HUYSSEN / high/low in an expanded field

363

High/Low in an Expanded Field

Andreas Huyssen

1. MODERNISM / modernity
VOLUME NINE, NUMBER

Globalization is bound to change the field of cultural and lit- THREE, PP 363–374.

erary studies, and it poses a serious challenge to modernist stud- © 2002 THE JOHNS
ies. More significantly, it also represents a major challenge to HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

various traditional and current notions of culture itself. But so Andreas Huyssen is
far, processes of globalization as distinct from historically com- the Villard Professor of
parable, earlier phenomena such as internationalization or em- German and Compara-
tive Literature at
pire building and colonization have been studied primarily in
Columbia University,
terms of economics (financial markets, trade, transnational cor- where he directs the
porations); information technology (television, computers, the Center for Comparative
internet); and politics (the waning of the nation state, civil soci- Literature and Society.
ety, the rise of NGOs). The cultural dimensions of globalization A founding editor of
and its history remain poorly understood, often for the simple New German Critique, he
reason that “real” or “authentic” culture—especially if framed is author of several
books on German
in an anthropological or post-Herderian context—is seen as that
literature (in German)
which is subjectively shared by a given community and there-
and of After the Great
fore local. Only economic processes and technological change Divide: Modernism, Mass
are perceived as universal and global. This global/local binary, Culture, Postmodernism
however, is as homogenizing as the alleged cultural homogeni- (1986), Twilight
zation of the global it opposes. Memories: Marking Time
How does the concern with modernism/modernity fit into in a Culture of Amnesia
(1995), and the
this debate? Most modernist research in the U.S. academy is
forthcoming Present
still largely bound by the local. It remains predominantly tied to
Pasts: Urban Palimpsests
the traditional North Atlantic canon and its disciplinary codifi- and the Politics of
cation in national or regional departments of language, litera- Memory (Stanford
ture, and culture. The canon has indeed been expanded in re- University Press).
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

364 cent years by the inclusion of phenomena such as the Harlem Renaissance or Carib-
bean modernism; but processes of translation and transnational migrations and their
effects remain insufficiently studied outside of local specializations. We lack a work-
able model of comparative studies that goes beyond traditional approaches and that
still takes national cultures as the units to be compared. Tim Mitchell has argued that
modernity has always presented itself as a stage of history and as a stage for historiog-
raphy in relation to the temporally and geographically non-modern.1 Modernist re-
search has long focused on the former, but neglected the latter: the modernity of the
geographically “non-modern.”
Clearly, globalization provides the horizon for the work of comparative modern-
isms today. But how can the transition be made from the often bland considerations of
the global in much of the literature—where the global appears either as threatening
specter or as beneficial invisible hand—to the study of cultural genealogies of lan-
guage, medium, and image as they undergo transformations under the pressures of
the global?
In this essay, I revert to a model of literary and cultural studies that, for rather
parochial reasons, has been prematurely put to rest by U.S. postmodernism: the model
of high and low art or elite and mass culture. High/low should here be seen as a cipher
for a much more complex set of relations that always involve palimpsests of times and
spaces that are anything but binary. I suggest that this model, once freed from earlier
parochialisms stemming from its embeddedness in U.S./European constellations, may
well serve as a template through which to look comparatively at phenomena of cul-
tural globalization—including that earlier phase of non-European modernisms in Asia,
Latin America, or Africa. For too long, such non-Western modernisms have either
been ignored as epistemologically impossible—since only the West was considered
advanced enough to generate authentic modernism—or dismissed as lamentable mim-
icry and contamination of a more genuine local culture. Such “studied ignorance,” as
Gayatri Spivak once called it, is no longer acceptable.
However, the high/low problematic also extends to the realm of tradition and its
activation in the present, taking very different forms at different historical times and
often inflected by radically different politics. This becomes clear when you consider,
for example, the political role played today by classical Brahmin epics in India, epics
written in Sanskrit ages ago but endlessly displayed on television and circulated in
many languages in oral culture today; the renewed struggle in China over what in
Mao’s times was relegated to the margin as feudal culture; and, also in China, the turn
to traditional popular culture as a defense against the influx of Western mass culture—
a debate heavily invested with politics; or for that matter the complex mix of Spanish
and Portuguese baroque culture within indigenous Indian, African, and other Euro-
pean immigrant traditions in certain countries of Latin America. The permeability of
the borders between high and low beginning in the period following high modernism
cannot be limited to the West (although this is one of the favorite tropes in the North-
ern debates that some twenty years ago made us read the Latin American boom novel
as a kind of postmodernism avant la lettre).2 Indeed, a strong and stable literary high
 HUYSSEN / high/low in an expanded field
culture cannot be assumed to have existed everywhere on the model of European 365
nation states such as France, England, or Germany. Such different pasts will inevitably
shape the ways a specific culture will negotiate the impact of globalization and its
attendant spread of media, communication technologies, and consumerism. In many
parts of the world, the legacies of imported and indigenous modernisms are very much
part of such negotiations. Even while media and consumerism may spread everywhere
in the world—although with different intensities and widely divergent access—the
imaginaries they produce are far from homogeneous.
As comparatists, however, we do have a problem. At a time when literary studies is
asked to cover ever more territory both geographically and historically (thus overload-
ing any individual critic’s circuits), the discipline is in danger of losing its coherence as
a field of investigation, of becoming bogged down in ever more local case studies, or of
becoming superficial in its negligence to maintain a methodological and theoretical
project. The U.S. model of cultural studies in particular can not adequately face the
new challenges. Among its critical limitations are a reductive focus on thematics and
cultural ethnographies; a privileging of consumption over production; a lack of histori-
cal depth; and an abandonment of aesthetic and formal issues coupled with its un-
questioned privileging of popular and mass culture.
The recurrent call for a return to the facts or to traditional philology is certainly no
solution. However, the increasing demand for a return to disciplinarity may be more
promising, depending crucially on how “return” is defined. If it is meant to annul the
changes in the humanities brought about by “theory” and the “cultural turn,” it would
simply be a regression. But if the return to disciplinarity was meant to counter the
premature anti-disciplinarity of so much cultural studies by merging recent theory
with traditional critical practices of the disciplines, it could play a salutary role. For if
globalization requires one single thing from the cultural critic, it would be a model for
comparative study across borders, languages, and cultures that might help nurture a
new sense of connectedness in difference, perhaps even a new kind of cosmopolitan-
ism. A major task, then, is to create a set of conceptual parameters for such compari-
sons that would lend coherence to a field of study in danger of becoming either too
amorphous or remaining simply parochial. My tentative reflections in this essay, there-
fore, are meant to move us into that crucial cultural space between the local, the na-
tional, and the global. And here it may be important for humanists and literary schol-
ars to draw on the recent attempts to revitalize social science area studies that are
themselves searching for new transnational and transregional paradigms.
The demand for an alternative model of comparison that would transcend an older,
European-style comparative literature paradigm may be new, but not all tools need to
be invented from scratch.3 Ultimately, the issue of globalization remains very much
tied up with the rich debate about modernity and aesthetic modernism and their re-
spective historical trajectories. For the political and cultural developments of the 1990s
have not been kind to the postmodernists’ confident prediction that modernity was at
an end, let alone the even more triumphalist claim that history had ended.4 Further,
the equation of modernity and even modernism with fascism, totalitarianism, and geno-
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

366 cide has been similarly ineffectual. Modernity is now (and has been for some time)
everywhere, and the discourse of postmodernity seems only an episode (if a significant
one) within a certain transformation of Western modernity itself. The issue facing
critics, therefore, is no longer modernity vs. postmodernity (although this inevitably
reductive binary still underlies much of the currently popular anti-modernity thinking
that issues from a narrowly understood postcolonial approach).5 The issue is rather
what Arjun Appadurai has identified as modernity-at-large, and what others have de-
scribed as alternative modernities. As Dilip Gaonkar wrote in a recent special issue of
Public Culture on alternative modernities, modernity

has arrived not suddenly but slowly, bit by bit, over the longue durée—awakened by con-
tact; transported through commerce; administered by empires, bearing colonial inscrip-
tions; propelled by nationalism; and now increasingly steered by global media, migration,
and capital.6

Indeed, the critical focus on alternative modernities with their rich histories and local
contingencies now seems to offer a better way to understand the here, there, and now
than either the notion of postmodernism in Asia and Latin America, or current global-
ization theories in the social sciences that uncannily resemble Cold War, U.S. gener-
ated modernization theory. Even if the West remains a major powerbroker and “clear-
inghouse” of world-wide modernities, as Dilip Gaonkar puts it, it does not offer the
only model of cultural development (as both cyber-utopians and the dystopian
McDonaldization theorists seem to believe). Nor does the West possess the only model
of political development toward civil society and human rights. The standard tale of
the two modernities in which aesthetic modernism and avant-gardism in Europe are
cast as adversary cultures directed against bourgeois society now appears very place-
and time-specific. We need only consider “Shanghai modern” in the 1920s as the space
of emergence of Chinese communism, or the explosion of modernism in Brazil in the
1920s and 1930s and its instrumentalization for a national proto-fascist project to know
that the oppositional European model between social and economic modernity and
aesthetic modernism does not translate seamlessly into other contexts. Indeed, it no
longer applies today as an interpretive model for European culture itself, and it was
never an apt model for colonial or communist societies in which cultural and political
modernization was shaped by very different constellations. Such historical and geopo-
litical differences are at stake with the notion of “modernity at large” that avoids the
trap of homogenization claims as strongly as it rejects the illusion of a happy plurality
of modernities—a kind of theoretical Benetton effect.
The same need to argue in place- and time-specific ways applies to the relationship
between high art and mass culture that accompanied the trajectory of Western moder-
nity from romanticism to postmodernism and that is intimately connected to the idea
of modernism as adversary culture. Much valuable recent work on the editing, mar-
keting, and dissemination of modernism has misconstrued my earlier definition of the
Great Divide as a static binary of high modernism vs. the market. My argument was
 HUYSSEN / high/low in an expanded field
rather that there had been, since the mid-nineteenth century in Europe, a powerful 367
imaginary insisting on the divide while time and again violating that categorical sepa-
ration in practice.7 After all, the insight that all cultural products are subject to the
market was already advanced by Theodor Adorno, key theorist of the divide, in the
late 1930s.8 Thus the recent, detailed documentation of the high modernists’ involve-
ment with the marketing of their works, their bickering with publishers, and engage-
ment with small journal enterprises—even with fashion magazines—will not do away
with the issue of the divide as a central conceptual trope and energizing norm of the
post-World War II period that took hold in the context of Cold War cultural politics
and the explosive acceleration of consumerism and television culture. It was that post-
war version of the divide that was primarily at issue in the postmodernist debate of the
1970s and early 1980s, not what certain modernist authors and artists did or did not do
at an earlier time. Finally, there was another dimension to the debate in the early
1980s. The critique of the divide in postmodernist discourse allowed the historical
avant-garde to emerge retrospectively as an alternative to high modernism and legiti-
mated a variety of neo-avant-garde enterprises of the 1960s and 1970s.
All of that is history. The modernism vs. mass culture problematic once central to
the emergence of postmodernism and its project to break down the walls between
high and low has since vanished from our screens. But it may have vanished for not
entirely good reasons. To recall it now in more than just an archival way will require
that the argument be freed from its limiting postmodernist connotations so that the
high/low relation may be deployed in a geopolitically expanded frame.
I suggest that the model of high vs. low can be productively rethought and related
to cultural developments in “peripheral,” postcolonial, or post-communist societies.
The high/low relationship has taken very different shapes and forms outside of the
Northern Transatlantic which may enable comparative analyses of cultural globaliza-
tion today as well as a new understanding of earlier and alternative roads taken within
modernity. For example, it captures aspects of cultural hierarchies and social class,
race, and religion; gender relations and codifications of sexuality; colonial cultural trans-
fers; the relation between cultural tradition and modernity; the role of memory and
the past in the contemporary world; and the relation of print media to visual mass
media. In other words, the discourse about alternative modernities in India or in Latin
America can be expanded profitably to include the assessment of alternative develop-
ments in the relations and crosscurrents between indigenous popular culture, minor-
ity cultures, high culture (both traditional and modern), and mass mediated culture.
Historically alternative modernities have existed all along and their trajectories con-
tinue into the age of globalization.9
Further, the reinscription of a complex and multi-layered high/low problematic
into our discussions of cultural modernity in transnational contexts and across borders
could counteract the widespread notion of cultural unity ascribed indiscriminately by
such writers as Alan Bloom, Benjamin Barber, and Samuel Huntington to the culture
of the East or the West, Islam or Christianity, the U.S. or Latin America. It could thus
counter the bad heritage from cultural anthropology and a Spenglerian, American
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

368 style Kulturkritik. The high/low dynamic might problematize the all too evident need
to create an inside/outside myth maintaining a Feindbild (enemy image), an absolute
other, that can be read itself as a heritage of the Cold War in current theories about
clashing civilizations. Moreover, it could also oppose and complicate the equally lim-
ited argument that only local culture (or culture as local) is “good,” authentic, and
resistant, whereas global cultural forms should be condemned as manifestations of
cultural imperialism—a frequent stand-in for Americanization. Every culture, after
all, has its hierarchies and social stratifications, and these differ greatly according to
local circumstances and histories. Unpacking such temporal and spatial differentia-
tions might be a good way to arrive at new kinds of comparisons that will surpass the
clichés of colonial vs. postcolonial, modern vs. postmodern, Western vs. Eastern, cen-
ter vs. periphery, global vs. local, the West vs. the rest. To de-Westernize notions such
as modernity and modernism will require much more theoretically informed descrip-
tive work about modernisms world-wide, including their interaction or non-interac-
tion with Western modernisms; their relationship to different forms of colonialism
(different in Latin America from South Asia and again from Africa); and their codings
of the role of art and culture in relation to state and nationhood. It may well turn out
that despite our best intentions, such de-Westernization of modernism/modernity will
always remain limited or seem less pertinent than it does now.
However, for me, there is yet another significant reason to rethink the high/low
relationship today. For it also points us back to the leftist modernism debates of the
1930s (those of Brecht, Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno) and their never abandoned
concern with issues of aesthetic value and aesthetic perception in relation to politics,
history, and experience.10 Revisiting the high/low problematic in a transnational con-
text might then enable us to reinscribe the issue of aesthetic value and form into the
contemporary debate, prompting us to rethink the historically altered relationship
between the aesthetic and the political for our age in ways surpassing both the debates
of the 1930s and the postmodernist and postcolonial debates of the 1980s and 1990s.
Indeed, in view of the fact that an aesthetic dimension shapes not just the high arts
but also the products of consumer culture via design, advertising, and the mobilization
of affect and desire, it is simply retrograde to claim that any concern with aesthetic
form is inherently elitist. Moreover, those earlier debates were primarily organized
around a linear temporal axis (modernism vs. realism, postmodernism vs. modernism)
and focused on media of high culture such as literature and painting. The condition of
globality, however, requires considering the strong geographic and spatial dimension
as well as recognizing its different intertwinings and aesthetic effects. We might want
to explore further what Arjun Appadurai has usefully described as the “production of
locality” and locality-as-producing as a key ingredient of modernities-at-large.11 Cen-
tral to such a discussion might be the analysis of city cultures and the aesthetic percep-
tions and social uses of space they produce. Indeed spatial metaphoricity of the high/
low distinction itself might be linked quite pragmatically to the different urban spaces
of cultural production and consumption such as the street, the neighborhood, the
museum, the concert hall and the opera house, the tourist site and the shopping mall.
 HUYSSEN / high/low in an expanded field
Reconsidering the high/low dynamic would reintroduce the issue of aesthetics and 369
form that cultural studies in the U.S. (as opposed to cultural studies in Brazil or Argen-
tina) has all but abandoned in its move against the alleged elitism of aesthetics. The
politically legitimate attack on an earlier social-cultural elitism embodied in the figure
of the aesthetic connoisseur does not take into account the fact that today aesthetic
“value” and the complexities of representation in cultural production can easily be
uncoupled from the socially coded elitism associated with Bourdieu’s “distinction.” An
apprehension of the aesthetic dimension of all image, music, and language production
remains crucial to a better understanding of how cultural markets function under con-
ditions of globalization.

2.

Cultural studies in its current configuration does not provide a good model for
understanding globalizing cultures. From the vantage point of a U.S.-style cultural
studies, it is easy to claim that the high-low debate has outlived its purpose. Following
the events of 1989–90, postmodernism as a concept, like the concern over high and
low culture, was swallowed up by an emerging new set of social, political, and eco-
nomic configurations. The vast expansion of cultural markets, a new museum and
gallery culture, and the electronic media have made evident the extent to which the
postmodern high/low debate was still predicated on the stability of literacy and print
as dominant medium, on the notion of architecture as building style, on the visual arts
as high marker of culture, and on the nation state as guarantor of high culture in
Western—especially North Atlantic—societies.
To revive this debate today would be futile. In the U.S. context—market
triumphalism, lifestyle revolution, the victorious march of pop cultural studies through
the institutions—low has won the battle and high has been relegated to the margins,
the American culture wars notwithstanding. However, it has been a Pyrrhic victory,
marred by continuing ressentiment toward the vanquished realm of high culture. A
significant part of the left academia still decries high culture as elitist and Eurocentric,
denounces aesthetics as totalitarian, and refuses a debate about cultural value. By con-
trast, the right ossifies traditional culture before modernism while rejecting contem-
porary high culture in much of the arts as well as in the literary and theoretical fields.
The outcome has thus not been the creative merger of high and low, as it once was
imagined by some in the postmodernist debate of the 1970s and early 1980s—a new
democratic culture that would couple aesthetic complexity with mass appeal, abolish
hierarchies of taste and class, and usher us into a new age of cultural pleasure beyond
either the entropies and minimalisms of late modernism or the numbing hegemony of
Cold War mass culture. If there ever was a postmodern utopianism, this would have
been it. But, as always with utopias, we have had to settle for much less.
Today, as we all know, the binary in its emphatic sense has been abolished by a new
logic of cultural circulation brought about by media technologies, new patterns of
marketing and consumption, and their radical effects both on cultural tradition and on
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

370 the structures of fashion and entertainment. Adorno had intimated these develop-
ments in the late 1930s. There are also, however, social changes that no longer give
even minimal support to a politically and socially relevant notion of high culture. The
high turnover velocity of low culture has by now engulfed even the production of
traditionally low-velocity high culture. Once solid cultural traditions (high) are set into
motion by the rapid turn-over of museum blockbusters, museal asset management à la
Guggenheim with its spectacular building projects; theater spectacles that become
media shows; ancient epics that are turned into TV series and comic books; and festi-
vals of classical music based on the star system, in which the global mobility of interna-
tional actors, directors, orchestras, and art works matches that of global capital flows.
None of this is to claim that the distinction between high art and mass culture no
longer exists, either in Western societies or elsewhere, as some might argue, for it very
much does. Differences will always remain in quality, ambition, and complexity be-
tween cultural products, in demands on the attentiveness and knowledge of the con-
sumer, and in diversely stratified audiences. But what used to be a vertical divide has
become in the last few decades a horizontal borderland of exchanges and pillagings, of
transnational travels back and forth, and all kinds of hybrid interventions. Complexity
does not reside only on one side of the old binary.
Another aspect sets us apart from, for example, the situation in the 1980s. The
largely national bases of both high and low cultures are fraying as a result of the cul-
tural flows accompanying waves of migration and diasporas and as a result of the in-
creasing number of corporate mergers in the culture industries across national bor-
ders. For those reasons alone, the high/low divide can no longer provide the field of
battle for an alternative social or political imagination as it did in the twentieth cen-
tury, first in the interwar years in Europe, and then again in the 1960s in Europe and
the U.S. To see low as a threat to social and cultural cohesion is a conservative phan-
tasm deployed for political maneuvering in the never-ending fight of U.S. conserva-
tives against the effects of the 1960s on secular culture and changing lifestyles. But
this phantasm, of course, feeds the mirror phantasm of the rebel consumer and a left
American populism.12
How to get out of this dead-end? In a very preliminary way, I would suggest the
following:
1. We abandon the high/low distinction in its traditional figuration that opposes
serious literature and art to the mass media, and replace this hierarchical or vertical
value relation by a lateral or horizontal configuration. This would de-dramatize the
notion of high and acknowledge that high is as much subject to market pressures as
low (and perhaps because of that in need of some support and protection). We no
longer face a hegemonic culture industry and its autonomous high other (as suggested
in the writings of Adorno or Clement Greenberg), but a quantitatively and qualita-
tively differentiated mass and niche marketing for all kinds of cultural consumption.
2. We should raise the issue of medium (oral/aural, written, visual) in all its histori-
cal, technical, and theoretical complexity rather than continue to rely on the tradi-
tional binary notion of media culture as low and its high literary other in traditional
 HUYSSEN / high/low in an expanded field
modernist fashion. For example, in a country such as Brazil where culture is shaped 371
more by musical and visual traditions of the popular realm than by what Angel Rama
has called the lettered city, such a focus on mediality would be more pertinent than
the high/low distinction itself.13
3. We should reintroduce issues of aesthetic quality and form into our analysis of
any and all cultural practices and products. Here the question of criteria is obviously
key: rather than privilege the radically new in avant-garde fashion, we may want to
focus on the complexity of repetition, rewriting, and bricolage. The emphasis might
then be on suggestive intertextuality, creative mimicry, the power of a text to question
ingrained habits through visual or narrative strategies, the ability to transform media
usage, and so forth. This suggestion argues for a modernism in the Brechtian sense,
but it is a modernism with a difference.
4. We should abandon the notion that a successful attack on elite culture can play a
major role in a political and social transformation. This was the signature of the avant-
garde and still lingers in certain academic-populist outposts. Instead we should pay
close attention to the ways in which cultural practices and products are linked to the
discourses of the political and the social in specific local and national constellations.
Here, for example, the issue of how major exhibits, museums, and cultural mega-
events are funded and whether or not funding determines content yields a more fruit-
ful field for investigation than the focus on the purity of high vs. the contamination of
low. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that culture is no longer organized
according to habitus and distinction as described by Pierre Bourdieu. When every-
thing becomes available (although not always accessible) to the consumer’s choice, it
becomes that much harder to find a place for effective political critique.
5. In all of this, comparatists can draw on a combination of a non-reductive cultural
studies with the disciplines of cultural history (including a sociological and economic
dimension), the new anthropology, and the traditions of literary and artistic criticism.
Key will be a sustained focus on the operations and functioning of public cultures and
the changing role of critique within them. Here, it seems to me, we need to draw on
the debates about civil society, imagined communities, gender, subalternity, and the
emerging debate about transnational urban imaginaries.
If we succeed in making our reading skills available to those other projects, we will
have expanded the field of literary criticism without abandoning what we do best.

3.

Thinking back to the high/low problematic today points to the distance we have
traveled since the heady days of postmodernism and the emergence of new forms of
cultural studies. But it also reveals the underlying American parochialism of the
postmodernism craze. Postmodernism thought itself global, but was perhaps nothing
more than the belated attempt to create a U.S. International against the model of the
European International Style of high modernism belonging to the interwar period
(1918–39). And yet, the postmodern decades in the U.S. from the 1960s to the 1980s
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

372 generated a new relationship between high culture and mass media culture that reso-
nates, however differently, in other cultures of the world. However, the simple reversal
of the old high/low hierarchy advanced by U.S. cultural studies is not the solution. It
may even be perceived as a betrayal of the original promises of the postmodern itself.
In a global context, therefore, the question about the relationship between high
culture (both traditional and modern), indigenous and national popular culture, mi-
nority or subaltern cultures, and transnational mass media culture may still provide an
impetus for a new kind of comparative work. This new comparative study would draw
our attention to the very different forms such constellations take, for example, in India
or China as compared with different countries in Latin America or Eastern Europe. A
number of interesting theoretical questions emerge in this context. We may ask whether
and how postcolonial theory applies unproblematically to Latin American countries
whose colonial and postcolonial history is fundamentally different from that of India
or African countries.14 We may also ask whether or not the notion of the subaltern can
be transferred unproblematically from one geographic context to another, and whether
notions of hybridity and diaspora—the latest master-signifiers—are sufficiently rigor-
ous to describe the complex racial, ethnic, and linguistic mixings in different parts of
the world.15 Attuned to the vicissitudes of traveling theory, we must guard against the
facile translation of critical vocabularies from one intellectual and geopolitical context
into another.16 And we must always secure deeper historical knowledge in order not to
capitulate to the market and to the obliviousness of the present.
Clearly, the role of high culture today varies greatly from country to country, and in
each case it is deeply embedded in local and national traditions, the different roles of
state and private sectors in cultural politics, systems of national education, the strength
or weakness of cultural institutions, and so forth. Yet some sectors of high culture,
such as opera, classical European music, or contemporary art and Western architec-
ture, have become transnational in organization and dissemination, as opposed to the
theater or literature, which remain bound by language and thus more limited in reach-
ing broad transnational audiences. Simultaneously, high culture itself has become ever
more commercialized and spectacularized, much more so than even an Adorno could
have imagined in the mid-twentieth century. The problem remains that some, both on
the left and the right, still want to force us to choose between high and low, or, as
Susan Sontag put it in the 1960s, between Dostoevski and The Doors. This choice,
then and now, is to be rejected. Of course, postmodern practices in literature and the
arts have rejected it all along, producing all kinds of fascinating hybridizations of high
and low that seemed to open up new horizons for aesthetic experimentation. But to-
day the celebration of a postmodern hybridity of high and low may itself have lost its
once critical edge. Cultural production today not only crosses the borders between
high and low, but has also become transnational in major new ways, especially in the
music industry, but also in certain sectors of film and television (e.g., Indian cinema in
Africa, the export of Brazilian telenovelas).17 Hybridization of whatever kind now hap-
pens increasingly under the sign of the market. But markets, even elite niche markets,
as Nestor Canclini has pointed out in his recent book La globalización imaginada,
 HUYSSEN / high/low in an expanded field
tend to domesticate and equalize the rough and innovative edges of cultural produc- 373
tion.18 They will go for the successful formula rather than encouraging the not-yet-
known, experimentation, and unusual modes of aesthetic expression. The danger is
that by now most of high culture is as much subject to market forces as mass mediated
products. Big mergers in the publishing industry shrink the breathing space for ambi-
tious writing. Literature itself, as we once knew it, becomes ever more an untimely
enterprise. But this may also be literature’s opportunity. For we need a space of writ-
ing to explore issues of aesthetic complexity, formal experimentation, the vicissitudes
of representation, and radical political content. We need to ask whether or not the
market can secure new traditions, new forms of transnational communications and
connectivities. Finally, however, we would abandon our role as critical intellectuals if
we were to exclude prematurely from such considerations the question of the complex
imbrication of aesthetic value and political effect, a question fundamentally posed by
the traditions of high culture that needs to be rescued for contemporary analyses of all
culture under the spell of globalization.

Notes
1. Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1–34.
2. For an account of how problematic such a reading is, see Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present:
Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1999), esp. chapter 1.
3. For an account of the debates in the field, see Comparative Literature in the Age of
Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
4. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
5. For a more sophisticated historical and theoretical account of the issue of modernity, see Timo-
thy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity.
6. Dilip Gaonkar, “Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 1.
7. See especially the introduction to Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). I should add that the term the Great
Divide not only referred to the imaginary divide between mass culture and modernism, but also to
that other divide so central to the debates at the time, namely that between modernism and
postmodernism. A main argument of the book was that both divides were generated by very specific
political and aesthetic constellations and were always belied by the complexities of real relations in
artistic practices.
8. See for example Adorno’s 1938 essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of
Listening,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New
York: Urizen Books, 1977), 270–299. See also my essay “Adorno in Reverse” in After the Great Di-
vide, 16–43, reprinted with a “Postscript 2000,” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and
Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 29–56.
9. The term “alternative modernity” may appear problematic to some. So let me say that it is not
meant to suggest that there is one real and authentic modernity which, in its spreading across the world,
created those alternative modernities in Latin America or in Asia. At the same time, our attempts to
de-Westernize or to de-Europeanize the concept of modernity may ultimately run up against a real
limit set by the genealogy of the concept itself. This tension is to be acknowledged rather than defused.
By now, there is a vast literature on “alternative modernities.” Apart from the still challenging
earlier work by Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996), see for instance the special issue on multiple modernities, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000), espe-
cially the essays by Stanley J. Tambiah and S. N. Eisenstadt.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

374 10. A limited number of translated texts from a much wider debate has been collected in the
volume by Ernst Bloch, et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977).
11. Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Modernity at Large, 178–200.
12. For a cutting attack on the downside of contemporary cultural studies in the U.S., see Commodify
Your Dissent: Salvos from “The Baffler,” ed. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: W.W. Norton,
1997).
13. Angel Rama, The Lettered City, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1996).
14. And within Latin America, one would need to distinguish, for example, between countries
such as Argentina and Uruguay with very sparse indigenous populations and the Andean countries
which have large Indian populations.
15. Here it might be useful to distinguish historically and theoretically between very different
notions of the hybrid—say, between Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge,
1994) and the earlier work by Nestor Garcia Canclini in Culturas hibridas: Estrategias para entrar y
salir de la modernidad (Mexico, D.F.: Grijalbo, 1989).
16. See Edward Said, “Travelling Theory,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226–47. Through such a process of translation, “cultural
studies” in the U.S. has turned out to be a quite different thing from what it was in the hands of the
Birmingham school, or critics such as Stuart Hall or Dick Hebdige.
17. See Veit Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1999).
18. Nestor Garcia Canclini, La globalización imaginada (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1999).