Discurs critic contemporan

în spațiul anglo-american
Phd Student, Adelina Rău

Mapping the Postmodern

Andreas Huyssen
Summary

In his article titled Mapping the Postmodern, Huyssen defines postmodernism by

putting it in relation to modernism and to his experience with his son at the Fridericianum
museum of art in Kassel, Germnay. Several works of art exhibited in the museum represent
precisely the contradictory state of postmodernism. For example, Kounellis’s golden wall
with a clothes stand including a hat and a coat placed before it makes one wonder whether the
artist disappeared into the wall leaving his clothes there, thus delivering the concept of
presence and absence at the same time. Also, Mario Merz’s spiral drew Huyssen’s attention
by the eclecticism of materials used which is comparable to the nostalgic eclecticism of
postmodern architecture. However, Huyssen tries to define the exhibits and art as something
different than the simple art as experienced before.
For Huyssen, the new tendencies in postmodernism, which, in his view, are embodied
in the Documenta 7, are in fact beyond the diverse pressures and social perversion that art has
had to bear, a liberation of art, resting on a confusion of codes, anti-modern, highly eclectic,
pretending to return to the modernist tradition, it is even anti-postmodern. (108)
Huyssen’s argument is based on the premise that postmodernism is a slowly emerging
cultural transformation in Western societies generating new aesthetic forms by recycling
techniques and strategies of modernism reintroducing them into an altered cultural context
(108-9). Huyssen also states that postmodernism is referred to as a continuation of or radical
rupture with modernism, hence he chooses to take a different route and describes
postmodernism as having shaped various discourses in the 1960s and puts it in relation to
modernism, avant-garde, neo-conservatism and post-structuralism.
Huyssen traces postmodernism back to the 1950s literary criticism when Irving Howe
and Henry Levin were lamenting the modernist movement. Later, in the 1960s, Leslie Fiedler
and Ihab Hassan held divergent views of what postmodern literature was. It was only in the
1970s that the term gained a wider currency. Postmodernism migrated to Europe, first in Paris
and Frankfurt. By the 1980s, modernism and postmodernism became the most contested
debate of the Western societies because it was more than an emergence of an artistic style.
Discurs critic contemporan
în spațiul anglo-american
Phd Student, Adelina Rău

Huyssen states that architecture is the most obvious place where the break with
modernism can be noticed. After the Great War and the Russian Revolution, the building
process of the Bauhaus, Mies or Le Corbusier attempted to rebuild a war ravaged Europe
making the building a vital parts of the new society. However, after 1945, modernist
architecture became a symbol of power. Charles Jenks distinguishes the vision of the modern
movement from the transgressions that took place later on, thus he suggests that architects
have a bifocal view: ‘the traditional slow-changing codes and particular ethnic meaning of
neighbourhood and the fast changing codes of architectural fashion and professionalism’
(Jenks in Huyssen 114). Such vision might as well apply to contemporary culture at large, but
it was still highly arguable.
Huyssen calls to mind Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour’s book
Learning from Las Vegas as the most significant book that distinguishes the postmodern from
the modernist dogma. In this book, pop art is used as a means to describe the break with the
austere canon of high modernist painting (115). Or as Kenneth Frampton puts it, it presents
Las Vegas as ‘an authentic outburst of popular fantasy’ (Frampton in Huyssen 115). Pop,
Huyssen contends, was the context where the notion of postmodern first emerged,
(modernism has always had a certain hostility towards mass culture.)
The revolt of the 1960s was never a rejection of postmodernism but a revolt against
the version of modernism domesticated in the 1950s. In fact, modernism had been perverted
into a form of affirmative culture. Moreover, Huyssen claims that postmodernism developed
in America and could not have been invented in Europe because Germany was still
rediscovering his moderns, trying to find a cultural identity whereas France was facing a
return to modernism. Further on, he sketches four characteristics of early postmodernism
which points to its continuity with the modern but as movement sui generis (of its own kind,
on its own).
The first stage describes postmodernism as displaying ‘new frontiers, as a rupture and
discontinuity, a generational conflict, an imagination reminiscent of earlier continental avant-
garde movements such as Dada and surrealism rather than high modernism’ (119). The
second stage has in its centre the iconoclastic attack on what Peter Bürger has tried to define
as the ‘institution of art’. Thus, the avant-garde’s attempt to merge art and life is contrary to
modernism which maintained versions of high culture or restored traditional form of culture
or art. The third stage presents postmodernism as celebrating technology. The fourth stage
Discurs critic contemporan
în spațiul anglo-american
Phd Student, Adelina Rău

marked the validation of popular culture as a challenge to the traditional one and Leslie
Fiedler’s is seen as the one who covers the gap between high art and mass-culture, this
relationship is precisely the one that marks the difference between high modernism and what
followed in the 70s and 80s both in the U.S and Europe.
Huyssen characterizes the period of the 70s as the period of a genuinely postmodern
and post-avant-garde culture (123). Many ideas of the past decade had vanished or had been
recycled. The early excitement about technology and popular culture have been replaces with
sober opinions. Counterculture and anti-war movements were considered nothing but childish
transgressions. The period that follows offers the fertile context for new experiments, mixings
of mass culture and modernism and all sort of various challenging projects of art and
literature.
The terms postmodernism and neo-conservatism were regarded as compatible with
each other, identical, also, postmodernism was considered to be ‘the kind of affirmative art
that could happily coexist with political and cultural neo-conservatism’ (127). Jürgen
Habermas was the first to question the relationship between the terms. He criticized both
postmodernism and conservatism for not coming to terms with modernism itself. Habermas’s
social theory defends the enlightened modernity and is against political conservatism.
However, he kept wondering what is postmodernism, what is its relation to modernism and
how can the 70s be characterized as postmodern. The American debate outlines three
positions towards postmodernism and modernism: ‘modernism is condemned as elitist and
postmodernism populist, postmodernism is a fraud and modernism the universal truth or the
70s proposition that anything goes.’ (130)
The French see modernity as beginning with Nietzche and Mallarmé, a deliberate
destruction of language. For Habermas, modernity is a resurrection of Enlightenment and its
traditions, critique, human emancipation (133), contrary to Habermas, the neo-conservatives
rely on an established tradition of standards and values immune to criticism and change (133).
Habermas was neither right nor wrong about the relationship between neo-conservatism and
postmodernism, it depends on the angle from which the issue is looked upon.(134)
Even if postmodernism and post-structuralism overlap at some point, they are not
identical. Huyssen argues that post-structuralism is a discourse about modernism, post-
structuralism opened up new ways in modernism, it can be understood as a theory of
modernism. Despite the differences between the main post-structuralist projects, none of them
Discurs critic contemporan
în spațiul anglo-american
Phd Student, Adelina Rău

is influenced by postmodernist works of art. In what concerns the French theories, they
provide us with and archeology of modernity, a theory of this movement, post-structuralism
offers a theory of modernism characterised by transgression, confident in its rejection of
representation and reality. (137)
By attacking the appearance of capitalist culture, post-structuralism, like modernism,
misses its core and is simultaneous with the real processes of modernization rather than in
contradiction. Thus there is a paradox, theories of modernism and modernity, elaborated in
France come to U.S as embodiments of postmodernism, but still, post-structuralism only
offers a theory of modernism not a theory of postmodernism(142). Even the French theorists
rarely speak of the postmodern (the only exception being Lyotard’s La Condition
Postmoderne), they frequently ponder on le texte and la modernite.
Lyotard defines the postmodern as a recurring stage within the modern itself. And he
also returns to the Kantian sublime which he considers to be crucial to modern art and
literature. On the contrary, the first moderns in Germany, built their strategies of the fragment
on the rejection of the sublime which they consider to be a sign of falseness. However, in
Lyotard’s essay, the postmodern and the modern are not different, as aesthetic phenomenon.
The most important distinction made by him is on the one hand, between the métarecits of
liberation and of totality and on the other hand, the modernist experimental discourse of
language games (144).
In the last part of his essay, Huyssen presents some of the most recent cultural and
political changes in what postmodernism is concerned. Contemporary arts can no longer be
regarded as just another phase in the modernist and avant-gardist movements, therefore,
neither postmodernism can be regarded as a continuation of modernism. Nowadays
postmodernism exist in a continual state of tension, in progress and can be seen as just another
crisis in the process of renewal and liberation of art and knowledge. Postmodernism does not
make modernism obsolete, on the contrary, it makes it work, recycling it and appropriating
most of its aesthetic strategies.
Modernism, avant-gardism and even postmodernism were necessary in art especially.
It contributed in the process of social change and helped art itself to survive in a capitalist
society, thus the importance of art in the social life should never be dismissed. Huyssen also
calls to mind some recent phenomena which will always remain a part of postmodernist
culture: the culture of inner and outer imperialism, the women’s movement and their
Discurs critic contemporan
în spațiul anglo-american
Phd Student, Adelina Rău

emergence in the arts, literature, film and criticism, the question of ecology and environment
that affects art and literature in a variety of ways and the growing awareness of the existence
of other cultures that have to be met by means other than conquest or domination (148).
To conclude, Huyssen states that in the future, postmodernism will have to be a
movement of resistance especially a resistance to the postmodernism of the ‘anything goes’.
The notion of postmodernism has to be brought back into focus, in arts and criticism alike, it
has to be rediscovered, reinvented and kept alive.
Discurs critic contemporan
în spațiul anglo-american
Phd Student, Adelina Rău

Bibliography
Frampton, K., Modern Architecture: A critical History, New York and Toronto:
Oxford University Press. 1980, p. 920.
Huyssen, A. “Mapping the Postmodern,” in Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (eds.), A
Postmodern Reader, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 105-156.
Jencks, C., The Language of Postmodern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1977, p. 97.