Adam Strantz ENGL 595 Duvall 03/04/10 Dividing the Spoils After the Great Divide Divisions, dichotomies,

dialecticsthese splitting forces are constantly in play in our cultural and literary theories. Whether conservative versus liberal, the individual versus society, human versus machine, or tradition versus change, distinguishing between these opposing sides often falls into that: an easy and clean break between two completely different viewpoints that set up their opposing camps and fire back and forth across this no man's land. Andreas Huyssen examines one such rift between modernism and mass culture, and the attempt to bridge the gap called postmodernism, in his 1986 book After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Far from simply dumping mass culture into modernism and chiding modernists for their elitism, Huyssen's postmodernism builds off of the historical avantgardism of Europe and pop culture of the 1960s to create a wholly unique beast. In three parts Huyssen traces after modernism's dismissal of mass culture, in terms of both what came next and where things went. By starting with modernism's othering of mass culture, moving through examples of German expressions of this split, and finally into the emergence of the postmodern, Huyssen historically contextualizes the avantgarde, modernism, and postmodernism not as evolutions or opponents to each other, but as a further fragmenting of the discourse between all these groups. Postmodernism is not the answer to our problems, but Huyssen argues that discovering and connecting the links between postmodernism, modernism, avantgardism, mass culture, technology, gender, politics, etc. will give us a firmer idea of where we stand and what comes past the divide. Dr. Adorno or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mass Culture Huyssen begins with historically situating the split between modernism and mass culture, starting with avantgardism. Avantgarde here is seen as the shock art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Marcel Duchamp's altering of a print of the Mona Lisa. The avantgarde's goal of combining art and reality has been conformed into a view as an elite enterprise beyond politics and beyond everyday life (4) that Huyssen believes loses its vital connection to mass culture and technology. Far from being just an outburst of anti-bourgeois expression, the avantgarde situated itself in the realm of the masses by appealing to the experiences and the technology that they were familiar with, as Huyssen says, Indeed, technology played a crucial, if not the crucial, role in the avantgarde's attempt to overcome the art/life dichotomy and make art productive in the transformation of everyday life (9). But the avantgarde could only exist in opposition to high art, so with its acceptance by mass culture and subsequent commidification (15-16) by the elite, avant garde lost its edge. Here Huyssen begins to explore the split in more Marxist fashion, focusing on a culture industry (19) created by the elite to package and sell art, experience, reality, and everything else back to the masses. Using the work of Theodor Adorno, Huyssen ties capitalism to the culture industry and the eventual othering of mass culture by modernism (28) once capitalism and culture had become inextricably linked in modernists' eyes. Huyssen seems to derail himself here slightly by simultaneously trying to refute most of Adorno's work and applying it in reverse, with also praising his exploration of Wagner (36-42). He literally calls Adorno's work wrong on numerous occasions, but the key is that by tracing the evolution of Adorno's views we can see underpinnings of culture industry before late capitalism and the failure of the avantgarde. This suggests an othering on the side of modernism towards mass culture that cannot be adequately explained as mass culture is no longer tied to capitalism historically. Huyssen finally makes the jump to modernism proper in his next essay exploring mass culture

as woman. By viewing modernism's often explicit masculine overtones (55) Huyssen makes a very strong case for the other of mass culture taking in gendered differences, in addition to political and ideological. This essay broadens Huyssen's argument considerably after his rail against Adorno, and historically contextualizes the feminist movement alongside modernism's attempt to eject mass culture from art, that mass culture is somehow associated with woman while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men (47). He also begins to form the connection between modernism and mass culture's shared oppression to capitalism, through quoting Benjamin (58) that will lead to their eventual rejoining in postmodernism. History of the German Modernism: Part I At this point in the book Huyssen has followed a fairly logical structure, Adorno digression notwithstanding. 19th-20th century avantgardism used technology and political expression leading to its acceptance by mass culture, this led to the cultural industry where the upper class decided that instead of lamenting their loss they would instead commidify art and sell it back to the masses, which in turn led to the rise of modernism and an othering both gender- and political-based of mass culture from art and expression. It is at this point that Huyssen decides that four essays on German modernism, including art, literature, and film, to contextualize the divide between modernism and mass culture. For brevity's sake I will focus on his essay on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, as it is the work I am most familiar with and it connects directly to his earlier point on the othering of woman as mass culture. Huyssen sees the creation of the machine woman as the ultimate expression of this view, (68-69) with man literally being replaced by both technology (the tool of mass culture) and woman at the same time. From the modernist viewpoint of the film, man must fight back against this other that threatens the stability and control he has over culture. By keeping art, expression, and creation under masculine control, the masses of low culture, woman, and worker cannot bring modernism back down to the cultural industry and capitalism subservience it has worked to extract itself from. Huyssen explores sequences of the film including the creation of the machine woman (70) and the views Lang shot from (74) to address Modernism's stark exclusion of the other that is mass culture from art. The examples are good and more in-depth than the passing allusions to other works from his previous essays, but they are situated entirely within German modernism and experience and therefore not the most recognizable examples to work with. The Hitchhiker's Guide Toward the Postmodern In the final act Huyssen brings many of these plot points together into an examination of postmodernism while simultaneously exploring how we got here. Huyssen sees the pop artists, and especially Andy Warhol, as pivotal in exposing high art's place in the culture industry, much to modernists' chagrin (150). Art becomes a commodity like anything else, bought and sold and created and displayed for capitalist gain, demonstrated when Warhol's soup cans and Lichtenstein's comics broke down the barrier between high art and mass culture. If anyone could be an artist and anything could be art, how could modernism keep out mass culture? This is where Huyssen sees the emergence of postmodernism, combining avantgarde's ideals with an acceptance of mass culture's changing aesthetics. To quote Benjamin, In every era the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it, (161) but unlike the commidification of art in earlier movements, postmodernism links back to modernism, avantgardism, mass culture, technology, gender, etc. with a detached but knowing reliance (166). Huyssen further completes his argument by contextualizing postmodernism nationally, especially with regards to the United States versus Europe, as different veins entirely (167). At the same time, postmodernism cannot be so inclusive to devolve into an anything goes movement (220) but it can learn from history even as it purports to be

something radically new and different. Huyssen's book traces the emergence of postmodernism from the split between mass culture and modernism with exploration of avantgardism's roots in the theory, technology's place in mass culture and art, and the political and gender implications of each. Pulled together from essays over a ten year span, the three parts of his argument don't always seem to fit together perfectly, but ultimately his exploration of what happened after modernism's great divide from mass culture, both in a sense of space: where theory went, and time: what came next. Theory went back to find its political, cultural, and technological roots, leading to what came next, postmodernism, tied to both the historical avantgarde and a reliance on those roots. Huyssen tries to show postmodernism as a connection past the dichotomy of mass culture and modernism, but sometimes seems to give in to the ease of division himself, with Adorno versus Benjamin, Europe versus America, high versus low culture, etc. Nonetheless, Huyssen shows the connection between modernism, mass culture, postmodernism, and all the rest with many examples, digressions, and additional explorations. In the end, the book is a fine exploration of postmodernism that situates the theory historically and culturally and gives its readers some notion of where to go after they've run out of divisions.