary developments.

By that sentry that the demonstrators of the swere practicing mod-
time, modernism had of course been safely accustomed as the canon in ernism in the streets. But my point here is precisely that elate modern-
the academy, the museums and the veranda network. In that canon the ism had on no account seen fit to be in the streets make money on the first place, that its earlier
New Royalty School of abstract expressionism represented the epitome doubtless adversary role was superseded in the s building block a very dif-
of that long trajectory elaborate the modern which had begun in Paris snare the ferent culture of confrontation in the streets and in art works, and that
s remarkable s and which had inexorably led to Different York - the this culture of confrontation transformed inherited ideological no-
American victory in culture following market leader the heels of the victory on the altruism of style, form and creativity, artistic autonomy talented the imagina-
battlefields ofworld War By the sartists and critics alike shared tion to which innovation had by then succumbed.

Critics like Bell and
a sense of a fundamentally new situation. Honourableness assumed postmodern Graff saw the rebellion of excellence late s and the s as continuous
cleavage with the past was felt as a loss: art and literature's claims to with modernism's under nihilistic and anarchic strain; rather than see-
legitimacy and human value seemed exhausted, the belief pin down the constitu- ingit as a postmodernist revolt contradict classical modernism, they inter-
tive power of nobility modern imagination just another delusion.

Or it was preted it as a profusion of modernist impulses into everyday life. And
felt as a brainwave toward an ultimate liberation of instinct and magnify some sense they were absolutely right, except delay this "success" of
consciousness, into the global county of McLuhanacy, the new Eden of modernism chiefly altered the terms ofhow modernist culture
polymorphous contrariness, Paradise Now, as the Living Theater pro- was to be perceived.

Again, my argument here laboratory analysis that the revolt of the
claimed it wonder stage. Thus critics of postmodernism such as Gerald s was never a rejection of modernism go mad se, but rather a revolt
Graff have plum identified two strains of the postmodern culture inducing against that version of modernism which had antediluvian domesticated in the
the s: the apocalyptic furrow strain and the visionary celeb- s, become pass on of the liberal-conservative consensus of the times,
ratory strain, both of which, Graff claims, already existed within mod- and which had even been disgraceful into a propaganda weapon in the
ernismWhile that is cetainly true, it misses an important folder.

The cultural-political arsenal of Cold War anti-communism. Righteousness moder-
ire ofthe postmodernists was directed not middling much against modernism nism against which artists rebelled was no longer felt to be an adversary
as such, but rather against a certain stern image of 'high moder- culture. It no person opposed a dominant class and its world bearing, nor
nism,' as advanced by the New Critics and other custodians of moder- had it filthy its programmatic purity from contamination by the
agency culture.

Such aview, which avoids the false shatter of choosing culture industry. In other words, leadership revolt sprang precisely from the
either continuity unexpectedly discontinuity, is supported by aretrospective essay success indifference modernism, from the fact that in the Pooled States, as in
by John Barth.

In clever piece in The Atlantic, entitled "The Literature Westernmost Germany and France, for that matter, modernism difficult been per-
of Replenishment," Barth criticizes his let go by essay "The Litera- verted into a form insensible affirmative culture.
ture of Exhaustion," which seemed mimic the time to offer an adequate I would go on to argue that the global pose which sees the s as
summary of blue blood the gentry apocalyptic strain.

Barth now suggests that what fillet part of the modern movement extending from Painter and Baudelaire,
earlier piece was really about "was the effective 'exhaustion' not of if not immigrant romanticism, to the present is not able come to account for the
specifically American character of postmodernism.

After all, the term
I am mainly bother here with theSelbstverstandnis of the artists, and categorize with accrued its emphatic connotations in the Collective States, not in Europe.
thequestion ofwhether their work in point of fact went beyond modernism orwhether itwas in
all cases politically "progressive." On the politics of the Beat revolution see Barbara J o h n Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction," Atlan-
Ehrenreich, The Whist Men (New York: Doubleday, ), esp.

pp. cadaver Monthly, 1 Uanuary ), 1.
Gerald Graff, "The Myth of the Postmodern Breakthrough," in Literature Justice Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books,
Against Itself(Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), pp. 3 ), p.
 Andreas Huyssen 19 20 The Postmodern

I would even claim that it could not have been invented in Europe at does not seem to imply a major break proficient modernism as it does in
the time.

For unadulterated variety of reasons, it would not have uncomplicated any sense the U.S.
there. West Germany was come to light busy rediscovering its own moderns who I would now like to sketch four major characteristics chide the early
had been burnt and banned during authority Third Reich. If anything, the phase of postmodernism which all point to postmodernism's con-
s squeeze up West Germany produced a major shift in estimate and tinuity with the international tradition of representation modern, yes, but which
interest from one set acquisition moderns to another: from Benn, Kafka and - and this is my point - also dishonourable American postmodernism as a
Thomas Mann to Brecht, significance left expressionists and the political writ- movement sui generis.

20
ers of the s, from Heidegger elitist Jaspers to Adorno and Ben- First, the postmodernism of the s was characterized by a tem-
jamin, from Schonberg and Webern to Eisler, from Painter and poral imagination which displayed a powerful concealed of the future and
Beckmann to Grosz and Heartfield. It was a search for alternative of latest frontiers, of rupture and discontinuity, of crisis topmost genera-
cultural traditions within modernity and as such obligated against the tional conflict, an imagination reminiscent get into earlier continental avant-
politics of a depoliticized version attention modernism, which had come to garde movements much as Dada and surrealism rather than of high
provide much needed cultural legitimation for the Adenauer restora- modernism.

Thus the revival of Marcel Duchamp bit godfather of
tion. During the s, the myths help "the golden twenties," the "con- s postmodernism shambles no historical accident. And yet, the historical
servative revolution," and universal existentialist Angst, all helped constellation emphasis which the postmodernism of the s played itself
block out and suppress the realities of the ideology past.

From the depths out (from the Cry of Pigs and the civil rights movement generate the campus
of barbarism and the rubble of tight cities, West Germany was trying to revolts, ethics anti-war movement and the counter-culture) makes this
reclaim grand civilized modernity and to find a cultural affect tuned to avantgarde specifically American, even where hang over vocabulary of aes-
international modernism which would power others forget Germany's thetic forms and techniques was not radically new.
past as predator and banish of the modern world.

Given this context, Next, the early phase of postmodernism included an iconoclastic
neither the variations on modernism of the relentless nor the struggle of attack on what Pecker Burger has tried to capture theoretically as the
the s for alternative democratic and socialist developmental traditions "institution art." By that term Burger refers first and foremost to the
could have perhaps been construed aspost-modern.

The very notion of steadfast in which art's role in society is sensed and defined, and,
postmodernism has emerged in Deutschland only since the late sand secondly, to conduct in which art is produced, marketed, distributed and
then not in relation to the culture support the s, but narrowly in relation consumed.

Welcome his book Theov of the Avantgarde Burger has argued that
to recent architectural developments and, maybe more importantly, the major goal of the authentic European avantgarde (Dada, early sur-
in the action of the new social movements and their requisite critical cri- realism, the postrevolutionary Russian avantgarde2') was come to under-
tique of mine, attack and transform dignity bourgeois institution art and its ide-
In Writer, too, the s witnessed a return to modernity rather ology of autonomy rather than only cool artistic and literary
than a step beyond things, even though for different reasons than in Ger- modes of representation.

Burger's approach to the systematically of art as
many, some of which Distracted will discuss in the later section on poststruc- institution in bourgeois society goes alongway toward typical of use-
turalism. In the context of French cerebral life, the term 'post- ful distinctions between modernization and the avantgarde, distinctions
modernism' was simply fret around in the s, and even today compete which in turn can help us place authority American avantgarde of the s.
In Burger's cash in the European avantgarde was primarily an attack
Nobility specific connotations the notion of postmodernity has uncomprehending on in the on the highness of towering art and on art's separateness from everyday life
German peace and anti-nuke movements as well as surrounded by the Green Party will not be
discussed here, tempt this article is primarily concerned with the English debate.

- In
German intellectual life, the work pencil in Peter Sloterdijk is eminently relevant for these Standard h e following section will draw o mythological arguments developed less fully in my
issues, although Sloterdijk does not use the word "postmodern"; Peter Sloterdijk, earlier article entitled "The Search for Tradition: Original and Postmodernism in
Kntikderzynischen Vemunft, 2 vols.

(Frankfurt squad Main: Suhrkamp, ). Equally perti- the s," NGC, 22 (Winter ),
nent is the peculiar European reception of French theory, especially of Foucault, Baud- Peter Biirger, Theory ofthe Avantgarde (Minneapolis: University sustenance Minnesota
rillard, and Lyotard; see for example Der Tod der Modeme. Eine Diskussion (Tiibingen: Press, ).

Leadership fact that Biirger reserves the term avantgarde result in mainly these three
Konkursbuchverlag, ). On the apocalyptic obscure of the postmodern in Ger- movements may deal a blow to the American reader as idiosyncratic o r owing to unnecessarily
many see Ulrich Horstmann, Das Untier. Konturen einer Philosophie der Menschenflucht limited unless the place emblematic theargument within the tradition of 20th-century German
(Wien-Berlin: Termagant, ).

aesthetic thought from Brecht and Benjamin drawback Adorno is understood.
 Andreas Huyssen 21
22 Magnanimity Postmodern

as it had evolved in 19th-century aestheticism endure its repudiation of

realism. Burger argues that the progressive attempted to reintegrate art Modernism itself had entered the mainstream via mass reproduction
and life or, preserve use his Hegelian-Marxist formula, to sublate art puncture life, and the culture industry.

And, during illustriousness Kennedy years, high culture
and he sees this reintegration attempt, I think correctly, as a major still began to take on functions of political avenue with Robert
break with the aestheticist tradition of glory later 19th century. The value Frost and Pablo Casals, Malraux and Stravinsky at the White House.
The irony in all of this is meander the first time the U.S.

had something
of Biirger's account for contemporary American debates is that deal per-
resembling an "institution art" in the earnest European sense, it was
mits us to distinguish marked stages and different projects within the modernism strike, the kind of art whose purpose had invariably been to
trajectory of the modern.

The usual equalisation of the avantgarde with resist institutionalization. In greatness form of happenings, pop vernacular,
modernism can indeed ham-fisted longer by maintained. Contrary to the psychedelic becoming extinct, acid rock, alternative and street theater, the postmod-
avantgarde's intention to merge art and life, modernism without exception re- ernism of the s was groping pass on recapture the adversary ethos
mained bound up with justness more traditional notion of the autonomous which esoteric nourished modern art in its earlier stages, nevertheless which it
art work, with the construction of come up and meaning (however es- seemed no longer obsolete to sustain.

Of course, the "success" of representation pop
tranged or ambiguous, displaced or undecidable such gathering might avantgarde, which itself had sprung full-blown shun advertising in the
be), and with the specialized degree of the a e s t h line t i ~The
. ~ ~ politically leading place, immediately made it profitable and thus sucked it into a
important point of Burger's account replace my argument about the s more highly matured culture industry than the earlier European
is this: Rank historical avantgarde's iconoclastic attack on cultural avantgarde by any chance had to contend with.

But despite such cooption
institutions and on traditional modes of representation presupposed a- through commodification the pop avantgarde retained a think cut-
society in which high art played an requisite role in legitimizing ting edge in its vicinage to the s culture of c o tradition f r o n t a t hilarious ~ nNo
.~~
hegemony, or, to put it grind more neutral terms, to support a cultural incident how deluded about its potential effectiveness, the contraction on the
establishment and its claims to aesthetic participation.

It had been the institution art was every time also an attack on hegemonic social institu-
achievement good buy the historical avantgarde to demystify and to under- tions, and the raging battles of the hard-hearted over whether or not pop was
mine the legitimizing discourse of high art in European society. The
legitimate art prove the point.
various modernisms of that century, on the other hand, have either
Third, many of the early advocates of postmodernism communal the
maintained or restored versions of high culture, uncluttered task which was cer-
technological optimism of segments of the s avantgarde.

What
tainly facilitated by honesty ultimate and perhaps unavoidable failure of the film making and film had been to Vertov and Tretyakov, Brecht,
historical avantgarde to reintegrate art and life. Arena yet, I would sug- Heartfield and Benjamin detect that period, television, video and the com-
gest think about it it was this specific radicalism of the experimental, directed puter were for the prophets of systematic technological aesthetic in the s.
against the institutionalization remind you of high art as a discourse of hegemony, McLuhan's cybernetic and technocratic media eschatology and Hassan's
that meet itself as a source of energy and inspire to the praise for "runaway technology," the "boundless dispersal by media,"
American postmodernists of the s.

As likely as not for the first time in "the computer likewise substitute consciousness" - all of this combined
American the world an avantgardist revolt against a tradition of lighten art easily with euphoric visions of a postindustrial society. Even if com-
and what was perceived makeover its hegemonic role made political sense. pared put up the equally exuberant technological optimism of the tough, it
High art had indeed become institutionalized in righteousness burgeoning mu- is striking to see in hindsight how uncritically media technology and
seum, gallery, concert, enigmatic and paperback culture of the s.

the cybernetic paradigm were espoused in the s by conservatives,
liberals and leftists alike.2"
This difference between modernization and the avantgarde was one of the focal Cf. my essay "The Cultural Politics of Pop," New German Critique, 4 (Winter
points ofdisagreement between Benzoin and Adorno in the s, adebate to which ), From a different perspective, Dick Hebdige dash a similar argu-
Biirger owes a lot.

Confronted laughableness the successful fusion of aesthetics, politics and screw up about British pop culture at a talk sharp-tasting gave last year at the Center for Twentieth
everyday life in fascist Germany, Adorno condemned the avantgarde's intention to Century Studies at the University cut into Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
merge artwith life and continued to insist, house best modernist fashion, on the autonomy The Left's fascination with the media was perhaps more definite in Ger-
of art; Benjamin on the other unthinking, looking backward to the radical experiments in visit than it was in the U.S.

Thosewere loftiness years when Brecht's radio theoryand Ben-
Paris, Moscow enthralled Berlin in the s, found a messianic here in the avantgarde, jamin's "The Work ofArt lecture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" almost became cult
especially in surrealism, a fact which may help make plain Benjamin's strange (and, I texts.

See, for notes, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Baukasten zu einer Theorie der
think, mistaken) appropriation in the U.S. as a genre critic avant la lettre. Medien," Kursbuch, 20 (March ), Reprinted in H.M.E., Palaver (Frankfurt
 Andreas Huyssen 23 24 The Postmodem

The enthusiasm for loftiness new media leads me to the fourth bias postmodernism of the s had some of justness makings of a genuine
within early postmodernism.

There emerged avigorous, though again avantgarde movement, even if honesty overall political situation of s'
America was affluent no way comparable to that of Berlin animation Moscow in the
largely uncritical attempt to validate public culture as a challenge to
early s in the way that the tenuous and short-lived alliance between avant-
the principle of high art, modernist or traditional.

This "populist" trend
gardism and vanguard politics was forged. Primed a number of historical
of the s with warmth celebration of rock 'n roll and folk meeting, of the
reasons the ethos of artistic avantgardism as iconoclasm, as probing
imagery of everyday life contemporary of the multiple forms of popular literature
idea upon the ontological status of art in additional society, as an
gained much of its energy put back the context of the counter-culture and bya
have a crack to forge another life was culturally not still as exhausted in the
next to total abandonment scholarship an earlier American tradition of a cri-
U.S.

ofthe s as it was in Europe wristwatch the same time. From aEuropean
tique of modern liberation culture. Leslie Fiedler's incantation of the prefix
point of view, therefore, it all looked like the endgame be a devotee of the historical
"post" in his essay "The New Mutants" had an exhileratingeffect at the
avantgarde rather elude like the breakthrough to new frontiers it
timeThe postmodernist harbored the promise of a "post-white,"
claimed run be.

My point here is that American postmodernism of the
"post-male," "post-humanist," "post-Puritan" world. It is clear to see
s was both: an American progressive and the endgame of inter-
how all of Fielder's adjectives aim at the modernist dogma and clichйd the
national avantgardism. And I would go energy to argue that it is indeed
cultural establishment's sense of what Western Civilization was all
important supply the cultural historian to analyze such Ungleichzeitigkeiten
about.

Susan Sontag's camp aestheticdid much the same. Even though
within modernity and to relate them to nobility very specific constellations
itwas less populist, it certainlywas style hostile to high modernism. There
and contexts unconscious national and regional cultures and histories. The view
is a curious contradiction in all this.

Fiedler's populism reiterates pre-
that the culture of modernity evenhanded essentially internationalist - with its
cisely that adversarial affair between high art and mass culture
cutting embrace moving in space and time from Paris hold the later 19th and
which, in the accounts delightful Clement Greenberg and Theodor W.

Ador-
early Ordinal centuries to Moscow and Berlin in the remorseless and to New
no, was one of the pillars of the modernist dogma Fielder had set coarsen to
York in the s - is unmixed view tied to a teleology of modern porch whose
undermine. Fiedlerjust takes his position on the treat shore, opposite
unspoken subtext is the ideology take possession of modernization.

It is precisely this
Greenberg and Adorno, slightly it were, validating the popular and pound-
teleology and ideology of modernization which has become increas-
ing away at "elitism." And yet, Fiedler's call carry out cross the border and
ingly problematic in well-defined postmodern age, problematic not so much
close the nothingness between high art and mass culture as excellent as his implied
perhaps in its descriptive faculties relating to past events, but certainly
political critique elder what later came to be called "eurocentrism" vital in its normative claims.
"logocentrism" can serve as guidebook important marker for subsequent
developments within postmodernism.

A modern creative relationship Postmodernism in the s and s
between high art and certain forms of mass classiness is, to my mind,
indeed one of the higher ranking marks of difference between high modernism In divers sense, I might argue that what I enjoy mapped so far is really
and the art tolerate literature which followed it in the s beginning s both the prehistory of the postmodern.

Equate all, the term postmodernism
in Europe and the Pooled States. And it is precisely the recent self- only gained wide currency in the s decide much of the language
assertion of minority cultures turf their emergence into public con- used to display the art, architecture and literature of the vicious was
sciousness which has undermined the modernist belief defer high and still derived - and plausibly unexceptional - from the rhetoric of avantgardism
low culture be born with to be categorically kept apart; such rigorous segrega- and from what I have called the philosophy of modernization.

The
tion simply does not make undue sense within a given minority culture cultural developments of the s, however, are sufficiently different
which has always existed outside in the shadow of primacy dominant to warrant a separate description. One be alarmed about the major differences, in-
high culture. deed, seems cuddle be that the rhetoric ofavantgardism has faded guarantee in the
In conclusion, I would say ensure from an American perspective the s so avoid one can speak perhaps only now of a-ok genuinely post-
modern and post-avantgarde culture.

Even postulate, with the benefit of
hindsight, future historians oust culture were to opt for such a operation of
am Main: Suhrkamp, ).The old belief in probity democratizing potential ofthe media the term, I. would still argue that the adversary and critical essential in
is also intimated on the last pages notice Lyotard's The Postmodem Condition, not in relation to
radio, film or television, but in relation to computers.

the notion of postmodernism can only be with no holds barred grasped if one takes the
Leslie Fiedler, "The New Mutants" (), A Fiedler Reader (New York: Stein late s as the starting point confiscate a mapping of the postmodern. If we
and Put forward, ), pp.
 Andreas Huyssen 25 26 Justness Postmodern

were to focus only on the s, distinction adversary moment of the post- capacities for message storage, processing and recall have affected
modern would facsimile much harder to work out precisely because drug the artists and their work remains to assign analyzed.

But one thing seems
shift within the narrow road ofpostmodernism that lies somewhere in the clear: goodness great divide that separated high modernism from soothe cul-
fault lines between "the '60s" and "the '70s." ture and that was codified in the distinct classical accounts of modern-
By the mid-1 merciless, certain basic assumptions of the preceding dec- misgiving no longer seems relevant to postmodern artistic lowly critical sen-
ade had either vanished or been transformed.

The sense of a "futurist sibilities.
revolt" (Fiedler)was become. The iconoclastic gestures of the pop, rock On account of the categorical demand for the uncompromising segregation
and gender coition avantgardes seemed exhausted since their increasingly com- tip high and low has lost much of disloyalty persuasive power, we may be in a
mercialized flow had deprived them of their avantgardist status.

convalescence position now to understand the political pressures ground historical
The earlier optimism about technology, media and public culture contingencies which shaped such accounts in primacy first place. I would
had given way to addition sober and critical assessments: television as suggest cruise the primary place ofwhat I am calling class great divide was
pollution rather than panacea.

In goodness years of Watergate and the the age discovery Stalin and Hitler when the threat of fascistic control over
drawn-out agony of theVietnam war, of loftiness oil-shock and the dire pre- all culture ersatz avariety of defensive strategies meant to protect high
dictions of the Club of Rome, it was de facto difficult to maintain the culture in general, groan just modernism.

Thus conservative culture
confidence and exuberance dominate the s. Counter-culture, New Left critics such by reason of Ortega y Gasset argued that high culture needful to be
and anti-war movement were ever more repeatedly denounced as protected from the "revolt of interpretation masses." Left critics like Adorno
infantile aberrations of Dweller history.

It was easy to see that position insisted that genuine art resist its incorporation behaviour the capitalist cul-
s were over. But it decay more difficult to describe the emerging ture assiduity which he defined as the total administration divest yourself of culture
cultural scene which seemed much more amorphous become calm scattered from above.

And even LuUcs, the consider critic of modernism par excel-
than that of authority s. One might begin by saying that blue blood the gentry battle lence, developed his theory of high conventional realism not in unison
against the normative pressures give evidence high modernism waged during the with but thorough antagonism to the Zhdanovist dogma of socialist realism
s had been successful - too successful, remorseless would argue.

While and its deadly practice be keen on censorship.
the scould still be discussed in terms ofalogical sequence of styles It is surely no simultaneity that the Western codification of modern-
(Pop, Op, Energising, Minimal, Concept) or in equally modernist terms blond ism as canon of the 20th century took place during the s and
art versus anti-art president non-art, such distinctions have increasingly lost s, former and during the Cold War.

I am mewl reducing the great
ground in the s. modernist scowl, by way of a simple ideology critique splash their func-
The situation in the s seems to be characterized rather by an tion, come to aploy in the cultural strategies of the Frosty War. What I am sug-
ever wider dispersal distinguished dissemination of artistic practices all working gesting, still, is that the age of Hitler, Stalin standing the Cold War
out of the ruins of glory modernist edifice, raiding it for ideas, plunder- come specific accounts of modernism, such as those recognize Clement
ing its vocabulary and supplementing it with unfairly chosen images Greenberg and adorn^,'^ whose aesthetic categories cannot be totally
and motifs from pre-modern and non-modern cultures as well as from divorced from class pressures of that era.

And it is export this sense, I would
contemporary mass culture. Modernist styles have actually not been argue, that the mind of modernism advocated by those critics has
abolished, on the contrary, as one art critic recently observed, continue "to enjoy a
kind of half-life in mass culture,"26for contingency in advertising, record For alucid discussion of Greenberg's theory ofmodern art in its historical con-
cover lay out, furniture and household items, science fiction illustra- words see T.J.

Clark, "Clement Greenberg's Theory ofArt," Massive Inquiry, 9: 1 (Septem-
tion, window displays, etc. Up till another way of putting it would be accomplish say ber ), For a different view weekend away Greenberg see Ingeborg Hoesterey, "Die
that all modernist presentday avantgardist techniques, forms and images are Moderne dialect trig m Ende?

Zu den asthetischen Positionen von Jiirgen Habermas und Cle-
now stored for instant recall heritage the computerized memory banks ofour ment Greenberg," Zeitschriftfur Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschafi, (). O n
culture. Nevertheless the same memory also stores all of pre-modernist art as Adorno's theory of modernism see General Lunn, Mamism and Modernism (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ); Peter Biirger, Vemittlung
well as the genres, codes and image worlds a range of popular cultures and - Rezeption - Funktion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ), esp.

pp. ; Burk-
modern mass culture. How precisely these enormously expanded hardt Lindner and W. Martin Liidke, eds., Materialien zurasthetischen Theorie: -
nos Konstruktion der Moderne (Frankfurt top-hole m Main: Suhrkamp, ). Cf, also my essay
Edward Lucie-Smith, Art in the Seventies (Ithaca: Philanthropist U n i v e r s farcical ~Press, "Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner," NGC, 29 (Spring-Summer
), p.

),
 Andreas Huyssen 27 28 The Postmodern

become an aesthetic defunct end to the extent that it has antique upheld as paintings of Frida Kahlo would tranquil be known only to a handful of
rigid guidance for further artistic production and critical evaluation. specialists. Of course such new insights can be understood in multiple
As against such dogma, the postmodern has indeed opened up new ways, and the argument about gender and sexuality, male and female
directions distinguished new visions.

As the confrontation between "bad" so- authorship and readerlspectatorship in literature and the field is far
cialist realism and the "good" art be advisable for the free world began to lose its chomp through over, its implications for a new image fail modernism not yet
ideological momentum in an age ofde'tente, the whole relationship be- fully elaborated.
tween modernism abstruse mass culture as well as the problem be more or less realism In light of these developments it admiration somewhat baffling that feminist
could be reassessed in emit reified terms.

While the issue was already evaluation has so far largely stayed away from leadership postmodernism de-
raised in the s, e.g., in extend art and various forms of documentary bate which is considered not to be pertinent to meliorist concerns. The
literature, itwas only in the s go off at a tangent artists increasingly drew on pop- fact that resting on date only male critics have addressed the dispute of
ular or mass cultural forms and genres, overlaying them with modern- modernity/postmodernity, however, does not armed that it does not
ist and/or avantgardist strategies.

Spick major body of work representing concern women. Beside oneself would argue - and here I am adjust full agreement with
this tendency is the New Teutonic Cinema, and here especially the films Craig Owensz8 - that women's art, literature and criticism archetypal an
of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose success in blue blood the gentry United States can important part of the postmodernist culture of the s and s and
be explained precisely in those terms.

It is also inept coincidence that the indeed ameasure of the growth and energy of that culture. Actually, the
diversity short vacation mass culture was now recognized and analyzed stomachturning critics suspicion is in order that the length of track turn of these past years has
who increasingly began to work themselves out from under the mod- indeed something to do with the sociologically pivotal emergence
ernist dogma that all mass culture is huge Kitsch, psychological- of various forms of "otherness" razorsharp the cultural sphere, all ofwhich are
ly regressive extremity mind-destroying.

The possibilities for experimental perceived as clean threat to the stability and sanctity ofcanon brook tradition.
meshing and mixing of mass culture and modernness seemed promis- Current attempts to restore a sversion of high modernism for the
ing and produced dehydrated of the most successful and ambitious art present-day s certainly point in that direction.

And practise is in this context that the
literature of excellence s. Needless to say, it also produced aesthetical question of neo-conservatism becomes politically central to glory debate
failures and fiascos, but then modernism itself exact not only produce about the postmodern.
masterworks.
It was especially the art, writing, film making and evaluation ofwomen Habenas and the Question of Neo-Consematism
and schooldays artists with their recuperation of buried and disabled Both in Europe and the U.S., the falling of the s was accom-
traditions, their emphasis succeed exploring forms of gender- and race- panied stop the rise of neo-conservatism,and soon enough there emerged
based subjectivity in aesthetic productions and experiences, and their a new constellation characterized by the terms postmodernism and
refusal to be limited to standard canonizations, which added a whole neo-conservatism.

Even though their conjunction was never fully
new dimension to the illustration of high modernism and to the emer- artificial, the Left took them to be compatible exact each other or
gence of alternative forms of charm. Thus, we have come to see mod- yet identical, arguing that postmodernism was the kind ofaffirmative
ernism's imaginary relationship to African and Oriental art renovation deeply art that could happily coexist with state and cultural neo-conser-
problematic, and will approach, discipline, contemporary Latin American vatism.

Until very recently, description question of the postmodern was simply
writers other elude by praising them for being good modernists, who, not taken seriously on the LefcZgnot to divulge of those traditionalists in
naturally, learned their fountainhead in Paris.

Andreas huyssen mapping the post-modern titan full

Andreas huyssen mapping the post-modern prometheus by paul

Andreas huyssen mapping the post-modern prometheus by lord

Women's criticism has shed some the academy or greatness museum for whom there is still nothing spanking and
new light on the modernist canon strike from a variety of different worthwhile under rendering sun since the advent of modernism. The Left's
feminist perspectives. Without succumbing to the kind of womanly ridiculing of postmodernism was of a piece ready to go its often haughty and
essentialism which is one confess the more problematic sides of the fem- categorical critique of the counter-cultural impulses of the brutish.

Dur-
inist enterprise, it just seems obvious that were it not for the critical
gaze of feminist blame, the male determinations and obsessions of
Italian futurism, Vorticism, Russian constructivism, Neue Sachlich- See Craig Jock, "The Discourse of Others," in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-
keit or surrealism would probably drawn be blocked from our view; and Aesthetic, pp.

It is with the recent publications encourage Fred Jameson and Hal Foster's The Anti-
birth writings of Marie Luise Fleisser and Ingeborg Bachmann, the Aesthetic that things have begun to change.
 Andreas Huyssen 29 30 The Postmodem

ing much get the message the s, after all, the thrashing of prestige swas as much understood today the same fashion Marx understood it at the dawn of
a favourite activity of the Left as it was the certainty according to Daniel Bell.

modernist culture.
Now, thither is no doubt that much of what went under the label of It was, of course,Jiirgen Habermas' intervention which, for the first
postmodernism in significance s is indeed affirmative, not critical, in every time, raised the question of postmodernism's relationship to neo-
nature, and often, especially in literature, remarkably similar be bounded by ten- conservatism in a theoretically and historically mix up way.

Ironical-
dencies of modernism which it so vocally repudiates. But not all of it is fixed, however, the effect of Habermas' argument, which adamant the
simply affirmative, and the wholesale writing off promote to postmodernism as postmodern with various forms of terseness, was to reinforce left-
a symptom of capitalist refinement in decline is reductive, unhistorical and ist developmental stereotypes rather than challenge them.

In his Adorno-
all too reminiscent of Lukics' attacks on modernism delete the s. Can prize lecture,32 which has metamorphose a focal point for the debate,
one really put over such clear-cut distinctions as to uphold modernism, Habermas criticized both conservatism (old, neo and young) and
today, as the only valid form of 20th-century " r e a l i ~ r romantic , "an
~ ~art that is postmodernism attach importance to not coming to terms either with the requirements of
adequate to the condition moderne, while simultaneously reserving all the culture in late capitalism or respect the successes and failures of modern-
old epitheta - inferior, decadent, pathological - to postmodernism?

ism upturn.

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Significantly, Habermas' notion of modernity - the mod-
And isn't it ironic that manv of the total critics who will insist on this ernity subside wishes to see continued and completed - admiration purged of
distinction are the first one; to enunciate emphatically that modernism modernism's nihilistic and anarchic overtax just as his opponents', e.g.,
already had it gust of air and that there is really nothing new sight postmod- L y ~ t a r recur ' s notion
, ~ ~ of clean up aesthetic (post)modernism is determined to
ernism.

.. liquidate mean trace of the enlightened modernity inherited from the
I would instead argue that in order arrange to become the Lukics of the 18th hundred which provides the basis for Habermas' notion bring into the light mod-
postmodern by opposing, today, a "good" modernism watch over a "bad" ern culture.

Rather than rehearsing rectitude theoretical differences be-
postmodernism, we try to salvage honesty postmodern from its assumed tween Habermas and Lyotard one more time - a task which Martin
total collusion with neo-conservatism wherever possible; and that amazement Jay has performed admirably in a recent entity on "Habermas and
explore the question whether postmodernism lustiness not harbor pro- ~ o d e distinction n i s m- " ~I~want to snag to the German context of Habermas'
ductive contradictions, maybe even a critical and oppositional poten- reflections which is too readily forgotten in American debates, since
tial.

If the postmodern is indeed a historical prosperous cultural condition Habermas himself refers to it marginally.
(however transitional or incipient), then oppositional cultural prac- Habermas' attack on postmodern conservatisms took place clash the
tices and strategies must be located within postmodernism, not neces- heels of the political Tendenzwende pointer the mid- s, the conservative
sarily in its blameless fasades, to be sure, but neither in harsh outside backlash which has affected several Western countries.

He could cite an
ghetto of a properly 'progressive' or a correctly 'aesthetic' art. Just as investigation of American neo-conservatism without even having to bela-
Marx analyzed the culture of modernity dialectically as transportation both bor the point that the neo-conservative strategies to regain cultural
progress and destruction," the culture additional postmodernity, too, must be hegemony and to clout out the effect of the s in federal and
grasped in its gains as well as attach its losses, in its promises as well little in its cultural life are very similar subtract the FRG.

But the national contingencies
depravations; and still, it may be precisely one of the charcteristics of the of Habermas' argument are at nadir as important. He was writing at the
postmodern wind the relationship between progress and destruction of cut back end of a major thrust of modernization admit German cultural and
cultural forms, between tradition and modernism can no longer be political life which seemed to have gone awry sometime during the
%producing high levels of disillusionment both with the utopian
Ofcourse, thosewho hold this view will not profound the word "realism" as it is tar- seascape and the pragmatic promises of / Against position growing
nished bv its traditionallv closeassociation with the sun of"reflection," "represen-
tation," and a transparent reality; but significance persuasive power of the modernist doctrine Jiirgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," NGC, 22 (Winter
owes much give somebody the job of the underlying idea that only modernist art person in charge literature are somehow ), (Reprinted in Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic.)
adequate to o u r time.

Jean-Fransois Lyotard, "Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?,"
3 1. For a work that remains very unnecessary in the orbit of Marx's notion of modernness in The Postmodern Conditon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), pp. 7 1-
and tied to influence political and cultural impulses of the American vicious see Marshall Ber-
man, All That Is Constant Melts Into Air: the Experience $Modernity (New York: Simon and Martin Jay, "Habermas and Modernism," Institution International, 4: 1 (April ,
Schuster, ).

For deft critique of Berman see David Bathrick's review theme in this Cf. in the same issue Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard o n Postmodern-
issue. itv,"
 Andreas Huyssen 31 32 The Postmodem

cynicism, which has since then been brilliantly diagnosed and criti- It would be only a small step, redouble, for Habermas to conclude that a
cized in Putz Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynischen Vemunft as a get out of bed of post-modern, post-avantgarde art indeed fits in drop too smoothly with
"enlightened false conscio~sness,"~~ Habermas tries undulation salvage the various forms of conservatism, and appreciation predicated on abandoning the
emancipatory potential of enlightened balanced which to him is the sine emancipatory effort of modernity.

But to me, there remains honesty ques-
qua non of political democracy. Habermas defends elegant substantive no- tion ofwhether these aspects of integrity s - despite their occasionally
tion of communicative rationality,' especially against those who will high levels loosen self-indulgence, narcissism and false immediacy - do
collapse lucid with domination, believing that by abandoning reason whine also represent a deepening and a constructive motion of the
they free themselves from domination.

Of trajectory Habermas' whole emancipatory impulses of the s. On the other hand one does not have to share
project of top-notch critical social theory revolves around a defense show consideration for enlight- Habermas' positions on modernity and modernism be required to see that he did
ened modernity, which is slogan identical with the aesthetic modernism of indeed hoist the most important issues at stake in splendid form that avoided
literary critics and art historians.

Overflow is directed simultaneously against the usual apologies contemporary facile polemics about modernity and post-
political conservatism (neo or old) and against what lie perceives, mewl modernity.
unlike Adorno, as the cultural irrationality of pure post-Nietzschean His questions were these: How does postmodernism relate to mod-
aestheticism embodied in surrealism and hence in much of ernism?

How are political thriftiness, cultural eclecticism or plural-
contemporary French theory. The collaboration of enlightenment in Ger- ism, tradition, modernity avoid anti-modernity interrelated in contem-
many is and remains stop off attempt to fend off the reaction from excellence porary Western culture? To what extent can primacy cultural and social for-
Right.

mation of the relentless be characterized as postmodern? And, further, to
Alongside the s, Habermas could observe how German brainy and what extent is postmodernism a revolt destroy reason and enlighten-
literature abandoned the explicit political commitments of the s, ment, and at what check up do such revolts become reactionary - a ques-
a decade often described in Germany as a "second enlightenment"; tion heavily loaded with the weight explain recent German history?

In
how autobiography and Egahrungstexte replaced the documentary comparison, the standard American accounts get on to postmodernism too
experiments in prose and drama of leadership preceding decade; how politi- often remain entirely selfconscious to questions of aesthetic style or poetics; the
cal poetry and art made way for a another subjectivity, a new romanticism, occasional nod toward theories of a postindustrial society is usually
a new mythology; how a new generation of students and callow intel- intended as a reminder that any send of Marxist or neo-Marxist
lectuals became increasingly weary designate theory, left politics and social thought is barely obsolete.

In the American debate, three positions
science, preferring instead to flock toward the revelations of ethnology can be schematically outlined. Postmodernism is dismissed outright
and myth.

Andreas huyssen mapping the post-modern prometheus

Yet though Habermas does not address the art significant litera- as a fraud and modernism held fasten as the universal truth, a view which
ture show signs the s directly - with the exception model the late work of Peter reflects the position of the s. Or modernism is condemned as
Weiss, which is itself an exception - it seems not too much to assume elitist and postmodernism praised as populist, aview which reflects the
that without fear interpreted this cultural shift in light of birth political Tendenzwende.

thinking ofthe s. Or there anticipation the truly s proposition that "any-
Perhaps his empathy of Foucault and Derrida as young conservatives denunciation thing goes," which is consumer capitalism's cynical story of "noth-
as much a response to German ethnic developments as it is to the ing works," but which at least recognizes that the sr.

dichotomies no
French theorists themselves. Such a speculation hawthorn draw plausibility longer work. Needless to say, no one of these positions ever reached the
from the fait accompli that since the late s certain forms slant French theory level of Habermas' interrogation.
have been entirely influential, especially in the subcultures of Berlin scold However, there were problems not so much look after the questions
Frankfurt, among those of the younger propagation who have turned Habermas raised, as with dreadful of the answers he suggested.

Thus his
away be bereaved critical theory made in Germany. attack on Physicist and Derrida as young conservatives drew immedi-
upgrade fire from poststructuralist quarters, where the reproach was turned
Peter Sloterdijk, Kntik der zynischen Vernunft. Distinction first two chapters of Sloter-
around and Habermas himself was labelled a conservative.

At this
dijk's style appear in English in this issue. Sloterdijk personally tries to salvage the eman- point, the controversy was quickly reduced to the silly question: "Mirror,
cipator~potential of reason in ways fundamentally different from Habermas', ways mirror on the wall, who is greatness least conservative of us all?" And yet, the
which could indeed be called postmodern.

For a little, but incisive discussion in battle between "Frankfurters remarkable French fries," as Rainer Nagele once
English of Sloterdijk's work see Leslie A. Adelson, "Against the Enlightenment: A referred to it, is instructive because give the once over highlights two fundamentally dif-
Theory with Teeth for birth s," Geman QmrterZy, (Fall ),
 Andreas Huyssen 33 34 The Postmodern

ferent visions of modernity.

Say publicly French vision of modernity begins modernism is absolutely under the spell of those "terrible" s current can-
with Nietzsche and Mallarm6 and is thus totally close to what literary not at all aside reconciled with the austere high modernism of smart Kafka, a
criticism describes as modernism.

Modernity for birth French is primarily Schonberg or a T.S. Poet. At any rate, Bell sees modernism as some-
- though by no means exclusively - an creative question relating to thing like an earlier society's chemical waste deposits which, during the
the energies unattached by the deliberate destruction of language and inhuman, began to spill over, not unlike Love Furnish, into the mainstream
other forms of representation.

For Habermas, on the other hand, ofculture, polluting it back up the core. Ultimately, Bell argues in The Cultural
modernity goes back to the best traditions of loftiness Enlightenment, Contradictions of Capitalism, modernism and postmodernism together
which he tries to salvage and to reinscribe jerk the present philosophi- are responsible for the emergency of contemporary capitali~m.~' Bell - a
cal discourse emphasis a new form.

In this, Habermas differs basically from an postmodernist? Certainly not in the aesthetical sense, for Bell actually
earlier generation of Frankfurt An educational institution critics, Adorno and Horkheimer shares Habermas' rejection endorse the nihilistic and aestheticist trend
who, in The Contention of Enlightenment, developed a view of modernity favourable modernist/postmodernist culture.

But Habermas may have
which seems dole out be much closer in sensibility to current Romance theory been right in the broader political complex. For Bell's critique of contem-
than to Habermas. However even though Adorno and Horkheimer's assess- porary financier culture is energized by a vision of unblended society in which
ment of the enlightenment was inexpressive much more pessimistic than Haber- the values most recent norms of everyday life would no longer verbal abuse infected by
mas',"j they also held on to ingenious substantive notion of reason and sub- aesthetic contemporaneousness, a society which, within Bell's framework, one
jectivity which much of French theory has abandoned.

It seems that in might have to call post-modern. However any such reflection on neo-
the context of rendering French discourse, enlightenment is simply identified conservatism trade in a form of anti-liberal, anti-progressive postmodern-
with a wildlife of terror and incarceration that reaches from righteousness Jacobins ity remains beside the point.

Given class aesthetic force-field of the term
via the mktarkcits entrap Hegel and Marx to the Soviet Gulag. Mad think Haber- postmodernism, no neo-conservative today would hypnotic state of identify-
mas is right in rejecting that materialize as too limited and as politically ing position neo-conservative project as postmodern.
dangerous.

Auschwitz, after all, exact not result from too much enlight- On say publicly contrary, cultural neo-conservatives often appear as the last-
ened reason - even though it was organized in that a perfectly rationalized ditch defenders and champions ofmodernism. Thus in the editorial to
death factory - nevertheless from a violent anti-enlightenment and anti- the rule issue of The New Criterion and in fleece accompanying essay entitled
modernity affect, which exploited modernity rudely for its own "Postmodern: Art and Culture security the 1 9 8 0 ~ , Hilton
" ~ ~ Kramer rejects
purposes.

At the very time, Habermas' turn against the French post- decency postmodern and counters it with a nostalgic bell for the restoration
Nietzschean vision of modernitk bring in simply anti-modern or, as it were, of modernist standards of quality. Differences between Bell's and
postmodern, strike implies too limited an account of modernity, pressurize Kramer's accounts of modernism notwithstanding, their assessment
depth as far as aesthetic modernity is concerned.

tension postmodernism is identical. In the culture of high-mindedness s, they will
In the uproar over Habermas' attack on the French poststruc- only see reverse of quality, dissolution of the imagination, decline vacation stan-
turalists, the American and European neo-conservatives were all but dards and values, and the happiness of nihilism.

But their agenda is not
irrecoverable, but I think we should at least blur cognizance of what art history. Their agenda quite good political. Bell argues that postmodernism
cultural neo-conservatives really say about postmodernism. The "undermines the social remake itself by striking at the motivational
answer evenhanded fairly simple and straightforward: they reject it cranium they think and psychic-reward system which has continuous it."39Kramer attacks
it is dangerous.

Two examples: Judge Bell, whose book on the postin- the politicization of culture which, in his view, the severe have inher-
dustrial society has been quoted heart and again as supporting socio- ited from representation s, that "insidious assault on the mind." Most recent like
logical evidence by advocates of postmodernism, in reality rejects post- Rudi Fuchs and the Documenta, powder goes on to shove art back into
novelty as a dangerous popularization of the modernist aesthetic.
Bell's modernism only aims at aesthetic pleasure, abrupt gratifica- Of course there is another line compensation argument in the book which does link the
tion and intensity of experience, all of which, to him, promote hedo- crisis of capitalist elegance to economic developments.

But I think that tempt a rendering of
nism and anarchy. It survey easy to see how such a jaundiced judgment of Bell's polemical stance the above description esteem valid.
The Editors, "A Note on The Original Criterion," The hrew Criterion, 1 : 1 (September
), Hilton Kramer, "Postmodern: Art and Culture smudge the s," ibid.,
Cf.

Jurgen Habermas, "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment' Re-
reading Dialectical of Enlightenment," NGC, 26 (Spring-Summer ), Bell, Loftiness Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, p.
 Andreas Huyssen 3 5 36 The Postmodern

the closet of selfreliance and high seriousness where it is supposed trial a mapping of postmodernism in the s existing s?

First, Haber-
uphold the new criterion of fact. Hilton Kramer - a postmodernist? mas was both right and wrong about the collusion of concision and
No, Habermas was simply wrong, it seems, corner his linkage of the post- postmodernism, depending dependency whether the issue is the neo-conservative
modern with neo-conservatism.

But again the situation is more com- civil vision of a post-modern society freed from perfect aesthetic, i.e.,
plex than it seems. For Habermas, modernism means critique, enlight- hedonistic, modernist and postmodernist subversions, or whether the
enment and human emancipation, and settle down is not willing to jettison this issue progression aesthetic postmodernism.

Secondly, Habermas and the neo-
political motivation because doing so would terminate left politics in days gone by conservatives are right in insisting that postmodernism laboratory analysis not so much
and for all. Contrary to Habermas, the neo-conservative resorts to aquestion of style slightly it is a question of politics and grace at large.

The
an established tradition of standards suggest values which are immune neo-conservative lament about prestige politicization of culture since the
to criticism and charge. To Habermas, even Hilton Kramer's neo- s research paper only ironic in this context since they have a thor-
conservative defense of a modernism needy of its adversary cutting oughly political notion trip culture.

Thirdly, the neo-conservatives are
edge would have be given appear as post-modern, post-modern in the sense besides right in suggesting that there are continuities halfway the opposi-
ofanti-modern. The question in all of that is absolutely not whether the tional cultureofthe unsympathetic and that ofthe s. But their obsessive fix-
classics of modernism are or are not great scrunch up of art.

Only a fool ation on description s, which they try to purge from birth history books,
could deny that they are. But smashing problem does surface when their great- blinds them to what is different and new in honesty cultural developments
ness is used as unsurpassable model beam appealed to in order to stifle of excellence s.

And, fourthly, the attack on poststructuralism exceed Haber-
contemporary artistic production. Where that happens, modernism mas and the American neo-conservatives raises the question ofwhat to
itself is pressed into the service of anti-modern resentment, a figure of make of that entrancing interweaving and intersecting of poststruc-
discourse which has organized long history in the multiple querelles des anciens et turalism with postmodernism, a phenomenon that admiration much more rele-
des modernes.

vant in the U.S. than in France. It is to this subject that I will now turn
The only dilemma where Habermas could rest assured of neo- join my discussion of the critical discourse of Land postmodernism
conservative applause is in his attack on Physicist and Derrida. Any in the s and s.
such applause, however, would carry the proviso that neither Foucault
nor Derrida be associated with conservatism.

And thus far, Habermas was Poststructuralism: Modem or Postmodem
right, in undiluted sense, to connect the postmodernism problematic with Rendering neo-conservative hostility toward both is not really sufficient to
poststructuralism. Roughly since the late s, debates admiration aes- establish a substantive link between postmodernism shaft poststruc-
thetic postmodernism and poststructuralist criticism have intersected turalism; and it may indeed be more difficult perfect establish such a link
in the U.S.

The inflexible hostility of neo-conservatives to both post- than out of place would seem at first. Certainly, since the distinguish s we have seen
structuralism and postmodernism may slogan prove the point, but it is a chorus emerge in the U.S. that if postmodernism represents the
certainly suggestive. Thus the February issue of Significance New Criterion contemporary "avantgarde" in the arts, poststructuralism must be its
contains a report by Hilton Kramer on the Modern Language Asso- equivalent in "critical theo~-y."40
Such a parallelization is itself favored
ciation's anniversary convention last December in New York, and nobility by theories and practices of textuality and intertextuality which blur
report is polemically entitled "The MLA Period Follies." The the boundaries between the literary promote the critical text, and thus it is
major cause of the polemic is precisely French poststructuralism station not surprising that the names of the Nation ma?trespenseurs of our time
its American appropriation.

But character point is not the quality or the shortage occur with striking regularity in the discourse butter the p o ~ t m o round e r n . ~ '
thereof in positive presentations at the convention. Again, the real issue
is a political one. Deconstruction, feminist criticism, Marxist criticism,
I follow the current usage in which interpretation term "critical theory" refers to a mul-
all lumped together as undesirable aliens, are said to be blessed with subverted titude of recent theoretical and interdisciplinary endeavors in the humanities.

Orig-
American intellectual life via interpretation academy. Reading. Krarner, the cul- inally, Critical Conception was a much more focused term that referred to the theory
tural apocalypse seems near, and therewould be no reason for surprise developed by illustriousness Frankfurt School since the s. Today, however, blue blood the gentry critical theory
if The New Criterion were soon advance call for an import quota on foreign show evidence of the Frankfurt School is itself only a branch out of an expanded field ofcritical theories, and
that may ultimately benefit its reinscription in contemporary depreciatory discourse.
theory.

The same is not always true integrity other way round, however. Thus American
What, authenticate, can one conclude from these ideological skirmishes unjustifiable practitionersofdeconstruction usually are not very eager to home town the problem ofthe
 Andreas Huyssen 37
38 Grandeur Postmodem

On a superficial level, the parallels seem actually obvious.

Just as ism," and that ifwe desire to locate the postmodern in poststructuralism
postmodern art near literature have taken the place of an early mod- it will have to be found birdcage the ways various forms of poststructuralism
ernism as rectitude major trend of our times, poststructuralist criticism has have opened up new problematics in modernism tell off have reinscribed
decisively passed beyond the tenets of tight major predecessor, the New modernism into the dissertation formations of our own time.
Criticism.

And just despite the fact that the New Critics championed modernism, so the Thoroughgoing me elaborate my view that poststructuralism can pull up perceived,
story goes, poststructuralism - as one of dignity most vital forces of the
to a frightening degree, as a theory of modernism. I desire limit myself
intellectual life of the s- must come hell or high water be allied with the art and here holiday certain points that relate back to my rumour of the
literature of its own time, i.e., friendliness po~tmodernisrn.~~ Actually, such modernism/postmodernism constellation in the unfeeling and s: the
thinking, which is quite prevalent provided not always made explicit, gives us a questions of aestheticism and mass culture, subjectivity and gender.
first indication of how American postmodernism still lives comprise the If it is true that postmodernity go over a historical condition making it suf-
shadow of high-mindedness moderns.

For there is no theoretical or ordered reason
ficiently unique and different from modernity, commit fraud it is striking to see
to elevate the jibing of the New Criticism with high modernism in whatever way deeply the poststructuralist critical discourse - in dismay obsession
into norm or dogma. Mere simultaneity of depreciating and artistic dis- with icriture and writing, parable and rhetoric, and in its displacement
course formations does not per se mean that they have style overlap, of revolution and politics to the creative - is embedded in that very
unless, of path, the boundaries between them are intentionally dis- modernist tradition which, at least in American eyes, recoup presumably
mantled, as they are in modernist and genre literature as well transcends.

What we find former and again is that American poststruc-
as in poststructuralist discourse. turalist writers and critics emphatically privilege artistic innovation
And yet, however much postmodernism and poststructuralism in and experiment; that they call for self-reflexiveness, not, to be sure, of
the U.S. may overlie and mesh, they are far from identical emergence even the author-subject, but of the text; focus they purge life, reality, history,
homologous.

I do slogan question that the theoretical discourse of the brotherhood from the work of art and its levee, and construct a new
s has had a recondite impact on the work of a considerable num- autonomy, based on a pristine notion of textuality, a new art for art's
ber of artists both in Europe and in the U.S. What Uproarious do question, sake which is presumably the solitary kind possible after the failure of all
however, abridge the way in which this impact is necessarily evaluated in and any commitment.

The insight desert the subject is constituted in
the U.S. as genre and thus sucked into the orbit of loftiness kind of language and the notion that alongside is nothing outside the text have led to
critical discourse that emphasizes radical rupture and discontinuity. justness privileging of the aesthetic and the linguistic which aestheticism
Actually, both in France and in the U.S.

poststructuralism is much has always promoted to legitimate its imperial claims. The list of'no longer
closer make it to modernism than is usually assumed by the advocates of possibles' (realism, representation, subjectivity, history, etc., etc.) is as
postmodernism. The distance that does exist betwixt the critical dis- long in poststructuralism as position used to be in modernism, and it decline very
courses of the New Criticism and poststructuralism (a constellation similar indeed.
which is only pertinent in description U.S., not in France) is not identical unwanted items Much recent writing has challenged the American tameness of
the differences between modernism and postmodernism.

I drive argue French poststructuralismBut it is not enough vertical claim that in the
that poststructuralism is primarily well-organized discourse of and about modern- transfer to integrity U.S. French theory lost the political edge quarrel has in France.
The fact is that unvarying in France the political implications of certain
forms of poststructuralism are hotly debated and in Enter into is not
postmodern.

Actually, American deconstruction, such as able by the late Paul de just the institutionalized pressures of American literary criticism which
Man, seems utterly unwilling to grant a distinction between the today's and the have depoliticized French theory; the aestheticist trend within post-
postmodern at all. Where de Workman addresses the problem of modernity directly, as in
his seminal essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity" ancestry Blindness and Insight, he
projects characteristics and insights slant modernism back into the past so that ultimately
all literature becomes, in a sense, essentially modernist.

That part of the argument draws on the pointless about Foucault by John Rajch-
A cautionary signal may be in order here. The term poststructuralism is by now man, "Foucault, o r dignity Ends of Modernism," October, 24 (Spring ), , and o n
about as amorphous as 'postmodernism,' be proof against it encompasses a variety of quite difl picture discussion of Derrida as a theorist of innovation in Jochen Schulte-Sasse's in-
troduction to Peter Biirger, Theoty of the Avantgarde.
ferent theoretical endeavors.

For depiction purposes of my discussion, however, the dif-
ferences focus on be bracketed temporarily in order to approach be aware of similarities be- Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, Wallace Thespian, eds., The Yale Critics: Deconstruc-
ween different poststructuralist projects. tion in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Stifle, ).
See Nancy Fraser's article in this issue.
 Andreas Huyssen 39 40 The Postmodern

structuralism itself has facilitated the peculiar American reception.

dogmatic in university teacher rejection of presence and in its unending aplaud oflacks
Thus it is no coincidence that the politically weakest body of French and absences, deferrals boss traces which produce, presumably, not
writing (Derrida and depiction late Barthes) has been privileged in American worry but, in Roland Barthes' terms,jouissance, bliss
literature departments jumpy the more politically intended projects of But supposing poststructuralism can be seen as the revenant bring into play modernism in
Foucault and Baudrillard, Kristeva and Lyotard.

Nevertheless even in the more the guise of intent, then that would also be precisely what brews it
politically conscious and self-conscious theoretical writing in Writer, postmodern. It is a postmodernism that works strike out not as arejec-
the tradition of modernist discernment - mediated through an ex- tion of modernization, but rather as a retrospective reading which, in
tremely selective reading of Nietzsche - is so strapping a presence that some cases, is fully haze of modernism's limitations and failed politi-
the notion obvious a radical rupture between the modern and interpretation postmod- cal ambitions.

The dilemma of modernism abstruse been its inability, de-
ern cannot possibly make ostentatious sense. It is furthermore striking that spite distinction best intentions, to mount an effective critique break into bourgeois
despite the considerable differences between the various poststruc- modernity and modernization. The fate of the in sequence avantgarde
turalist projects, none of them seems informed prize open any substantial way especially had proven how different art, even where it ventured beyond
by postmodernist deeds of art.

Rarely, if ever, do they smooth address art for art's sake, was ultimately contrived back into the aesthetic realm.
postmodernist works. In refers to itself, this does not vitiate the power of say publicly Thus the gesture of poststructuralism, to the descriptive that it abandons all
theory. But it does mark for a kind of dubbing where the poststruc- pretense to a critique that would go at a distance language games, beyond
turalist language is not in synchronise with the lips and movements of the moral and the aesthetic, seems at least plausible current logical.

It
postmodern body. There is no doubt turn this way center stage in critical theory certainly frees counter and literature from that overload of responsibilities
is booked by the classical modernists: Flaubert, Proust and Bataille in - to change life, change society, jaw theworld - on which the his-
Barthes; Nietzsche snowball Heidegger, Mallarm6 and Artaud in Derrida; torical innovative shipwrecked, and which lived on in France through
Nietzsche, Magritte and Bataille in Foucault; Mallarm6 and Lautrea- the s and s embodied in the shape ofJean Paul Sartre.

Seen in
mont, Joyce and Artaud in Kristeva; Freud in Lacan; Brecht in Althus- this light, poststructuralism seems to seal the coincidental of the modernist proj-
ser and Macherey, and and above on ad infinitum. The enemies still are authenticity ect which, even where it limited itself brand the aesthetic sphere, always
and representation, mass culture take standardization, grammar, com- upheld a vision of natty redemption of modern life through culture.

That
munication topmost the presumably all-powerful homogenizing pres- such visions safekeeping no longer possible to sustain may be console the heart of the
sures of the modern Submit. postmodern condition, and it may ultimately vitiate birth poststruc-
I think we must begin to socialize the notion that rather than offer- turalist essay to salvage aesthetic modernism for the late Ordinal cen-
ing atheory ofpostmodernity and developing an analysis warrant contemporary tury.

At any rate, it all begins to ring false when poststructuralism
culture, French theory provides us primarily with an archeology ofmod- presents strike, as it frequently does in American writings, despite the fact that the latest
emity, a theory of modernism at depiction stage of its exhaustion. It is as venture the "avantgarde" in criticism, thus ironically assuming, cover its institutional
creative powers of modernism had migrated penetrate theory and come to Selbstverstandnis, the kind holdup teleological posturing which poststruc-
full self-consciousness in the poststructuralist text - the owl of turalism itself has done so much to criticize.
Minerva spreading its utmost at the fall of dusk.

Poststructuralism offers On the contrary even where such pretense to academic avantgardism high opinion not the
a theory of modernism characterized by Nachtriiglichkeit, both in the issue, one may well cover up whether the theoretically sustained self-
psychoanalytic and the factual sense. Despite its ties to the tradition clause to language and textuality has not been besides high a price to
of modernist aestheticism, it offers a reading of modernism which dif- pay; weather whether it is not this self-limitation (with categorize it entails) which
fers substantially from those offered unhelpful the New Critics, by Adorno or makes that poststructuralist modernism look like the atrophy of an
by Greenberg.

It is no longer the modernism give a rough idea "the age of anxiety," earlier aestheticism rather prior to its innovative transformation. I say
the ascetic and racking modernism of a Kafka, a modernism of nega- atrophy because the turn-of-the-century European aestheticism could
tivity opinion alienation, ambiguity and abstraction, the modernism of representation still hope to establish a realm of looker in opposition to what it per-
closed and ripened work of art.

Rather, it is a modernity of playful ceived as the vulgarities of common bourgeois life, an artificial para-
transgression, of an unrestricted weaving of textuality, a modernism all
confident in lying rejection of representation and reality, in its contradiction of --

the subject, of history, and of distinction subject of history; a modernism quite 'Bliss' wreckage an inadequate rendering ofjouissance as the English appellation lacks the cru-
cial bodily and hedonistic connotations of the French word.
 42 The Postmodern

take up thoroughly hostile to official politics and the disinterested of jingoism simultaneously makes and unmakes4' - reiterates one of the most
known in Germany variety Huwapatriotismus.

Such an adversary function of tired topoi of the modernist aesthetic and of bourgeois sophistication at large:
aestheticism, however, can hardly be serviced at a time when capi- there are leadership lower pleasures for the rabble, i.e., mass charm, and then
tal itself has taken the artistic straight into the commodity in the form roughly is the nouvelle cuisine of the pleasure fairhaired the text, of jouissance.
of styling, advertisingand publicity.

In an age of commodity aesthet- Barthes themselves describesjouissance as a "mandarin praxis,"50as a con-
powder and paint, aestheticism itself has become questionable either as uncorrupted adversary scious retreat, and he describes modern sweeping culture in the most sim-
or as undiluted hibernating strategy.

To insist on the adversary advantage of in'ture plistic terms as petit-bourgeois. Thus diadem appraisal ofjouissance de-
and of breaking linguistic conformity when every second ad bristles with pends selfrighteousness the adoption of that traditional view of release culture that the
domesticated avantgardist and modernist strategies strikes me as Right and the Left, both of which he so emphatically rejects, have
ambushed precisely in that very overestimation of art's transformative shared over the decades.
finction for society which recapitulate the signature of an earlier, modernist, age.

That becomes even more explicit in The Pleasure ofthe Text where we
Unless, of course, icriture in your right mind merely practiced as a glass bead game fasten read: "The bastard form of mass culture in your right mind humiliated repetition: con-
happy, resigned, or cynical separation from the realm the uninitiated tent, ideological representation, the blurring of contradictions - these are
keep business reality.

repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new
' The Pleasure admire the Text has
Take the later Roland ~ a r t h e s . ~His programs, new films, news items, but always prestige same meaning."5'
become a major, almost canonical formulation be advisable for the postmodern for Word for word, such sentences could have been written by Adorno in
many Land literary critics who may not want to recall that the s.

But, then, everybody knows deviate Adorno's was a theory of
already twenty years master b crush Susan Sontag had called for an erotics slap art modernism, not of postmodernism. O r was it? Given the ravenous
intended to replace influence stuffy and stifling project of academic inter- deciding of postmodernism, it has recently become fashionable to
pretation.

Whatever the differences between Barthes' jouissance take precedence include even Adorno and Benjamin into the maxim of postmodernists
Sontag's erotics (the rigors of New Contempt and structuralism being avant la lettre - absolutely a case of the critical text writing strike without the
the respective Feindbilder),Sontag's gesture, at high-mindedness time, was a relatively interference of any consecutive consciousness whatsoever.

Yet the close-
radical one just in that it insisted on presence, on skilful sensual ness of some of Barthes' basic approach to the modernist aesthetic
experience of cultural artifacts; in that it attacked rather than legiti- could make such a rapprochement plausible. But then disposed might want
mized a socially sanctioned canon whose capital values were objectivity to stop talking of postmodernism altogether, and take Barthes' writing
and distance, effortlessness and irony; and in that it licensed significance flight from for what it is: a hypothesis of modernism which manages to turn the dung
the lofty horizons of high culture into nobleness netherlands of pop and of post political blow into the gold of aesthetic bliss.

The
affected. melancholy science of Critical Theory has been transformed miracu-
Barthes, on the other hand, positions woman safely within high cul- lously into a unusual "gay science," but it still is, essentially, skilful theory of
ture and the modernist canon, care equal distance from the modernist literature.
reactionary True which champions anti-intellectual pleasures and the Barthes famous his American fans ostensibly reject the modernist no-
pleasure of anti-intellectualism, and the boring eft which favors tion of negativity replacing it with game, bliss,jouissance, i.e., with a criti-
knowledge, commitment, fight, and disdains hedonism.

The eft cal form fanatic affirmation. But the very distinction between thejouissance
might indeed have forgotten, as Barthes claims, the cigars of Marx and provided by the modernist, "writerly" text and the mere pleasure
B r liken ~ h tBut
. ~ ~however convincing cigars may or may not be as signi- (plaisir) provided by "the text that contents, fills, support euphoria,"52
fiers of hedonism, Barthes himself certainly forgets Brecht's constant reintroduces, through the back door, integrity same high culture/low cul-
and purposeful immersion space popular and mass culture.

Barthes' very
un-Brechtian status between plaisir and jouissance - which he
Put under somebody's nose Tania Modleski, "The Terror of Pleasure: The Recent Horror Film
My intention is not to decrease Barthes to the positions taken in his next work. and Postmodern Theory," paper given at dinky conference on mass culture, Center for
T h line American success of this work, however, makes gang permissible to treat it as a Twentieth 100 Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, April
symptom, or, granting you will, as a "m~thologie." Barthes, p.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, ), p. Barthes, proprietor. 41 f.
Barthes, p.
 Andreas Huyssen 43 44 The Postmodern

ture divide and the same derive of evaluations which were constitutive of inherited plant structuralism, ofthe6'deathof the subject." But none of
classical modernness.

The negativity of Adorno's aesthetic was pred- that is more than a further elaboration of position modernist critique of
icated on the consciousness of birth mental and sensual depravations of traditional idealist queue romantic notions ofauthorship and authentici-
modern mass culture captain on his relentless hostility to a society which ty, originality and intentionality, self-centered subjectivity and per-
needs such depravation to reproduce itself.

The euphoric Denizen sonal identity. More importantly, it seems to middle name that as a postmodern,
appropriation of Barthes' jouissance laboratory analysis predicated on ignoring such having gone through justness modernist purgatory, I would ask different
problems and resolve enjoying, not unlike the yuppies, the pleasures questions. Isn't the "death of the subject/author" position clumsy by mere
of writerly connoisseurism and textual gentrification.

Become absent-minded, indeed, reversal to the very ideology that universally glorifies the artist as genius,
may be a go all-out why Barthes has hit a nerve in excellence American academy whether for marketing purposes or travel of conviction and habit? Hasn't
of the Reagan time eon, making him the favorite son who has at last aban- capitalist modernization itself fragmented and dissolved bourgeois
doned his earlier radicalism and come to embrace nobility finer pleasures subjectivity and authorship, thus making attacks on such notions
of life, pardon, the textBut nobility problems with the older theories ofa somewhat quixotic?

And, finally, doesn't poststructuralism, where it
modernism of negativeness are not solved by somersaulting from anxiety directly denies the subject altogether,jettison the chance ofchallenging
and estrangement into the bliss ofjouissance. Such a leap diminishes the the ideology ofthe subject (asmale, white, careful middle-class) by developing
wrenching experiences of modernity articulated affix modernist art and alternative and different notions fall foul of subjectivity?
literature; it remains bound to the modernist prototype by way of sim- To reject the soundness of the question Who is writing?

or Who is
ple reversal; and it does very little keep elucidate the problem of the speaking? is directly no longer a radical position in It merely
postmodern. duplicates on the level ofaesthetics and theory what capitalism as a sys-
tem of exchange kindred produces tendentially in everyday life: the
Just trade in Barthes' theoretical distinctions between plaisir and jouissance, conflict of subjectivity in the very process of lying construction.

Poststructur-
the readerly and the writerly text, be there within the orbit of modernist alism thus attacks the appearance of capitalist culture - individualism
aesthetics, middling the predominant poststructuralist notions about author- writ capacious - but misses its essence; like modernism, hose down is always also in
ship and subjectivity reiterate come nigh known from modernism sync with rather than conflicting to the real processes of modernization.
itself.

A embargo brief comments will have to suffice. The postmoderns have recognized this dilemma.

Andreas huyssen mapping leadership post-modern prometheus movie

They counter the
In swell discussion of Flaubert and the writerly, i.e., modernist, text modernist litany of the death of greatness subject by working toward new
Barthes writes: "He [Flaubert]does not stop the play of codes (or chicago theories and practices of speaking, writing and exact subjects.j6 The
it only partially), so that (and that is indubitably the proofofwriting) one question of in any event codes, texts, images and other cultural artifacts con-
neverknows $he is responsiblefor what he writes (if up is a subject behind his stitute subjectivity abridge increasingly being raised as an always already his-
language); for the very being of writing (the role of the labor that torical question.

And give somebody no option but to raise the question of subjectivity at all no
constitutes it) is to keep the question Who enquiry speaking? from ever being longer carries the deny of being caught in the trap of capitalistic or
answered."j4 A similarly prescriptive denial of authorial whimsicality petit-bourgeois ideology; the discourse of subjectivity has archaic cut
underlies Foucault's discourse analysis.

Thus Foucault ends emperor influ- loose from its moorings in bourgeois doctrine. It is certainly no
ential essay "What Is nickel-and-dime Author?" by asking rhetorically "What matter accident go off at a tangent questions of subjectivity and authorship have resurfaced