Great divides and genres as impulses

I've been finishing up Andreas Huyssen's After the Great Divide, which is about the relationship between high art and mass culture in different literary and theoretical movements in the twentieth century. He points to the frequently-observed fact that canonical modernism tended to characterize and identify itself by means of a consciously exclusionary strategy, defining itself in a paroxysm of anxiety over being "contaminated" in some way by mass culture. (This is a tendency that is documented extensively in John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses.) But, he points out, the culture of modernity has been more complicated than that, and the relationship between high art and mass culture more volatile and problematic.

Even as this impulse to insist on a categorical distinction between a "high" art and mass culture, this Great Divide, asserted itself, it (he says) has always been immediately challenged. Modernity has (at least) two experimental threads, the modernist and the avant-garde. Avantegardism, in Huyssen's account, is the resistant thread -- and postmodernism, in this account, though it relies on different methods, is not a new upheaval but a continuation and rearticulation of the resistant tradition that was earlier articulated in the avant-garde.

Interestingly, Huyssen feels, once the Great Divide is established in the discourse and the culture, attempts to destabilize it don't stick; in fact, they have a tendency to revitalize and strengthen the old dichotomy, tickling it into backlash. Hence the need for, or space for, the postmodernist impulse at all. And one of the undercurrents of the book, which burbles up explicitly from time to time and pours forth in the introduction and conclusion, is his frustration with the virulence of the Great Divide meme in modern scholarship.

Huyssen does a nice job of exploring the political, historical, cultural and emotional conditions that have worked to motivate this recurrent impulse to insist on a Great Divide. This being an area I felt was often neglected in Carey, I found it gratifying to see it given so much attention here; the best and most fully articulated expression of it is in his discussion of Adorno, who he sees as the theorist of Great Divisionism par excellence.

I appreciated Huyssen's exploration of the way that the very inclusionist impulse that characterizes Adorno's account of modern culture -- he was an innovator in his insistence that any theory of modern culture would have to encompass not just high art but the culture at large -- lays the groundwork for his later blistering critique of the American culture industry. But best of all is his discussion of the political impulse that underlies Adorno's devotion to the categorical distinction between high and low, and the account of why it makes sense in the context of Adorno's experience, writing at a time when avantegardism was being appropriated by truly dire institutions, and when it seemed understandably urgent to save the autonomy of artistic production from the totalitarian pressures of commercialism, fascist mass spectacles, and so on.

Anyway, the point of all this summary is to get to the point where I can remind myself that a thing that catches my attention regarding Huyssen's taxonomy of modernist genres -- because that's what a lot of his project is, teasing out the distinctions between and intersections of the avant-garde and aestheticist modernism -- is the degree to which these genres are depicted as different impulses, rather than types, styles, feature sets, or even families of artifacts. It's not entirely lacking in these other frames of categorization, but the story of genres here is a story of competing impulses before it's anything else.

(I guess the other point of talking about this is to say that one of the pleasant, and I think admirable, things about the kind of narrative/cognitive study I do is its amenability to undermining or transcending this great divide.)

(literature)

all about the log | discussion | genre references | language | literature | narrative gaps | planning |