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Strategies of representation most closely identified with late nineteenth-and twentieth-century movements in the arts that challenged the conventions of realism and romanticism. Some critics dismiss \'modernism\' as the emptiest of labels, and certainly the diversity of modernisms needs emphasis. Even so, Lunn (1985) identifies four major preoccupations of aesthetic modernism in the early twentieth century that provide a useful series of formal coordinates:
{img src=show_image.php?name=2022.gif } Aesthetic self-consciousness. \'Modern artists, writers and composers often draw attention to the media or materials with which they are working\', Lunn argues, and in doing so establish the status of their work as a \'fiction\' in the literal sense of \'something made\': they thus seek to escape from the idea of art as a direct reflection of the world. {img src=show_image.php?name=2022.gif } Simultaneity and juxtaposition. Modernism often disrupts, weakens or dissolves temporal structure in favour of an ordering based on simultaneity; different perspectives are often juxtaposed within the same frame. {img src=show_image.php?name=2022.gif } Paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty. Modernism often explores what Lunn calls \'the paradoxical many-sidedness of the world\': instead of an omniscient narrator, for example, modernist writers may deploy multiple, limited and partial vantage-points from which to view events. {img src=show_image.php?name=2022.gif } The demise of the centred subject. Modernism often exposes and disrupts the fiction of the sovereign individual or the \'integrated subject\'.These shifts did not emerge in a vacuum, and many commentators treat modernism — and in particular the avant-garde (Bürger, 1984) — as both a critique of and a response to a protracted series of major crises within capitalist modernity at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its historico-geographical coordinates include: the explosive growth of modern cities and radical transformations of their built forms, economies and cultures; the restructuring of European capitalism, especially through the Agricultural Depression at the end of the nineteenth century and the intensified technical changes brought about by a new round of industrialization; the aggressive advance of European colonialism and imperialism; and the turbulence of the First World War and the Russian Revolution (see Bradbury, 1976; Anderson, 1984; Timms and Kelley, 1985; Hobsbawm, 1987; Eksteins, 1989).
Even in such an abbreviated form, this cultural mapping has three implications of direct relevance to human geography. First, these episodes brought with them significant changes in conceptions of time and space in the West (Kern, 1983) which also had dramatic repercussions far beyond the shores of Europe and North America (Rabinow, 1989; Wright, 1991) and which were directly implicated in new productions of alterity (see other/otherness; Torgovnick, 1990). Secondly, the characteristic ways in which these changes were registered in the arts, literature and elsewhere were profoundly gendered and sexualized. \'The territory of modernism\', Pollock (1988) reminds us, \'so often is a way of dealing with masculine sexuality and its sign, the bodies of women.\' Representations of modern spaces were typically made to revolve around masculine subject-positions — like the mobile figure of the flâneur — and to privilege encounters \'between men who have the freedom to take their pleasures in many urban spaces and women from a class subject to them who have to work in those spaces often selling their bodies to clients or to artists\' (Pollock, 1988, p. 54; see also Wolff, 1990). Indeed, Lefebvre\'s account of the production of space — which was itself in some part inspired by his own association with early twentieth-century modernism — repeatedly draws attention to the significance of modernism for the triumph of a \'visual-geometric-phallic\' space. Thirdly, modernism was connected not only to experimentation in the arts but also to philosophical reflection and the formation of the social sciences, including the critical inquiries of the Frankfurt School (see, e.g. Berman, 1989; Pippin, 1991). Most of these intellectual projects (including human geography) retained the social markings and erasures produced by the racialized, gendered and sexualized processes of othering that were written into modernism\'s prospectus.
Lunn\'s characterizations make most sense when applied to modern art and literature — in discussions of movements like surrealism and cubism — and probably have less purchase on modern architecture, which has its own chronologies and concerns (Frampton, 1985; Holston, 1989). These assumed a wider significance in the 1950s and 1960s when a so-called high modernism emerged as a dominant cultural thematic, distinguished by what Bürger (1992) describes as a \'pathos of purity\'. \'In the same way as architecture divested itself of ornamental elements\', he argues, so \'painting freed itself from the primacy of the representational, and the nouveau roman liberated itself from the categories of traditional fiction (plot and character)\'. And in much the same way, and at much the same time, one could see spatial science divesting human geography of its interest in difference and differentiation, which became so many \'residuals\' and so much \'noise\', in order to reveal the purity of universal geometric form (often, like architecture, cast in terms of a functionalism). It would not be difficult to present other high modern movements in social thought in much the same way: e.g. structuralism.
From such a perspective, postmodernism becomes a critique of high modernism. But equally important are its echoes and filiations with the early twentieth-century avant-garde: connections which, as Lunn (1985) shows, were particularly important for the development of western Marxism. Not for nothing does Berman (1983, 1992) urge the importance of reclaiming that earlier modernism. In fact, he suggests that it has its roots even earlier, in the nineteenth-century writings of Baudelaire and Marx, both of whom (in different ways) sought to come to terms with a world in which \'all that is solid melts into air\'. Those most interested in elucidating such connections have often been concerned to establish the ways in which modernism and postmodernism bear on (and yield particular insights into) the production of space and spatiality. Thus Harvey (1989) sought to elucidate the web of connections between the cultural formations of modernism, the experience of time-space compression and the changing political economy of twentieth-century capitalism, and this in turn provoked a critique of the ways in which modernist representations like Harvey\'s work to erase the gendering and sexualization of their maps of modernity (Deutsche, 1996). There have also been explorations of the ways in which the production of modern urban space can be illuminated through the writings of Walter Benjamin (1892-1941) (Gregory, 1994; Savage, 1995; see also Buck-Morss, 1989; Gilloch, 1996), and accounts of the continuities between surrealism and the cultural-political interventions of the situationists in the modern city (Bonnett, 1992; Pinder, 1996). These reflections have had noticeable effects on both the terrain of analysis (objects, methods) and the terrain of representation (strategies, media): most obviously in the carefully and consciously modernist work of US geographer Allan Pred. In particular, his experimental studies of the constellation between commodification, the culture of \'world exhibitions\' and the formation of Identities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries make artful use of techniques of visual and verbal montage, and have been freely informed by Benjamin\'s example (Pred, 1995). Far from eclipsing modernism, therefore, the late twentieth-century rise of postmodernism has prompted many human geographers to provide more critical, constructive and discriminating readings of early twentieth-century modernism. (DG)
References Anderson, P. 1984: Modernity and revolution. New Left Review 144: 96-113. Berman, M. 1983: All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. London: Verso. Berman, M. 1992: Why modernism still matters. In S. Lash, and J. Friedman, eds, Modernity and identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 33-58. Berman, R. 1989: Modern culture and critical theory: art, politics and the legacy of the Frankfurt School. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bonnett, A. 1992: Art, ideology and everyday space: subversive tendencies from dada to postmodernism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10: 69-86. Bradbury, M. 1976: The cities of modernism. In M. Bradbury, and J. McFarlane, eds, Modernism 1890-1930. London: Penguin, 96-104. Buck-Morss, S. 1989: The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bürger, P. 1984: Theory of the avant-garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bürger, P. 1992: The disappearance of meaning. In S. Lash and J. Friedman, eds, Modernity and identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 94-112. Deutsche, R. 1996: Men in space. Reprinted in her Evictions: art and spatial politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 195-202. Eksteins, M. 1989: The Rites of Spring: the Great War and the birth of the modern age. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys. Frampton, K. 1985: Modern architecture: a critical history. London: Thames and Hudson. Gilloch, G. 1996: Myth and metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the city. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gregory, D. 1994: City/commodity/culture: spatiality and the politics of representation. In his Geographical imaginations. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 214-56. Harvey, D. 1989: The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Blackwell. Hobsbawm, E. 1987: The age of empire, 1875-1914. London: Cardinal. Holston, J. 1989: The modernist city. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kern, S. 1983: The culture of time and space, 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lunn, E. 1985: Marxism and modernism. London: Verso. Pinder, D. 1996: Subverting cartography: the situationists and maps of the city. Environment and Planning A 28: 405-28. Pippin, R. 1991: Modernism as a philosophical problem. Oxford: Blackwell. Pollock, G. 1988: Modernity and the spaces of femininity. In her Vision and difference: femininity, feminism and histories of art. London and New York: Routledge, 50-90. Pred, A. 1995: Recognizing European modernities. A montage of the present. London and New York: Routledge. Rabinow, P. 1989: French modern: norms and forms of the social environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Savage, M. 1995: Walter Benjamin\'s urban thought: a critical analysis. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 201-16. Timms, E. and Kelley, D., eds, 1985: Unreal city: urban experience in modern European literature and art. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Torgovnick, M. 1990: Gone primitive: savage intellects, modern lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolff, J. 1990: The invisible flâneuse: women and the literature of modernity. In her Feminine sentences: essays on women and culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 34-50. Wright, G. 1991: The politics of design in French colonial urbanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Suggested Reading Harvey (1989), ch. 2, 16. Lunn (1985), ch. 2. Pollock (1988). |
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