After the Great Divide  

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"Ever since the mid-19th century, the culture of modernity has been characterized by a volatile relationship between high art and mass culture. . . . Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture." --After the Great Divide (1986) by Andreas Huyssen, p. vi


"Pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the postmodern first took shape, and from the beginning until today, the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism's relentless hostility to mass culture." --After the Great Divide (1986) by Andreas Huyssen, p. 188


"All culture is standardized, organized and administered for the sole purpose of serving as an instrument of social control."--After the Great Divide (1986) by Andreas Huyssen, p. 21

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After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986) is a study by Andreas Huyssen on modernism, mass culture and postmodernism. The two most relevant ones are "The search for tradition" and "Mapping the postmodern".

Many essays had previously been published in the New German Critique and were not specifically written to address the postmodern question question per se. The essays are informed by a Freudo-Marxist worldview.

The term "divide" only used a handful times and the context is this:

"What I am calling the great divide is the kind of discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture ... this divide is much more important for a theoretical and historical understanding of modernism and its aftermath than the alleged historical break which [...] separates postmodernism from modernism."
"I would suggest that the primary place of what I am calling the great divide was the age of Stalin and Hitler when the threat of totalitarian control over all culture forged an variety of defensive strategies to protect high culture in general, not just modernism."

On the cover is a photo of Fritz Lang's Metropolis cityscape.

Contents

PART ONE The vanishing other: mass culture

The hidden dialectic: avantgarde - technology - mass culture p .3

Adorno in reverse: from Hollywood to Richard Wagner p .16

  • "To write a prehistory of the modern was the stated goal of Benjamin’s never completed arcades project on nineteenth-century Paris. The dispute between Benjamin and Adorno revolving around their different readings of cultural commodification and of the relationship between prehistory and modernity is well-documented and researched. Given Adorno’s trenchant critique of Benjamin’s 1935 exposé of the arcades project it is somewhat baffling to find that he never wrote about mass culture in the nineteenth century. Doing so would have allowed him to refute Benjamin on his own ground, but the closest he ever came to such an undertaking is probably the book on Wagner written in London and New York in 1937 and 1938. Instead he chose to battle Benjamin, especially the Benjamin of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in his analysis of the twentieth-century culture industry. Politically, this choice made perfect sense in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but the price he paid for it was great." --p. 28

Mass culture as woman: modernism's other p. 44

  • "I want to show this briefly for two of the most influential and b now classical accounts of the historical trajectory of modernism—the accounts of Clement Greenberg in painting and of Theodor W. Adorno in music and literature. For both critics, mass culture remains the other of modernism, the specter that haunts it, the threat against which high art has to shore up its terrain. And even though mass culture is no longer imagined as primarily feminine, both critics remain under the sway of the old paradigm in their conceptualization of modernism.
  • "Contrary to what Fred Jameson has recently argued, Adorno never lost sight of the fact that, ... modernism and mass culture have been engaged in a compulsive pas de deux."

PART TWO Texts and contexts

The vamp and the machine: Fritz Lang's Metropolis p. 65

Producing revolution: Heiner Müller's Mauser as a learning play p. 82

The politics of identification: "Holocaust" and West German drama p. 94

Memory, myth, and the dream of reason: Peter Weiss's Die Ästhetik der Widerstands p. 115

PART THREE Toward the postmodern

The cultural politics of pop p. 141

The search for tradition: avantgarde and postmodernism in the 1970s p. 160

Mapping the postmodern p. 179

  • The following section will draw on arguments developed less fully in my earlier article entitled "The Search for Tradition: Avantgarde and Postmodernism in the 1970s," NGC, 22 (Winter 1981), 23-40.
  • "One of the most telling documents of the break of postmodernism with the modernist dogma is a book coauthored by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour and entitled Learning from Las Vegas. Rereading this book and earlier writings by Venturi from the 1960s today, one is struck by the proximity of Venturi's strategies and solutions to the pop sensibility of those years. Time and again the authors use pop art's break with the austere canon of high modernist painting and pop's uncritical espousal of the commercial vernacular of consumer culture as an inspiration for their work. What Madison Avenue was for Andy Warhol, what the comics and the Western were for Leslie Fiedler, the landscape of Las Vegas was for Venturi and his group. The rhetoric of Learning from Las Vegas is predicated on the glorification of the billboard strip and of the ruthless shlock of casino culture. In Kenneth Frampton's ironic words, it offers a reading of Las Vegas as ‘an authentic outburst of popular phantasy.' I think it would be gratuitous to ridicule such odd notions of cultural populism today. While there is something patently absurd about such pro-positions, we have to acknowledge the power they mustered to explode the reified dogmas of modernism and to reopen a set of questions which the modernism gospel of the 1940s and 1950s had largely blocked from view: questions of ornament and metaphor in architecture, of figuration and realism in painting, of story and representation in literature, of the body in music and theater. Pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the postmodern first took shape, and from the beginning until today, the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism's relentless hostility to mass culture."-- p. 188

See also




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