Néstor GarcÃa Canclini, 'Modernity after Postmodernity'
In: Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America. Edited by Gerardo Mosquera. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995,
pp. 20- 51.
Modernity without Modernization? 'How can we speak of postmodernism in a country where we have such a pre-modern movement as the Sendero Luminoso?' Henry Pease GarcÃa asked recently. [1,2] The contradictions in each country may be different but there is a general impression that although liberalism and parliamentary representation have entered into constitutions, we lack sufficient social cohesion or modern political culture to make our countries governable. Caudillos (political chiefs) still make political decisions through informal alliances and forces. As Octavio Paz has pointed out, positivist philosophers and social scientists modernized university life but thoughts of the masses are governed by small local politicians, religion and manipulation by the media. The elite enjoys poetry and avant-garde art while the masses are illiterate. [3] Modernity tends to be seen as a mask, a simulacrum of the elite and of state machinery, especially that concerned with the arts and culture, which by this very characteristic is rendered unrepresentative and incongruent. The liberal oligarchies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries considered their rule to be that of the state, but they only organized some parts of society to promote subordinate and inconsistent development. They acted as if they were creating national cultures, while in fact they were creating elite cultures by ignoring the huge Indian and peasant populations; these reacted to their exclusion through countless revolts and in migrations that ‘disturbed’ the cities. Populism seemed to incorporate these excluded sectors, but its policy of economic and cultural distribution, without structural change, was reversed within a few years or diluted into demagogic form of customer service.
[…]
To be cultured it was no longer necessary, as it had been in the nineteenth century, to imitated European behaviour and to ‘ashamedly reject our own characteristics’, as Amaral has written. [16] Modernity coincided with the desire to explore and define what it was like to be Brazilian. The modernists used two opposed sources: international, especially French, information and ‘a nativism which is apparent in the inspiration and search for Brazilian roots. [It was also in the 1920s that research began into Brazilian folklore.] This fusion is apparent in Emiliano di Cavalcanti’s painting Five Young Women from Guaratinguetá, where Cubism provided the vocabulary with which to paint mulattas. It is also there in Tarsila do Amaral’s work, where the constructive structures she learnt from André Lhote and Fernande Léger were filled with Brazilian colour and atmosphere. In Peru the rupture with academicism occurred in 1929, led by a group of young painters who were as interested in artistic questions of form as they were in visually commenting on contemporary national problems and painting ‘Andean people’. For this reason they were called ‘indigenists’, although they went beyond the identification with folklore. Their aim was to launch a new art that represented the national as part of international modern aesthetic developments. [17] The coincidence between the interpretations of social historians concerning the rise of cultural modernization in Latin America is significant. What happened was not a transplant, especially with regard to the leading artists and writers, but rather a re-elaboration to contribute to social change. The attempt by artists to create independent cultural arenas, secularize images and organize themselves professionally was meant to encapsulate their world aesthetically, as some European modernist movements had done in order to hide away from social modernization.
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The State Conserves the Heritage, Companies Modernize It Symbolic differentiation began to act in a different manner, through a double separation: on the one hand by the traditional, administered by the state, and the modern, by private enterprise; on the other hand between a modern, or experimental, modernity for the elite promoted by one type of industry and a mass modernity, organized by another type of industry. The general tendency is for the modernization of culture for the elite to be undertaken by the state as the masses become the responsibility of private enterprise. While traditional heritage remained the responsibility of the state, the promotion of modern culture was increasingly the responsibility of business and private organizations. Two styles of cultural action were born from this difference. As the state understood its policy to be the protection and preservation of heritage, innovatory projects passed into society, especially into the hands of those with money to risk. The arts provide two types of symbolic return: for the state, legitimacy and consensus as it identifies itself as the representative of national history; for business, profit as it uses avant-garde culture to create an ‘independent’ image for its economic expansion.
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Toward a New Century: Postmodern Restructuring We would be missing half the point if we saw the result of modern contradictions as only the triumph of market expansion at the expense of modern emancipatory, democratizing and renovative projects. The restructuring of culture that we call postmodernism implies a radical restructuring of the relationships between tradition and modernity or between ‘high’, popular and mass culture that goes far beyond the concerns of the market. It also implies changes in collective identities, national and foreign articulations and in almost all the dilemmas we have been dealing with. It is worth pointing out here that I am not suggesting that postmodernism is a new tendency that will replace modernity and traditionalism. In line with thinkers such as Jameson and Huyssen, I understand it not as a discontinuity or rupture with modernism but rather as a reorganization of its internal forces and its relationship with tradition. [30] More than a new paradigm, postmodernism is a peculiar type of construction on the ruins of modernity, raiding its vocabulary and adding premodern or non-modern ingredients.
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It is worth pointing out here that I am not suggesting that postmodernism is a new tendency that will replace modernity and traditionalism. In line with thinkers such as Jameson and Huyssen, I understand it not as a discontinuity or rupture with modernism but rather as a reorganization of its internal forces and its relationship with tradition. [30] More than a new paradigm, postmodernism is a peculiar type of construction on the ruins of modernity, raiding its vocabulary and adding premodern or non-modern ingredients.
[…]
At this crossroads of traditional popular symbolism with the international circuits of the culture industry, the questions facing identity, nationality, defence of sovereignty and uneven appropriation of knowledge and art are transformed. Conflicts are not resolved, as neo-conservatives would have it, but they move into another register: that of an increasing displacement of culture. Popular movements that shift their activities on to this new stage combine the defence of their own traditions with what one Mexican artist who lives between Tijuana and San Diego calls ‘a more experimental, multifocal and tolerant view of culture’. [32] In other words, cultures whose independence is more conditioned than in traditional societies but which are more innovative and democratic.
[1] Sendero Luminoso: Literally ‘Shining Path’, a Peruvian Maoist guerrilla movement especially powerful in rural areas [translator’s note].
[2] Henry Pease GarcÃa, ‘La izquierda y la cultura postmodernidad’, in Proyetos de cambio. La izquierda democrática en América Latina (Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1988), p. 166.
[3] Octavio Paz, El ogro filantrópico (Mexico City: JoaquÃn Mortiz, 1979), p. 64.
[16] Aracy A Amaral, ‘Brasil, del modernismo a la abbstracción, 1910-1950, in Damián Bayón (ed.), Arte Moderno en América Latina (Madrid: Taurus, 1985), pp. 270-81.
[17] Mirko Lauer, Introducción a la pintura peruana del siglo XX (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1976).
[30] Andreas Huyssen, ‘GuÃa del postmodernismo’, Punto de Vista 29, year 10, (1987). The original version was published in New German Critique, 33, (1984).
[32] Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ‘Wacha ese border, son’, La Jornada Semanal 25 (October 1987), pp. 3-5.