Reluctance, Modernity’s Curse: A Review of Ales Debaljak’s Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms
Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and its Historical Forms (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998), the second book in Stjepan Mestrovic’s Postmodern Social Futures series, is a book about collisions, of high culture and capitalism, of changing artistic and historical practices, and of Central European and American styles of scholarship. In other words, it is an academic survey with a not unfamiliar scope: the trajectory of cultural and social developments which mouth into what is usually termed the postmodern, over the course of which art loses its privileged status as a cultural form serving and promoting the vanguard of political thinking, as well as its role as a vehicle of elitist status distinction. Many are the academic voices bemoaning this trajectory, and the Central European context, where a certain Bildungs-ethos perhaps survives best (along with authoritarian professors and melancholic intellectuals full of self-pity), is unsurprisingly fertile ground for such voices.
Slovenian critic and poet Ales Debeljak’s exploration of critical theory’s insights into the history and workings of culture industries in the light of developments in the Central European cultural sphere over the past decade draws attention to the weaknesses in both. The basic argument of the book follows a Benjamin-Bürger-Huyssen approach to the relationship that develops between the capitalist mode of production and the institution of art as history advances from modernity to postmodernity, understood à la Giddens to be “a social-historical period of radical ‘consequences of modernity’” (xix). It lays out in a lucid and thorough-going manner the well-rehearsed narrative of how Kant’s concept of autonomy eventually led to the historical avant-garde springing full-born from the head of the modernist art institution with its pens and paintbrushes swinging in furious attempts to behead the institutional body which gave it life and made it possible, only to fail in the terrible face of fascist reality. How the tale continues through the second-half of the twentieth century can be gleaned from the section headings of Chapter 4: “The Colonization of the Life-World,” “Information Technologies between Emancipation and Domination,” “Professional Experts as Agents of Colonization,” “Bureaucratic Control of Consumption,” “Corporate Depersonalization,” “From Citizens to Consumers,” and “The Decline of Modern Bourgeois Individualism,” after which Debeljak’s concluding condemnation of postmodernist art practices as dehumanized and dehumanizing sell-outs comes as no surprise to the attentive reader.
The crux of such theoretical trajectories is the intersection of art and everyday life, and thus art is interrogated for “mechanisms of... social and political accommodation” (166), something in which 1960s Pop Art, for example, is found wanting. However, these trajectories carry with them a curse; or, given Debeljak’s discourse, perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak of a caveat emptor. When one begins with Kant, it is hard not to fall into the trap of thinking about what the enlightenment is and not about what ART is. A bit of brainstorming is all the informed reader needs to come up with any number of culture industries, parts of which to different extents have managed to integrate art and everyday life without a complete loss of art’s “critical-negative” potential, and yet which receive from Debeljak no attention or recognition for this accomplishment. To mention just one example here: film. As Gill Branston has demonstrated in her recent Cinema and Cultural Modernity (Open University Press, 2000), the vision of modernity that emerges through the lens of film scholarship is much more three-dimensional, not to say colorful and dynamic, than that seen through Debeljak’s self-confessed melancholic Central European spectacles (he describes his work as “an honest exercise in melancholic lamentation over the loss of public space and autonomous art” (122)). To circumvent objections that film is not necessarily an art-form relevant to Central European modernity, one could cite Andrew Horton’s edited collection The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos (1997), Peter Lutze’s Alexander Kluge: The Last Modernist (1998), and Tom Gunning’s The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (1999).
But maybe this is asking too much from a monograph that very clearly pursues (and states) its agenda, namely “to complete the rational project of modernity” (xx). As any good neo-Habermasian should know, however, this is an impossible (not to mention thankless) project (and how many times does it have to be mentioned to neo-Habermasians that his is a male, bourgeois public sphere, that the coffeehouse as an ideal of enlightened, rational discussion is a myth that hides the exclusionary tendencies of its class prejudices in an non-democratic, elitest discourse etc.?). What Debeljak presents are very concisely well-grounded, if somewhat uncritical summaries of the main thinkers that have influenced him and that inform his view of the world. But we have become used to the fact that when Central European Bildungs-ethos meets German professorial superiority (a.k.a. the better argument), the outcome is invariably an apocalyptic vision of culture in general and art in particular that reaffirms the hegemonic positions of those who bemoan such a supposed decline.
Rather than highlighting these shortfalls here (which are basic lacunae of the whole Habermas revival that is currently infecting the academy in its conservative turn against everything labeled “postmodern”), we would like to give Debeljak credit here for his brave attempt to rephrase and recombine a wide variety of approaches, some of which have (undeservedly) been all but forgotten (like the seminal thinking of Arnold Hauser and Ernst Fischer). And some of Debeljak’s trajectories of criticism are obviously very valid, e.g. his discussion of corporate influences – although these passages too are prone to the kind of oversimplification of the workings of corporate control that his assuming a moral high ground makes him so susceptible to. We would recommend reading this book as a textbook that discusses some very important theories and thinkers and that can also serve as an important object lesson for the highly problematic tendency, which it shares with many contemporary schools, of unambiguously and unreflexively assuming an elitist, moralistic stance vis-à-vis art and culture.