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After Great Divide

Huyssen’s Warning

• Not meant to be static binary of modernism v market
• “My argument was rather that there had been, since the mid-nineteenth century in Europe, a powerful imaginary insisting on the divide while time and again violating that categorical separation in practice. After all, the insight that all cultural products are subject to the market was already advanced by Theodor Adorno, key theorist in the divide, in the 30s.”

Intro

• “Ever since the mid-19th century, the culture of modernity has been characterized by a volatile relationship between high art and mass culture.”
  • Flaubert, Baudelaire can’t be understood only in terms of the development of high culture, for example
• “Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.”
  • This position gave it strengths and weaknesses
  • they made their anxiety look like “an irreconcilable opposition, especially in the l’art pour l’art movements of the turn of the centure (symbolism, aestheticism, art nouveau),” in abstract painting, experimental writing, “high modernism” canonization
• Modernism
  • “insistence of the autonomy of the artwork”
  • “obsessive hostility to mass culture”
  • separation from “culture of everyday life:
  • distance from “politics, economics, social concerns”
  • “self-sufficiency of high culture”
• Nonetheless, “plethora of strategic moves tending to destabilize the high/low opposition from within”
  • in particular, the avant-garde: clash of autonomy aesthetic w/revolution in Germany, Russia: dada, constructivism, surrealism (but “absorbed” by modernism very soon)
  • but only temporary effects: the binary lives on: the “paradigm” shows strength
• A G
  • “aimed at developing an alternative relationship between high art and mass culture” diff from modernism which for him maintains hostility between high/low
• Great Divide
  • the discourse of high art/low culture distinction
  • it’s his explanatory mechanism, which he says is better than the explanatory mechanism “modernism v postmodernism”
  • two periods of the Great Divide
    • late 19thc and early 20thc
    • 20 years after WWII
    • postmodernism doesn’t operate under the Great Divide
• He is diagnosing problems modernist studies used to have
  • “if mass culture enters in at all, it is usually only as negative, as the homogeneously sinister background on which the achievements of modernism can shine in their glory” ix (both Frankfurt School and poststructuralism do this)
  • his solution: not to say that all is great (empty pluralism), but to keep art v kitsch distinction (“Cultural trash”) while not keeping the “high modernist dogma [which] has become sterile” as a referent for present culture … which instead of Great Divide has postmodernism
    • which isn’t a “total break” but a “new set of mutual relations” between modernism, mass culture, and the avant-garde
    • b/c present culture: “the boundaries between high art and mass culture have become increasingly blurred” which for him is “opportunity” not “failure” ix
• Adorno: “theorist par excellence of the Great Divide” ix, the “insurmountable barrier” between high modernist art and popular culture, during 1930s
  • saying similar stuff as Clement Greenburg
  • why they had good reason to at this historical moment: b/c protecting art from “fascist mass spectacles, socialist realism” as well as “degraded mass culture” which were “totalitarian” in 30s
    • where “avantgarde’s dream of leading art back into life and creating a revolutionary art had become a nightmarish reality in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.” x
    • for example his critique of Wagner b/c of the “fascist Wagner cult” sets stage for his later theories
  • 42: his framework for critiquing American mass culture already in place before he arrived in California
  • “Culture industry is the result of a fundamental transformation in the ‘superstructure’ of capitalist societies.”
    • “transformation completed with the stage of monopoly capitalism”
    • this is diff from the limited autonomy Marx gave art b/c he was working w/in 19th c liberal capitalism (believed in free market, cultural autonomy)
    • see, now the 20thc is more about unity: cultural “subsumed” under economic now 21
      • “by reorganizing the body of cultural meanings and symbolic significations to fit the logic of the commodity”
      • helped by technological advances in reproduction and dissemination: standardization
      • “swallow up” and “homogenized” so that culture acts “as an instrument of social control” 21
    • TO SEE MORE about Adorno, go to “Dialectic of Enligh” notes

Random

• Technology: Avant-garde used technology in its mission against high modernism: modernization of art techniques will be revolutionary
• T S Eliot and Ortega y Gasset as ones who said their “mission” was “to salvage the purity of high art from the encroachments of urbanization, massification, technological modernization” 163
• Quotes Matei Calinescu as saying avantgade is “most extreme form of artistic negativism—art itself being the first victim” while modernism “it never conveys that sense of universal and hysterical negation so characteristic of the avantgarde. The anti-traditionalism of modernism is often subtly traditional.” 163