I am finally moving on from my modernism list, which, I know, has not received many posts in the past month. I was too tired to write in this forum, and nothing seemed sufficiently coherent.
The last few books I read, however, were generally unsatisfying, largely due to their projective goal: namely, to give an account of "Modernism" as a movement and, in particular, as it led into the "Postmodern." A few brief comments on Hussyen's After the Great Divide will have to suffice.
Since the book is a collection of essays, I felt free to pick the ones which seemed most relevant. Consequently, some of the others, which were focused on specific art works, may have included more of the concrete analysis I feel was lacking. But even so, one can't simply relegate the reading of specific texts to a few chapters and expect your account of "cultural history" to be convincing. But that is my first complaint: what is the benefit of cultural history? How do we define it? What is, after all, culture? Is the idea of culture really a valuable concept to allow us to move forward as critics?
I am being sweeping here merely for the sake of argument. There are, after all, many valuable ways of using the term. But using the term and making it central to one's argument are two different things. For example, the thread running through Hussyen's text is the argument that modernist art, while constituted against mass culture, was always, from its origins, implicated in it in some fashion. Modernism always derived a certain energy, legitimacy, aesthetic from the very thing it claimed as its other. Hence, a "great divide" between "high culture" and "mass culture" which he is seeking to contest, towards the end of carving out a space for a critical contemporary postmodern culture (contemporary for him--the book was written in 1986, so some of the complaints I have are probably due to its particular historical moment).
Hussyen claims in his introduction that to argue that the high/low divide "simply has to do with the inherent 'quality' of the one and the depravations of the other--correct as it may be in the case of many specific works--is to perpetuate the time-worn strategy of exclusion" (vii). While I admit that Hussyen is after specific critics here (such as Greenberg's avant-garde vs kitsch and Adorno's art vs. culture industry), I cannot help but wonder why it is of any value to talk of anything other than specific works. To be sure, we can talk of "practices" and we can talk of "cultural capital" and we can even talk about "modes of distribution" but can we honestly point to "high culture" as a thing, let alone a thing with inherent qualities? In other words, why not simply talk about "specific works," which Hussyen is clearly willing to admit can be evaluated on the basis of quality, and why not talk about those works regardless of whether they were produced within the context of "high" or "mass" culture? And, furthermore, what evaluative criteria are you using when you talk about those specific works, if you are willing to admit that such a judgment can be made?
Hal Foster becomes an interesting counterpoint here in his The Return of the Real, when, again referring to Greenberg, he claims that the criteria of evaluation which may distinguish modernist aesthetics from whatever comes after it is the difference between "quality" (formal traits based on an objective, inherent, and essentially universal standard) and "interest" (a much looser term--is this work of art interesting?). While Foster's book is less interested in the high/low distinction, he does offer a very interesting (!) deferral and recuperation model of understanding modernism vs. contemporary, and thus he tends to bring apparant distinctions together. However, he doesn't go far enough thinking through the "quality" vs. "interest" conflict, which, if we do pursue it further, can cut through Hussyen's great divide in an entirely different way. What if quality equals interest? Could it not be that what makes a work "quality" is not its "reference to standards" but a particular conceptual and affective character which provokes a certain degree of interest, a kind of subjective investment? [Note: Kantian aesthetics can easily be misunderstood here. The aesthetic experience, for Kant, is precisely a blend of conceptuality and affectivity; it is a source of pleasure. Thus, even tho he repeats that it is "disinterested," he is using "disinterested" in a precise sense, that is, to say that the aesthetic pleasure is not based on mere sensation or a specific concept.] In which case, it simply makes no sense, or at least isn't very interesting, to say that "high culture" is superior to "mass culture"--or to spend all kinds of time arguing against that distinction.
Strangely enough, in his account of US 1960s counter-culture and art, Hussyen argues that part of the revolt against "high modernism" was the realization that this art had become "institutionalized"--it was mass produced, participated in establishment culture, etc. Which, he seems to suggest, defeats its purpose. I can't help but recall all of my punk rock teenage years, when major efforts were spent on defining which bands had sold out, whether later albums signed with major labels disqualified the earlier albums from the designation of punk, etc. While this is Hussyen's account of the perception of the 60s, and not necessarily his own, it strikes me as an undertheorization of the work of art, that conceptual and affective quality I referred to earlier, which would lead one to think that absorbtion into mass culture eliminates or reduces its value. I would argue that even when Oprah slaps a sticker on The Sound and the Fury, the novel is still a rigorous, demanding, critical piece of writing that has the potential to make something happen in its readers. Its status as a commodity does not negate or eliminate that. Which is not to mystify art; instead, it is to resist the mystification of capitalism and commodity culture.
But perhaps resistance is always the question we return to, and it is clearly what Hussyen and Foster want. Both of their books end with a call to acknowledge, understand, and promote a critical, creative, resistant postmodernism, a call which reveals an anxiety that a rejection of "modernism" is a rejection of resistance (some of Charles Altieri's arguments follow that line of thinking), a fear that postmodernism is nothing more than the cultural logic of late capitalism, that Pop art and Thomas Pynchon are simply unresistant or complicit parts of the same culture industry that brought you the Iraq war. Foster and Hussyen don't believe this, of course, and neither do I. But where Hussyen in particular falls short, I think, is in not attempting to give an account of what in the world characterizes resistance, critical, even (dare I use the word?) creative works. One may choose to defer the question, but that doesn't make the question go away entirely. I, for one, am far less interested in "modernism" vs "postmodernism," "high" vs "mass," since I think they distract us from what makes art worth talking about in the first place--they are concepts that have led us into critical dead ends. The question is what concept will lead us out.
Posted by pjaussen at June 28, 2007 10:09 AM