History of the Present : The Contemporary and Its Culture 9780367530952, 9781003080404

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The constitution of cultural modernity
2 From the modern to the contemporary
3 The past present: history as trauma
4 The present past: history as heritage
5 The future present: science fiction and the time of the novel
6 The present future: from world literatures to global literature
7 The present for the present: the museum of contemporary art
8 The absolute present: modern, postmodern, contemporary
Index

Citation preview

History of the Present

This book explores the demise of the grand narrative of European modernity. That once commanding narrative located the meaning of the past in the present and the meaning of the present in an ever-receding future. Today, instead, the present defines both the past and the future. The ‘contemporary’ has replaced ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ self-understandings. The times of the past and the future have been transformed into versions of ‘now’ while the present has acquired its own history. History of the Present describes the emergence of this ‘contemporary’ historical consciousness across a wide spectrum of cultural phenomena ranging from historiography to heritage and museum studies, and from the globalization of the novel to the rise of science fiction. The culture of the ‘contemporary’ appears particularly clearly in the merging of high and low culture along with art and fashion. This book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and social theory, museum and heritage studies, and literary history and criticism. David Roberts is Emeritus Professor in the School of Languages and Literatures at Monash University, Australia. He is the author of Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno and The Total Work of Art in European Modernism, the co-author of Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism, the editor of Reconstructing Theory: Gadamer, Habermas, Luhmann, and the co-editor of Comic Relations: Studies in the Comic, Satire and Parody.

Morality, Society and Culture Series Editors John Carroll

Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University; and Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.

Peter Murphy

Adjunct Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University and Adjunct Professor in the Cairns Institute at James Cook University.

The Morality, Society and Culture series publishes rigorous scholarly work exploring how moral questioning and action have been transformed in contemporary social relationships and by contemporary culture. Can cultural texts such as films, television broadcasts and art be vehicles for moral demands? Do we learn what it means to be ‘good’ from soap opera and advertising? If cultural texts are forms of moral mimesis, then are the standards of the ‘right’ and ‘good’ dependent on external considerations of cultural visibility and social relevance — and if so, how are some moral issues made visible or invisible, relevant or irrelevant? Now that morality has become cultural and is amenable to sociological and cultural study as well as philosophical investigation, this series explores how and to what effect moral questioning, action and debate are inextricably entwined with contemporary social and cultural forms, texts and institutions. The books in this series offer new understandings of the connection of morality, society and culture, analyze key contemporary events, and establish new methodologies. Titles in this series Cosmologies of the Anthropocene Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism Arne Johan Vetlesen On Guilt The Force Shaping Character, History, and Culture John Carroll History of the Present The Contemporary and its Culture David Roberts For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/MoralitySociety-and-Culture/book-series/ASHSER1429

History of the Present

The Contemporary and its Culture David Roberts

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 David Roberts The right of David Roberts to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-53095-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08040-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In Memoriam Agnes Heller György Markus

Contents

Acknowledgementsviii

Introduction

1

1 The constitution of cultural modernity

5

2 From the modern to the contemporary

15

3 The past present: history as trauma

27

4 The present past: history as heritage

47

5 The future present: science fiction and the time of the novel

65

6 The present future: from world literatures to global literature

82

7 The present for the present: the museum of contemporary art

101

8 The absolute present: modern, postmodern, contemporary

120

Index

140

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Peter Murphy for his illuminating comments during the preparation of my manuscript for publication. In particular I am indebted to his suggested choice of title that helped crystallize the focus of the book and to his critical reading of the final chapter. I would also like to thank Neil Jordan, Alice Salt, and the team at Routledge for their friendly and efficient support throughout the production process and publication. I would like to thank Sage and Taylor & Francis for permission to republish the following essays: Crowds, Clones, Cancer: The Suicide of Western Civilization in Canetti’s Auto da Fe and Houellebecq’s Atomised. Thesis Eleven 142 (2017). The Absolute Present of Historical Consciousness: Agnes Heller between the Postmodern and the Contemporary. In Critical Theories and the Budapest School, ed. Jonathan Pickle and John Rundell. London: Routledge, 2018. György Markus’s Theory of Cultural Modernity. Critical Horizons 2019: 3.

Introduction

When did the modern become contemporary? When did the story of modernism lose its purchase? To ask this question is to ask what replaced the grand narratives of European modernity. This question always lay in waiting in the inescapable paradoxes of a progress that constantly devoured itself — a progress that found the meaning of the past in the present and the meaning of the present in an ever-receding future. The paradox of progress ended in the paradox of a postmodernism that had ‘progressed’ beyond progress without ever cutting the umbilical cord. With the final recognition of the distinctness of the contemporary, ‘contemporary’ as a term ceased to simply denote the most recent manifestations of the modern. The contemporary and its culture signaled the arrival in a present no longer defined in relation to what had gone before but a present that now defined the past and the future, a present that had acquired its own history. Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time is still the classic exposition of the fundamental shift from the pre-modern, religiouslybound orientation to the past to the moderns’ reorientation to the future. This shift was crystallized by the ever-expanding gap between the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation,’ opened up by the increasing rate of economic and social change across the eighteenth century. It led to a differentiation between the past and the future, out of which a new sense of historical time emerged that led in turn to the new conception of history as progress, understood as ‘a long-term process of growing fulfilment which, despite setbacks and deviations was ultimately planned and carried out by men themselves’ (Koselleck 2004, 278). The catastrophes of the twentieth century consigned the paradigm of progress to the realm of a ‘future past.’ Walter Benjamin captured the reversal of historical semantics that followed from the explosion of the continuum of historical progress in his paradoxical concept of Jetztzeit, the ‘time of the now.’ His posthumous theses ‘On the Concept of History,’ written in the darkest days of the 1930s, can now be seen as anticipating the contemporary rethinking of modern historicism (Benjamin 2003). For the French historian Henry Rousso (Rousso 2017), Benjamin inaugurates the ‘history of the present’ (chapter three). Rousso shares with Benjamin the experience of history as trauma, that is, the presence of a past that is not past and done with. Koselleck had already pointed out, however, that experience necessarily involves

2  Introduction a ‘present past’ just as expectation involves ‘the future made present’ (Koselleck 1985, 272). Such making-present is the key to the concept of presentism, coined by the French historian and contemporary of Rousso, Francois Hartog, to identify the new regime of historicity which he argues we have now entered (chapter four). Hartog (Hartog 2015) posits three fundamental regimes of historicity since the Greeks, oriented respectively to the past (the ancients), to the future (the moderns), and to the present. Hartog’s historiographical model opens up to a history of the present that is more comprehensive than Rousso’s in that it involves a fundamental reconception of the relations between past, present, and future. Hartog’s presentist regime has expanded to incorporate the past and the future. The contemporary regime is thus characterized by a consciousness of the con-temporary that encompasses not only the endless present of consumer society but also a new sense of our present responsibility towards the past and the future, integral to a more fully developed idea of contemporaneity (chapters four and eight). Let me just note at this point that however profound the break between the modern and the contemporary regimes of historicity in Benjamin’s or Hartog’s reading, the contemporary, even if it marks the radical break with European historicism and cultural modernism, does not signify the end but rather a new stage of cultural modernity, against the background of a still-unbroken narrative of global economic modernization. My starting point here is György Markus’s theory of the constitution of cultural modernity (Markus 2011), built around the paradoxical unity of the arts and the sciences (chapter one). This provides a normative model of the epoch of European high culture from the second half of the eighteenth century through to the Second World War, against which continuities and discontinuities between the modern and the contemporary can be analyzed with special reference to three main tendencies of cultural modernity, highlighted by Markus: aestheticization, scientization, and musealization (chapter two). The chapters that follow set out to explore some salient aspects of contemporary cultural modernity in the light of the primacy of the present in relation to the past (chapters three and four), in relation to the future (chapters five and six), and conclude with contrasting self-understandings of the present (chapters seven and eight). Each group of paired chapters aims to bring out the divergent internal semantics of the con-temporary. Thus whereas the traumatic history of the twentieth century presupposes an inescapable past present (chapter three), the contemporary transformation of history into heritage is predicated on a present past (chapter four). When we turn to the future, Koselleck’s ‘future made present’ can take the form of the future present of history brought to its end, in the literal ‘realization’ of the inescapable paradox that all stories can only be told from their end (chapter five) or in fictional anticipations of a present future that allow us to trace in the globalization of the novel the index of a Kantian ‘universal history with cosmopolitan intent’ (chapter six). These antithetical versions of the ‘end purpose’ of the novel both bear witness to the transformation of the modern into the contemporary. When we turn to the relation of the present to itself, the primacy of the present means, as the Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller argues (Heller 1993), that the past and the future can only be conceived as the past and

Introduction  3 the future of our present (chapter eight). This present present to itself has become the absolute present of our imperfect historical knowledge and the imperfect truth of philosophy of history after the philosophy of history of the moderns. Heller’s absolute present — between Hegel and Benjamin — stands as the other of the present for the present of contemporary art and culture, which lives from the temporality of fashion and its promise of the eternal return of the new (chapter seven). Our three ‘ecstasies’ of the present have in common what we may call with Benjamin the ‘time differential’ at the heart of the ‘time of the now.’ These time differentials contain the possibility of cognitive gain through the mutual illumination of past and present, for which Benjamin’s inspiration was Proust (chapter three). The possibilities of cognitive gain — and loss — are particularly evident in the displacement of the historicist ordering of the past, consecrated in the modern museum, by a ‘transhistorical’ exhibition practice that is turning the contemporary museum into a time machine (chapter seven), not so far removed from the licence to time travel, granted to historical or science fiction (chapter five). Hartog’s account of the transforming of the past into heritage highlights in turn the consequences for the museum as one of the founding institutions of modern historicism (chapters two and seven). The new freedom of the contemporary in relation to the past means that the defining, asymmetrical difference between the past and the future, underwritten by the idea of progress, has lost its self-evidence, and with it the dividing line between the actual and the possible. Futurism’s engagement with possible futures, from economic prediction to risk management, from utopian to dystopian fictions, has found its counterpoint in a growing ‘fictioning’ of the past, now that it can no longer be safely relegated to the evolutionary prehistory of the present. The exponential expansion of historical and archeological knowledge is constantly redrawing the maps of history and of prehistory that now extends into deep time. The discovery of the sunken continent of the past, waiting to be explored in all its distance and nearness and brought to present experience, is the other of the decline of the future. André Malraux’s imaginary museum appears in retrospect as the beginning of the contemporary quest to incorporate humanity’s cultural heritage into a transhistorical presence that would accomplish in relation to the past what Kant envisaged for humanity’s cosmopolitan future. In this respect we see how central the universalizing interest of the modern museum and its historicist consciousness remains to the emerging horizon of global contemporary consciousness. The past is becoming as new and unknown as the future. It expands as the future contracts to become the other frontier of a present that is here to stay and grasps itself as the contemporary. The present is no longer the moving point of the linear process that connects the past to the future but the meeting point of the past and the future. This, our ‘absolute present,’ is all that is left from the wreckage of the grand narratives of the moderns. It is sufficient, however, to give meaning to the contemporary, conceived on the one hand as the space-time of the con-temporary and on the other hand as the space-time of contemporaneity. In both respects the contemporary appears as the chastened continuation of European modernism. Perhaps the drastic epistemological break with the modern regime of historicity

4  Introduction that drew the line between the modern and the contemporary was necessary in order to see the modern epoch and the global contemporary as two distinct but related stages of cultural modernity. Here Paul Rabinow’s definition of the contemporary is particularly appropriate. In Marking Time, he defines the contemporary as a ‘moving ratio of modernity’ that grasps the modern as an ethos that is already becoming historical (Rabinow 2008). I  read, however, his argument that the contemporary is not an epoch as confirming the continuity of the one ongoing epoch of cultural modernity. I share his emphasis on the cognitive gain that lies in the abandonment of thinking in terms of epochs, cultural unities, and progress in order to clear what he calls a non-linear space of enquiry into the multiple configurations of the old and the new (Rabinow 2008, 2–3) — in my terms, the con-temporary and its time differentials. The contemporary in this sense is the ‘moving ratio’ of a temporal consciousness that has reduced progress to the aporias of fashion at the same time as it embraces the inescapable presentness of knowledge. More generally, the acceptance of the primacy of the present marks the break with a futurism that destroyed the past and devalued the present in favour of an overcoming of the otherness of the past and recognition of its presence as a counterbalance to a threatening future. Above all, our present seeks to find its meaning in a shared awareness of responsibility for the past and the future capable of transforming the contemporary into a truly global contemporaneity.

References Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Selected Writings 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hartog, Francois. 2015. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Heller, Agnes. 1993. A Philosophy of History in Fragments. Oxford: Blackwell. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Markus, György. 2011. Culture, Science, Society. The Constitution of Cultural Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Rabinow, Paul. 2008. Marking Time. On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rousso, Henry. 2017. The Latest Catastrophe. History, the Present, the Contemporary. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

1 The constitution of cultural modernity

The present chapter aims to situate and contextualize György Markus’s key writings on cultural modernity in relation to their theoretical antecedents in Kant and Hegel’s conception of modern society as a society of culture and in Lukács’s reception of Kant and Hegel in his early pre-Marxist works. The following chapter examines some of the contemporary ramifications of certain tendencies in modern culture highlighted in Markus’s writings. In this first chapter I set out to reconstruct the presuppositions of Markus’s theory of the high culture of classical modernity in order to bring out the descriptive strength and the analytic contribution of his approach in relation to the tradition of cultural critique in modernity, in particular in Western Marxism. The second chapter goes beyond Markus’s theory of the high culture of modernity to explore in relation to the changed constellations of contemporary culture the twin offshoots of the structuring dichotomy of the arts and the sciences in modern culture, aestheticization and scientization, as they manifest themselves against the background of the ongoing processes of rationalization in the workplace and in administration. I then turn to the question of the continuities and discontinuities between modern and contemporary culture in relation to the museum as a core institution of the Enlightenment. Musealization represents perhaps the most significant cultural expression of the symbiosis of the aestheticization and scientization of the past that underwrites the emergence of the contemporary historical consciousness of global culture as a new postcivilizational form beyond all traditional cultures and civilizations, including Western cultural modernity. The aim of the analysis is to show how Markus’s theory of modern culture from the late eighteenth century to the end of World War II contains elements crucial to the theorization of contemporary culture, characterized by new forms of paradoxicality that go beyond his own model. The continuities and the discontinuities between his theory of modern culture and contemporary culture help us to appreciate both the specificity and the limits of his thinking on modernity as a society of culture. My analysis of the contemporary is necessarily a work in progress. The references to a number of theorists of the contemporary, primarily French and German, must serve as a first indication of the complexity, scale, and range of the cultural dynamics that are transforming the culture of Western modernity into global contemporary culture.

6  The constitution of cultural modernity The ‘single idea’ of culture, the problem of culture that Lukács bequeathed to his Budapest pupils was one that Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, and György Markus were to address in different ways after their break with the ruling Soviet orthodoxy in Hungary and their emigration to Australia. The problem of culture, more exactly, the question of Enlightenment and culture became the primary focus of Markus’s work in Sydney. His theorization of modern culture, predicated on the open articulation of the antinomies of modernity, had as its immediate presupposition Markus’s seminal contribution in Budapest to the renewal of critical theory: Marxism and Anthropology. The Concept of ‘Human Essence’ in the Philosophy of Marx (Markus 1978), followed by the further elucidation of the concept of human essence in terms of the paradigm of production in the late seventies. In Marxism and Anthropology Markus argued that Marx conceives species-essence as intersubjectivity, understood as the historically produced social totality that is the product of human labour and its teleological relation to nature. The world that is given to humans is an already existing, historically produced objectivity, reproduced and changed through a process of appropriation that presupposes the selection of ends and means. Appropriation is therefore an open, undetermined process through which human essence — the human capacity to be, in Marx’s words, a ‘universal and therefore free being’ — can unfold in and through social development. Once Marx’s historically open conception of human essence is grasped, the mechanistic understanding of historical determinism is demolished and, as Markus will go on to show in his acute analysis of Marx’s practical-social rationality, the paradigm of production must be understood as a project that articulates human essence as an in-principle unlimited tendency for progress. Or more exactly, precisely qua project the paradigm of production is only one among competing historical alternatives in relation to social development. Marxism and Anthropology thus lays the groundwork in the 1960s for the ever more radical revisionism that culminated in the joint critique of the Soviet system of power in Dictatorship Over Needs by Feher, Heller, and Markus (Markus 1983) and in Markus’s elucidation of the paradigm of production in Marx. It is not by chance that ‘Life and the Soul: The Young Lukács and the Problem of Culture’ is the one essay from Markus’s Budapest years that is included in the most important collection of his Australian essays, Culture, Science, Society (2011). It forms the bridge between the legacy of Lukács and the enduring theme of Western Marxism — the crisis of culture in modernity — and the main concern of Markus’s work in Australia. To understand the questions that Markus’s post-Marxist theory of cultural modernity seeks to answer, we need to go back to Lukács’s pre-Marxist search for answers to the problem of culture in modernity. ‘Life and Soul: The Young Lukács and the Problem of Culture’ is pivotal here. As indicated, this essay looks back to the ‘single idea’ of Lukács and Western Marxism — the problem of culture — and points forward to the ‘single idea’ of Markus’s work from the early 1980s on: what he was to call ‘the constitution of cultural modernity’ (Markus 2011). The Lukácsian problem of culture is transformed in Markus into the paradoxical unity of culture. The problem of culture, so central to Lukács and Western Marxism, derives, however, from the paradoxes

The constitution of cultural modernity  7 inherent in the Enlightenment conception of culture that were given their fundamental, foundational expression in Kant and Hegel. The opposing conceptions of culture in Hegel and Kant — the philosophicalhistorical and the metaphysical — define the parameters of Lukács’s problem of culture. If culture signified for Lukács the form that unifies all dimensions of life into a totality, and if only in such an authentic totality can art and philosophy cease to be alienated from life, the deciding question of culture is this: is a life free of alienation possible? ‘The issue,’ in Markus’s words, ‘is whether the conditions of the age in which he [Lukács] lived was an expression of the existential and ontological tragedy of culture or of a historical crisis from which recovery was possible’ (Markus 2011, 527). Ontological tragedy or historical crisis? Lukács’s first answer was historical in the form of a comparison between classical tragedy and modern drama in Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des modernen Dramas (The History of the Development of Modern Drama 1909) and between Greek and Christian epic and the modern novel in Theory of the Novel (1916), which was originally intended as the introduction to a study of Dostoevsky and his adumbration of a utopia of authentic life beyond alienation. Lukács’s contrast between the organic totality of authentic culture and the fallen world of god-forsaken modernity demonstrates the historical reversal of the relationship between life and culture, life and the work of art. Authentic culture gave meaning to the work of art and in turn art gave the highest expression to the totality of life. In the condition of modern alienation, however, the artwork becomes the surrogate for the lost totality of the past. And as such it has a double role. On the one hand, it is called to give meaning here and now to alienated life by objectifying and giving form to the split between soul and world, individual and society, inner values and external institutions. On the other hand, as the highest exemplification of totality the artwork becomes the redemptive other that points to the possibility of a world beyond alienation. The affinities to Nietzsche’s critique of modern culture are evident. The Theory of the Novel parallels Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Dostoevsky embodied for the young Lukács the redemptive promise, as did Wagner for the young Nietzsche, of a coming age of authentic culture. The existential truth of the artwork as the utopia of authentic life for the young Lukács or as the defetishizing objectivation of the ‘generic’ forms of human activity in the late Specificity of the Aesthetic (1963) reveal the underlying continuity of Lukács’s pre-Marxist and Marxist thinking about the place and function of art in social life. It was the young Hegelian Lukács who was so important for Adorno and Benjamin (but also for Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 1929), not the unknown Lukács of the Heidelberg manuscripts on aesthetics, written between 1912 and 1918, abandoned by Lukács and not published until 1974, edited by György Markus (Lukács 1974a, 1974b). The motivating interest of the Heidelberg manuscripts remained the crisis of modern culture but the deciding question was now Kantian: works of art exist, how are they possible? This question replaces the Hegelian narrative of the loss of authentic culture by the question of the transcendental, that is, systemic, conditions of possibility of the work of art. It meant the acceptance of the ontological tragedy of culture, the acceptance that works of

8  The constitution of cultural modernity art, like all great cultural objectivations, can transcend alienation but they cannot abolish it (Markus 2011, 537). Ironically this metaphysical resignation, which confirmed the impossibility of authentic culture and could only be compensated by the retreat to the ‘redeeming power of form’ (534), opened up fruitful theoretical possibilities cast aside by Lukács in 1918, which were to find their continuation in Markus’s own theory of cultural modernity. The presuppositions of Markus’s theory of modern society as the society that knows itself as culture are given in Kant and Hegel’s interpretation of enlightened society. Despite their fundamental differences, Kant and Hegel in Markus’s reading share a common sense of the practical limits of Enlightenment. Kant’s optimism regarding the existence of a public capable of enlightening itself rested on the conviction that freedom of thought went hand in hand with freedom of trade, specifically a free book market. The public’s preference for novels and romances rather than ideas meant, however, that the commercialization of literature had betrayed the ends of Enlightenment (Markus 2011, 394–396). Kant’s optimism was defeated by the gulf between his understanding of the autonomy of the public sphere, defined by the normative roles of author and reader, and the actual interests of authors, readers, and thus of publishers. The virtuous circle of the public sphere is shadowed by the vicious circle of private interest: Adorno’s analysis of the ‘culture industry’ spells out the dialectic of Enlightenment in modern society that is unable to bridge the gulf between the Enlightenment as social-historical project and its practical realization. In ‘The Hegelian Conception of Culture’ Markus reconstructs Hegel’s understanding of cultural modernity as the end result of the world-historical process of the growth in self-consciousness, the process that Hegel called Bildung, which covers both collective and individual cultivation. Culture conceived as Bildung reflects Hegel’s commitment to the fundamental idea of the Enlightenment, ‘the emancipation of rational and self-determining individuality, for whom the cultivation of reason and will is a value-in-itself [sic]’ (Markus 2011, 407). But Hegel’s autonomous individual, like Kant’s self-enlightening public, is a postulate, confined in practice to the few. Even though modernity is the epoch of Bildung that knows itself as culture and recognizes its institutions as those created and sustained by human activities, it is nevertheless challenged to effectively realize the reciprocity of individual cultivation and the general culture of society (408–409) that had once been the accomplishment and actuality of historical, that is, traditional, cultures. Hegel’s dialectic of Enlightenment arises from the two causes that go to the heart of ‘the problem of culture,’ which so resonated in cultural critique from the Romantics to Nietzsche and Heidegger, Simmel and Weber, and Western Marxism. The one cause lies with the progress of Spirit to self-consciousness, the other in the division of labour and the differentiation of the social totality together with the resultant growth in complexity: the one expresses and reflects the historical process of the dissolution of spiritual unity, the other expresses and reflects the historical process of ever-increasing alienation. The loss of a spiritual home haunted the nineteenth century and beyond. It turned secularization into the religion of the loss of religion, the religion of mourning for

The constitution of cultural modernity  9 the lost totality of culture. Hegel’s concern lay, however, not with the cultural pessimism of the few but with the socio-cultural gulf that had opened up between the educated elite and the mass of the population, brought about by the decline of religion and shared beliefs. Hegel shared Kant’s doubts as to the possibility of a self-determining public. Of the three historical forms of the absolute and the divine — art, religion, philosophy — only philosophy could now meet the highest needs of enlightened society. Self-enlightenment remained, however, the privilege and preserve of the few now that religion had lost its socially binding power. For Markus the outcome is a deeply paradoxical conception of modernity: ‘the only society that makes progress into its own inherent principle, and thereby ends “history” can progress only on the basis of a dead cultural tradition, a tradition which its development robbed of spiritual creativity and forced into a merely private sphere’ (413). Modernity’s destruction of all cultural traditions is epitomized by the museum, the bourgeoisie’s monument to Hegel’s paradox of progress. The cultural treasures of the museum make manifest the spiritual impoverishment of modern individuals, emancipated from traditional bonds. This emancipation signifies for Markus ‘the progressive emptying of the individual from all substantive contents and aims’ as the alienating consequence of ‘the progressive transformation of each sphere of the institutional order into an autonomous mechanism which, driven by its objective logic, makes more and more narrow, rigid, and impersonal requirements and demands upon the individual’ (407). It is at this point — the transformation of substance into function — that we must pause. Markus’s reconstruction of the contradictions of cultural modernity, exemplified in Kant and Hegel’s recognition of the dialectic of Enlightenment, seems to pose impossible obstacles to any possible solution to the ‘single thought’ of culture of the young Lukács and in Western Marxism. And this is indeed the case, there is no ‘solution’ to the problem of culture when it is conceived in postHegelian terms of historical disenchantment. Lukács himself recognized the theoretical impasse when he turned from Hegel back to Kant in his Heidelberg writings on aesthetics between 1912 and 1918. And despite the fact that Lukács had not abandoned his search for an absolute answer to the problem of culture, the central place that the work of art takes in the Heidelberger Philosophie der Kunst (Lukács 1974a) and the Heidelberger Asthetik (Lukács 1974b) provides the crucial stepping stone to Markus’s theory of the high culture of modernity. Lukács absolutized the work of art as an aesthetic totality of experience, captured in the unity of objective form and subjective spontaneity, comparable to Schelling’s ‘deduction of the art work’ in his early System of Transcendental Idealism as the absolute coincidence of subject and object, the conscious and the unconscious. In the earlier Heidelberger Philosophie der Kunst the work of art is grasped as the solution to the fundamental contradictions of life in that it presents qua aesthetic totality the a priori of all actual experience. In the Heidelberg Aesthetics, however, the Kantian question of the conditions of possibility of works of art, as distinct from the fact that works of art exist, can be answered only in the form of a paradoxical absolute, as befits Lukács’s own description of the intention of his aesthetics as a ‘reverent negative theology’ (Lukács 1974b, 274).

10  The constitution of cultural modernity The condition of the work’s possibility resides in the pre-established harmony of form and content. The immanent validity of the work, based on the closed system of the internal relations of its constituent elements, makes the work the sole source of value in the aesthetic sphere. Precisely this absolute transcendence of the work in relation to both empirical authors and recipients determines the normativity of production and reception, objectified in the work. The normative relationship between Author, Work, and Recipient, subsumed in the absolute transcendence of the work, presents what we might call the ‘absolute’ schema of Markus’s own triad of Author, Work, and Recipient. Lukács’s answer to the Kantian question needs to be de-theologized before it can be appropriated, before the turn from Hegel to Kant can be completed. The final step concerns the Lukácsian concept of form. As Markus points out, the concept of form is more comprehensive than that of the ‘work’: For Lukács, form designates all the functions connected with the creation of meaning. It enables the multiplicity of facts, events and all the other elements of life to be arranged into meaningful structures, organised patterns of meaning. (Accordingly, form is related not only to the sphere of “absolute spirit” but also to that of “objective spirit”.) (Markus 2011, 535) Lukács’s concept of form is general enough to encompass and designate not only the congruence of life and works in authentic culture but also the internal principle of objectivation and validity particular to the modern differentiated spheres of the constitution of meaning. In the first chapter of the ‘Heidelberg Aesthetics’ Lukács defines his own position as a rejection of Hegel’s reduction of all forms of transcendental constitution to one single logical type in favour of the plurality and autonomy of the separate spheres (Markus 2011, 235). If the aesthetic validity of the work of art is still for Lukács absolute, it does not mean, however, as we have seen, that the work of art can abolish alienation. Thus whether Lukács turns to Hegel or to Kant they only confirm the problem of culture in modernity and hence his own aesthetics and the aesthetic theory of Benjamin and Adorno as negative theology. The final step from Hegelian substance to (neo-)Kantian function remains to be taken. Between Lukács and Markus’s theory of cultural modernity stands Ernst Cassirer’s studies on the conditions of intersubjective validity in the natural and the cultural sciences. (See the discussion of Cassirer and his ‘path-breaking’ Substanzbegriff in Markus 2011, 499–520). Although Cassirer expanded his early work on epistemological problems in modern philosophy and sciences (Cassirer 1906) to a general philosophy of symbolic forms covering the arts and the sciences (1923–1929), his crucial contribution for our purposes lies in his functional theory of objectivity, which resides not in the work itself, that is, not in the work’s immanent system of relations, but in the system of relations within which the work is itself possible. This functional system of relations in the arts, humanities, and sciences constitutes the conditions of production in the high culture of modernity,

The constitution of cultural modernity  11 whose products have for Markus the following features in common — objectivation, innovation, dematerialization, and autonomy (Markus 2011, 22). The work as an ideal object, that is, as a dematerialized complex of meaning, is for Markus autotelic, valuable in itself, autonomous, independent of external subordination, and autochthonous, determined by its own internal logic regulated by the normative values of the sphere. These normative values are themselves products of a functional theory of objectivity that requires recognition of the historical relativity of norms. As Cassirer writes: That we [in science] find only a relative stopping point, that we therefore have to treat the categories, under which we consider the historical process itself, themselves as variable and capable of change, is obviously correct: but this kind of relativity does not indicate the limits but rather the particular life of cognition. (Cassirer 1906, 16) Cassirer’s defence and justification of ‘the particular life of cognition’ is specifically modern; it describes the modern system of culture as one for which historical change, categorical relativity, and open-endedness are constitutive. Lukács’s conundrum of historicity and timelessness in the artwork that he could only resolve metaphysically (Lukács 1974a, 151–232) is resolved with Cassirer into the empirical functioning of the cultural and the natural sciences, which derive their intersubjective validity in the case of science by reference to the universal laws of nature and in the case of culture through the possibility of universal meaning that transcends the time-bound nature of cultural creations through an open-ended historical process of reception and re-interpretation. Cassirer’s late systematization of Kant’s two realms of reason and imagination in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942) forms the epistemological background to Markus’s theory of cultural modernity. The two key essays here are ‘A Society of Culture: The Constitution of Cultural Modernity’ (1994) and ‘The Paradoxical Unity of Culture: The Arts and the Sciences’ (2003). The two dimensions of Markus’s theory are 1) the structure of validity that is common to the arts and the sciences and allows us to speak of their paradoxical unity and 2) the historicity qua project of the high culture of modernity. I leave the discussion of the historicity of ‘classical’ cultural modernity to the following chapter because it involves the question of the relationship between classical modern and contemporary global modernity, in order to focus here on the unifying conceptual scheme that enables Markus to articulate the basic similarities and the fundamental differences between the two domains of the arts and the sciences. He calls this scheme the ‘cultural relation’ that embraces the three functional roles of Author-Work-Recipient, each of which is defined by the normative expectations and requirements of the role. These normative roles, however, do not prescriptively determine the actual character of these practices, nor the effective evaluative criteria of their

12  The constitution of cultural modernity results. They are (in Kantian terminology) not of constitutive, but only of regulative character. They only indicate delimiting conditions that ought to be met if something is to be regarded as pertaining to the general realm and to a particular domain of culture. (Markus 2011, 61) This normativity regulates not only what belongs to the respective domains but equally who has the right to participate. The high, as opposed to the low, culture of modernity is not open to everyone. Markus’s regulative framework is minimal but it delivers a great deal precisely by refraining from solving ‘the problem of culture.’ The paradoxical unity of culture is underpinned by this methodological abstention, which replaces the grand narratives of the crisis of culture in modernity by the self-regulating constitution of a society of culture. Before briefly listing what this replacement achieves in relation to post-Hegelian critical theories of culture from Nietzsche to Heidegger, Simmel to Weber, Lukács to Benjamin and Adorno, let me illustrate with reference to Heidegger and Adorno the totalizing critique and rejection of modern culture. In ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (1938) Heidegger identified the following five components of modernity: (1) science; (2) technology; (3) aesthetic art as experience; (4) culture as the realization of the highest values, which calls for cultural politics; (5) the de-divinization of the world, underlined and confirmed by the religiosity which cultivates subjective religious experience (Heidegger 1977, 75–76). The flight of the gods goes together with the self-definition of modernity in terms of the highest values of its culture: the twin utopias of science and art, which exclude religion and relegate it to the private sphere of experience. For Heidegger the essence of modernity lies in this objectivation of the world and subjectivation of human being (hence his recurrent polemic against subjectively defined experience qua Erlebnis), which define the reality of reality in terms of the world as picture. The completion of modernity is accomplished for Heidegger once the essence of modernity becomes one with its unessence, a telos inherent in the institutionalization of science as research, that is, as business (Heidegger 1977, 116–118). Although Heidegger does not elaborate on the institutionalization of art, his reference to cultural politics is meant to apply to the high culture of modernity as a whole. For Adorno in turn the very word ‘culture’ is a product of the cultural politics that have made culture and administration inseparable: The combination of so many things lacking a common denominator — such as philosophy and religion, science and art, forms of conduct and mores — and finally the inclusion of the objective spirit of the age in the single word ‘culture’ betrays from the outset the administrative view, the task of which, looking down from on high, is to assemble, distribute, evaluate and organize. (Adorno 2001, 107)

The constitution of cultural modernity  13 The ‘administrative view’ calls the very distinction between culture and culture industry into question in ‘the age of integral organization.’ Modernity’s utopia turns out to be institutional dystopia: ‘the increase in the quantity of administrative apparatus has brought about a new quality,’ says Adorno, quoting Weber on ‘the irrevocable expansion of the control of all public and private relations through bureaucratization’ (Adorno 2001, 108). But, as Markus observes, the distinction between culture and culture industry plays a fatally incriminating role in Adorno’s conception of modern culture. It results in a double overburdening of ‘culture.’ . . . On the one hand, it is an overburdening of the ‘culture industry’ with an ineradicable, incurable guilt of serving as the ‘cement’ for a system of impersonal domination that absolves the theory from analysing its inner diversity and differentiation. On the other hand, this is an overburdening of art with a task which as art, as the source of aesthetic experience, it cannot fulfil at all today. The sad fact, that in the absence of effective social-political alternatives, ‘culture’ — and culture in the reduced sense of the arts and philosophy — remains the sole accessible terrain of critical activity for radical intellectuals, thus receives an ideological, and ultimately circular self-justification. (Markus 2011, 631) Against the whole German tradition of cultural critique Markus defends with Cassirer the Kantian conception of the high culture of modernity as the successor to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. He legitimizes the ‘particular life of cognition’ of this culture and thereby modernity in its own right against the negations of the legitimacy of modernity explicit or implicit in the cultural pessimism of critical theory in the wide sense. He refuses the narratives of the tragedy of culture, the death of art, which all in their different ways rewrite the Hegelian enlightenment of art in terms of the deadly hostility of science to art. Whether we speak of Socratic enlightenment (Nietzsche), alienation and reification (Lukács), disenchantment (Weber), rationalization (Adorno), or Heidegger’s Gestell, the progress of the sciences and knowledge is presented as the nemesis of art. Markus replaces the antithetically destructive relationship between the arts and sciences by the complementarity of the two domains, which is understood as essential to the ongoing vitality and reproduction of high culture. Driven by the everrenewed disputes between the two main ideological programmes of the moderns, Enlightenment and Romanticism, the project of cultural modernity necessarily takes on the general character of critique, constantly tempted, however, to totalizing conclusions that deny the legitimacy of modernity (Markus 2011, 74–80). Markus’s insistence on the paradoxical unity of culture as the condition of its functioning is directed precisely at the fatal illusions and consequences of all such simultaneously totalizing and one-sided critiques that claim to overcome the antinomies of the modern condition or that in denouncing the dialectic of Enlightenment fall victim to the dialectic of Romanticism (see Roberts and Murphy 2004).

14  The constitution of cultural modernity The autonomy of the arts and the sciences as self-regulating domains, separated from direct social functions, insulates normativity from all overriding external demands at the same time as it makes normativity a function of the evolving and changing historical system. Markus’s account is thus in no way tied to a terminal vision of modernity and the decadence of its culture. There are no gods, old or new, waiting to save us. Rather, the high culture of modernity is a historical phenomenon that is classical because it came closest to realizing the Kantian conception of modern society as a society of culture. Its historical limits indicate the remit of Markus’s theory but not the limits of the evolving and changing cultural creativity and self-understanding of modern society. If this was not the interest or focus of Markus’s published writings on culture (even though he had long worked on a comparative analysis of theories of mass culture), they do contain highly relevant pointers towards theorizing contemporary culture, which is the focus of the following chapter.

References Adorno, Theodor. 2001. ‘Culture and Administration,’ in The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 107–132. Cassirer, Ernst. 1906. Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit. Vol. I. Berlin: Cassirer. Cassirer, Ernst. 2000. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942). Yale: Yale University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, tr. William Levitt. New York: Harper & Row, 115–154. Lukács, Georg. 1974a. Frühe Schriften zur Ästhetik: Heidelberger Philosophie der Kunst (1912–1914), ed. György Markus. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Lukács, Georg. 1974b. Frühe Schriften zur Ästhetik. Heidelberger Ästhetik (1912–1918), ed. György Markus. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Markus, György. 1978. Marxism and Anthropology. The Concept of ‘Human Essence’ in the Philosophy of Marx (1965). Assen: Van Gorcum. Markus, György. 2011. Culture, Science, Society. The Constitution of Cultural Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Markus, György, Ferenc Feher and Agnes Heller. 1983. Dictatorship over Needs. Oxford: Blackwell. Roberts, David and Peter Murphy. 2004. Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism. London: Continuum.

2 From the modern to the contemporary

Does it make sense to speak of contemporary society as a society of culture that still relates to the Kantian conception of modern society? The answer is yes in the basic sense that contemporary society knows itself as a society of culture, even though its relation to the high culture of European modernity is marked as much by discontinuities as continuities. This dis/continuous relation underlies the ongoing relevance of Markus’s analysis to contemporary global modernity at the same time as it indicates the profound differences. To take one symptomatic example: the place of intellectuals as the leading protagonists of high cultural critique in the contemporary world. For Markus the intellectual was the prime carrier of the ideas of the Enlightenment and of the modern conception of society as culture. This is no longer the case. Intellectuals and modern intellectual culture have been pushed aside by the new elites of world society now that ‘a very specific, a single group of social actors: the intellectuals’ have lost their social role. Here Markus has in mind the ‘specialists’ in cultural critique. It was they who ‘spearheaded the feuding projects of Enlightenment and Romanticism.’ Today they are no longer needed. Their role has been taken over by the genuine experts: ‘the managers and PR persons of various cultural institutions and media, and their patrons and allies in social and political establishments’ (Markus 2011, 652–653). Does this mean the end of what Markus calls the often uneasy but persistent connection between culture and critique in modernity? Is rationalized modernity the conclusion rather than the continuation of the project of Enlightenment? These are the questions that Markus leaves unanswered in Culture, Science, Society. They are, however, integral to his theory of cultural modernity just as that theory remains an indispensable reference for the analysis of contemporary culture. Markus’s reconciliation of normative structure and historical system is itself historical. His theory describes the high culture of classical (European) modernity from the late eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War. The two key distinctions of his theory are that between the arts and the sciences and that between high and low culture. As we have seen, the vitality and capacity for selfreproduction that defined high culture came from the productive tension between and essential complementarity of the two domains of the arts and sciences. There was no such productive complementarity, however, between the spheres of high and low culture, produced and reproduced primarily by the segmentation and

16  From the modern to the contemporary commodification of the market for cultural goods. But in both respects the culture of classical modernity was built around processes of differentiation, normative in relation to the arts and sciences, economic in relation to the separate interests of recipients of high and low culture. This basic structure of differentiation still applies to contemporary culture but it no longer plays the defining role that it did for modern culture. The arts and the sciences still constitute separate domains, they still retain their normative criteria, even though they can no longer police and autonomously determine their borders as they once could. This erosion of borders points to the new forms of de-differentiating dynamics reshaping contemporary culture that are tied up with the penetration of the life world by aestheticization and scientization. We could say that the paradoxical unity of high culture has dis/ appeared into the diffused ubiquity of scientific and aesthetic attitudes. Science and the scientific attitude have provided the dominant ideology of modernity since the Enlightenment. The social effects in the form of the rationalization of the workplace and the bureaucratization of organizations have taken on a new competitive intensity since World War II and the progressive universalization of the developmental model of the nation-state. The same processes of competitive rationalization are at work in the aesthetic colonization of the life world in relation to products and consumers. This operative complementarity only becomes culturally interesting, however, when this dual penetration of work and leisure takes on a new quality through the inter-penetration of aestheticization and scientization to produce possibilities of creative hybridization that mirror and are mirrored in the inter-penetration of high and low culture. To sum up these introductory comments: the paradoxical unity of high culture has been transformed into the paradoxical unity of high and low culture — a unity, defined not by the complementarity of the differentiated spheres of the arts and sciences, but by their inter-penetration as it is reflected in contemporary culture on the level of both content and form. As regards content, I am thinking here of the importance of science fiction for critical reflection on science and technology; as regards form I am thinking of the appropriation of the creative possibilities of technology in the arts. Musealization is the third of the transgressive universalizing tendencies, highlighted by Markus as key components of modern culture. It applies the combined processes of aestheticization and scientization to the past but also to the present. It is thus simultaneously the instrument, demonstration, and exhibition of the relativizing historicization of the civilizations and cultures of the world that was both the project and projection of cultural modernity and is now being transformed into the historical consciousness of contemporary global culture. Contemporary culture shares the same dialectical relationship with traditional culture that Markus describes in ‘Antinomies of Culture’: From the viewpoint of the broad concept of culture, modern society appears as essentially deficient. But at the same time — and from the perspective of this very same concept — modernity takes on the character of the paradigmatic or ‘most fully developed’ culture because it is the culture which self-reflexively knows itself as culture. By recognizing all others as equal cultures, cultural

From the modern to the contemporary  17 modernity posits itself as more equal than others. It is its very particularity — that is, its self-reflexive character — that makes it universal: the recognition of other societies as ‘cultures’ confers on it the task and the right to assimilate/acquire/take into possession their ‘cultural achievements’ — of course, what it qualifies as such. (Markus 2011, 642) The contemporary is thus both a break with the paradigm of high culture and at the same time the continuation and amplification of universalizing cultural tendencies at work since the Enlightenment, whose effects are most clearly apparent in the arts (chapter seven). In the following I confine my comments to art as the most salient aspect of contemporary culture, including its multiple interactions with the sciences and technology, leaving the wider question of scientization as the reflection of the dominant scientific ideology of society and its ongoing rationalizing of social life to one side. Scientization in this wide organizational sense describes the ever-expanding penetration of scientific rationality and pseudo-scientific rationales into the world of work, administration and education. The causes of the disintegration of the high culture of modernity are manifold but they can be summed up in terms of the erosion of the normative criteria of its two domains from both internal and external reasons. In ‘A Society of Culture’ Markus lists some of the key factors that have made the classical conception of high culture inapplicable to contemporary practices. De-objectivation undoes the idea of the work as a self-subsisting ideal object, dissolving it into unlimited data in the sciences or into ephemeral event or happening in art; rematerialization reduces the work as a meaning-complex to a series of self-referential operations in science or to an object in art that foregrounds the material media of communication. In relation to the author, novelty is divorced from the creative subject, who disappears into the multiple authorship of scientific papers or whose death is proclaimed in art. In relation to reception, Markus stresses the loss of autochthony and the consequent vitiation of the formal normative autonomy of the two domains, which he illustrates by reference to the effective suspension of the intersubjective validation of research results in the sciences under the pressure of the costs of verification and the interests of external funding (Markus 2011, 30–32). Although the modern arts have always been dependent on the art market and old and new forms of patronage, it is clear that the normative distinction between aesthetic and market criteria has largely lost its purchase. All these factors are negative indices of the decline and dissolution of the high culture of modernity. Nevertheless, despite the importance of the external influences of money and power at work here, we need to recognize that the internal processes dissolving the boundaries of high culture express the dynamics of historical change inherent in the Enlightenment conception of culture. Emblematic of these changes is the transformation of the status of the artwork. In Lukács and Markus the work occupies central place as the synthesis of production and reception. Modern aesthetic theory is the theory of the work of art as thing, as discrete object, and of works of art as the sole province of theory.

18  From the modern to the contemporary The original meaning of aesthetics as referring to sensuous perception was thus narrowed down to the normative criteria of judgment that served to determine the borders of art proper from the crafts, handiwork, design, and decoration, or kitsch. Aesthetic theory in this sense went hand in hand with the modern differentiation of the arts as a separate domain. The dis/appearance of the aesthetic sphere into aestheticization of the lifeworld is reflected in the dis/appearance of the artwork into ambient happening, event, performance. Both are symptomatic of a fundamental process of de-differentiation that calls for a recovery of the original meaning of aesthetics as sensuous perception. This is the gist of Gernot Böhme’s argument for a new aesthetics that responds to aestheticization and that has as its focus the production of atmospheric aura as opposed to auratic artworks (Böhme 2013). The price of Böhme’s new aesthetics is the loss of the cognitive tension at work in the paradoxical uniting of opposites. Ambient happening, event, performance aim at immersion, the appearance and illusion of the merging of distinct spheres. Film music is a good example of the production of atmospherics that typically blends the two worlds of the avant-garde and the commercial in the one ambient soundscape. The concept of atmosphere, understood as that which surrounds objects, as that which resides in between, captures precisely what may be seen as one of the defining features of contemporary culture: the erosion and dissolution of differentiating boundaries, evident in the relativization of the unique artwork by new media of reproduction and in the emancipation of aesthetic value and of aesthetic work from the sphere of the arts (more generally, we could think of atmosphere as akin to all the trans-phenomena of contemporary culture, from the transhistorical and the transaesthetic to transcultural or transgender identities). The analytic key to the break between the modern and the contemporary lies in the dissolution of the modern distinction between high and low culture. The paradoxical unity of high culture has dissolved (more exactly: dis/appeared) into the paradoxical unity of high and popular culture or more exactly, the ambiguous unity of the two between cognitive dissonance and atmospheric dissolution. But as Markus stresses, the modern distinction between high and low culture could only emerge in the first place through the process of commodification and its dialectic: It was commodification that destroyed the network of patronage relations which directly conferred an instrumental functionality upon works of high culture, and just thereby made it possible for the Enlightenment to conceive of them as works of high culture: as embodiments of free, autonomous spiritual activities that alone can guide us towards universally valid ends. It was, however, this same commodification that immediately destroyed this illusion of the Enlightenment. (Markus 2011, 644) Although Markus himself regards the proclamations of the collapse of the orienting contrast between elite and mass culture as grossly overstated (652), to my mind he underestimates the profound changes over the 70 years since the end of the Second World War. The erosion of the borders between high and low culture

From the modern to the contemporary  19 has led to multiple processes of crossover between the high, professionalized systems of the arts and the sciences and a wider social reception, evident in the concomitant scientization and aestheticization of the work place, everyday life, and consumption that characterize the contemporary world. As Markus observes, this universalizing dynamic means that aesthetic and scientific ‘attitudes’ are no longer confined to some pre-established domain: ‘anything and everything can, in principle, become the object of scientific investigation or of aesthetic experience (and artistic representation).’ (649) Nevertheless, the two ‘attitudes’ remain for Markus mutually exclusive, precisely because their respective ideological programmes cannot be reconciled, even more because this irreconcilability is the paradoxical condition of possibility and the motor of cultural modernity (650). But if it is the case that reason and imagination, the arts and the sciences, represent different but complementary spheres, it is equally the case that aestheticization and scientization have become mutually reinforcing tendencies, which permeate anything and everything in the contemporary world, not only in their own right as distinct historical processes, but also in the form of new creative symbioses of the arts and technology that one might think of as a new techne embracing the arts and the sciences beyond the divide of classical high culture — a new techne, however, that as yet finds its primary expression in the arts and in the creative industries. Much has been written on the aestheticization of everyday life and on the aesthetic paradigm as the result of the transformation of a capitalism centred on production to a capitalism centred on consumption (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). The French philosophers Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy see in this transformation the emergence of a second, ‘hypermodern’ modernity, characterized by the interdependence of the industrial and cultural spheres (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2013). We can understand their notion of ‘artistic capitalism’ as describing a new stage of the ongoing transformation of the culture industry, carried by the alliance of high and low culture and of the arts and commerce. Artistic or creative capitalism has as its defining feature the drive to de-differentiate the aesthetic and the economic spheres, most readily apparent in a generalized aestheticization of consumption, whose origins go back to the nineteenth century and the spread of industrial mass production, which led in turn to the invention of the department store and the development of modern advertising. The department store became the site of the capitalist re-enchantment of the world through ‘the theatralization of the place of sale and the showcasing of merchandise’ (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2013, 134), whose purpose was to transmute commodities into magic objects and the department store into a palace of dreams. The emergence of a second stage of hyper-consumption and of what Lipovetsky calls ‘transaesthetic’ capitalism since the 1970s marks the point of the complete interpenetration of the economic and aesthetic spheres and a resultant society of the hyperspectacle (Lipovetsky, chapter 4), in which the screen and the image reign supreme. Lipovetsky’s term ‘transaestheticism’ sums up the logic of the de-differentiation of art as a separate sphere. In the high culture of modernity the ‘end of art’ functioned as a motivating theme, in contemporary culture art the ‘end of art’ is played out as the dis/appearance of art into the spectacle (Debord), hyperspectacle (Lipovetsky), atmospheres

20  From the modern to the contemporary (Böhme), simulation (Baudrillard) — all terms that seek to capture the imaginary of re-enchantment at work in aesthetic capitalism. The ‘magic object’ of desire of the nineteenth century department store has metamorphosed into the ‘virtual object’ of contemporary advertising: the image, which combines aesthetic seduction and the ‘scientific’ promise of performance in one. The ultimate virtual object of aestheticization is now the self: more real — that is, more ‘imaginary’ — than reality. Self-image has become the focus of the ever-expanding lifestyle industries, from wellbeing, health, physical, and spiritual exercises, fashion and brands to social media, that all play into the culture of narcissism. The image of the self extends moreover to cosmetic and plastic surgery; it implies all the potential forms of self-enhancement from the cyborg to artificial intelligence and the transhuman. These effects of aestheticization and scientization manifest the more general processes of symbiotic convergence, hybridization, and de-differentiation of the separate spheres and logics of the arts and the sciences, markets, institutions, and media that have brought about what may be called the dis/appearance of the high culture of modernity into all aspects of contemporary culture. And just as the high culture of modernity produced and reproduced the critical articulation of its antinomies in the competing programmes of the Enlightenment and Romanticism (in relation to nature, society, history, and human being), so global contemporary society possesses its own forms of critical self-reflection, in which the cultural critique of the moderns has been replaced by the conflicting positions of experts of all persuasions, complemented and amplified in turn by the interactive connectivity of social media. More important, indeed crucial to the understanding of contemporary culture, is a) the extent to which entertainment and the arts have found common cause around the critical thematization of issues from identity, gender, race, migration to ecology, fear and fascination of technology, artificial intelligence and the transhuman (issues that in fact still largely reflect and reproduce the old dichotomies of Enlightenment and Romanticism) and b) the extent to which the thematic contents and the technical media of entertainment and the arts both exemplify and self-critically reflect the practical symbiosis of aestheticization and scientization. Science fiction has become the master trope, perhaps even the master genre of contemporary culture. It mirrors and critically poses in the most general form across the spectrum of entertainment and the arts the inescapable questions of our relationship to (human) nature, science, and technology (chapter five). Science fiction in this respect is the appropriate term that captures not only central themes of contemporary culture but also the cross-fertilizing aestheticization of technology and technologization of aesthetic production and reproduction. Science fiction, moreover, was the creation of low culture in the age of high culture, and nothing illustrates better the coalescence of high and low culture than the centrality of science fiction to contemporary cultural production and reception. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been promoted retrospectively to the status of the founding myth of Promethean modernity. And again it was cinematic mass culture, the culture industry par excellence together with its Academy of the Arts and Sciences, that paved the way to the new aesthetic-scientific digital techne that

From the modern to the contemporary  21 challenged and supplanted the division between the distinct spheres of the arts and sciences in high culture. The new world of digital animation, visual effects, virtual reality, video art, and video games proclaims technological innovation at the same time as it demonstrates a technological imaging of the world that now animates the whole realm of consumption. To sum up the foregoing discussion: contemporary culture presupposes a global market for art and entertainment, which in turn is part of a global consumer market for tangible and intangible goods, animated by advertising, an event- and experienceculture, and tourism. The global art and entertainment industries, the culture and creative industries have comprehensively refashioned the cultural institutions of Western modernity — museums, galleries, opera houses, concert halls (along with universities) into commercial enterprises. Warhol was perhaps the first to have recognized that the two distinct functions of the museum and the department store were on the way to the paradoxical unity that has been consummated in the contemporary museum. It is no surprise that museums have achieved their greatest public success over recent years with the staging of exhibitions of fashion, which register the spectacle of the contemporary as the eternal return of the new. In turn digitalization has subsumed the genres of modernity — drama, novel, film, news — in the one universal medium streamed into the home or mobile phone. And just as the World Wide Web makes the art, architecture, literature of the world progressively available, so Malraux’s imaginary museum of world art has become virtual reality in the cloud. Malraux recognized in the photographic image the technical means to transforming the legacy of the world’s cultures into one universal archive and museum. The analytic possibilities thereby opened up through comparative studies across space and time would not only liberate art from the confines of the nineteenth century museum into the museum without walls, it would also allow us to grasp the stylistic unity of a historical culture or civilization and assimilate them all into one great historical ensemble that expresses the ‘spirit of art’ (Malraux 1976). For Malraux, Western culture, the society that knows itself as culture, was the first to recognize and include the art of the whole world; it was an act that universalized the world’s cultures into the ‘spirit of art.’ This process of progressive universalization was the work of the museum and it brings us to the third of Markus’s three tendencies of cultural modernity — musealization, not the most ubiquitous but the most comprehensive and significant of the three in that it provides the most general cultural reflection on the meaning of the contemporary. The works of cultural modernity are premised on the idea of originality, just as the idea of originality presupposes the existence of a tradition from which the new work departs. Conceived in terms of originality, tradition takes on two fundamental characteristics: it is a living tradition but one whose compass is constantly expanding. For the moderns the aesthetic legacy, progressively incorporating the arts of the past in all their variety and forms, has become a readily accessible resource for recipients and an imaginative source for artists. As Markus writes in ‘The Paradoxical Unity of Culture,’ whether one understands this expansion

22  From the modern to the contemporary of aesthetic tradition as a sign of the ‘incredible openness’ or of the ‘insatiable cultural imperialism’ of the moderns: The history of modern art is also that of the recovery and absorption of forgotten or alien pasts — and this process is still going on. . . . Tradition now lacks what it was always meant to be — a binding force for contemporary practice. But as the power of tradition dissipates, its weight constantly increases. (66) The other side of this dialectic of historicization is the acceleration and radicalization of the production of novelty, which only contributes to the expansion of the musealized tradition: As the temporal distance between the outdated old and the radically new becomes ever shorter, the life-span of the new, in which it counts as novel, of contemporary relevance, diminishes too. The more radical the novelty the more rapidly it becomes musealised. The more artistic practice seems to approximate to the state of permanent revolution, the more the art work of the future turns immediately into the artwork of the past. (66) This dialectic ends in the total paradox of the museum of the contemporary (chapter seven), that is, in the telescoping of the time of the modern into the space of the contemporary. Musealization resumes, moreover, the tendencies built into the cultural dynamics of modernity. From the modern to the contemporary the museum has functioned as the institutional expression, instrument, and organon of the aestheticization and scientization of the past, set in train by the Enlightenment’s understanding of history as a meaningful process of change and development. The cultural institutions of the modern nation-state can be thought of as expositions of the historical-scientific-interpretative appropriation of the world, from the national past to the civilizations of Asia and the ‘primitive’ cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. The organizing principle of the museum in all its different forms: fine arts, natural history, anthropology and ethnology, historical cultures, science, and technology, lies in the exhibition of their respective contents as an unfolding development through time. Thus from the second half of the eighteenth century art museums assumed the role of guardians and the custodians of permanent collections that demonstrated the selection, classification, and canonization of artistic production. The art-historical museum was born under the sign of the end of Absolute Spirit. It epitomized for Hegel the pantheon of the departed gods, consecrated to the religion of dead religions, the sacred site of Enlightenment secularization. Aestheticization transformed the religious artworks of the past into the sacred relics of the modern religion of art in a far-reaching process that progressively universalized the cultures and civilizations of the world into the one inheritance, animated by Malraux’s ‘spirit of art,’ to create the imaginary space of contemporary global

From the modern to the contemporary  23 consciousness, to which I return later. The museum of the contemporary ratifies — for a second time after Hegel — the end of the history of art consequent on the internal dissolution of the boundaries of art, whose wider contemporary counterpart is an aestheticization of the transhistorical present (chapter seven). Whether modern or contemporary, the museum exhibits and stages the afterlife — the virtual second life — of the arts of the past; and just as this art has been universalized into the one ‘spirit of art,’ so now all past cultures and civilizations are being universalized into the one ‘spirit of culture,’ whose contemporary counterpart is the ideology and practice of a culturalism that sacralizes culture at the same time as it ‘culturalizes’ anything and everything (chapter four). The excavation and resurrection of the past would not be possible without the work of science. The laboratory offers ever more advanced techniques and research tools for anthropologists and archaeologists from the study of population movements through genetic drift to the carbon dating of sites and artefacts, the recovery and deciphering of ancient texts, the reconstruction, preservation, and display of ancient objects, and so on. The methodology of the analysis of historical sources has been worked on since the Renaissance; libraries collect, catalogue, and archive everything from the oldest records to the most recent tweets of the President. Human and natural history await unification into the one gigantic database that will be the ‘absolute spirit’ of world civilization. After the grand narratives of modernism, past and present have merged into one in the museum of the contemporary and its staging of the paradoxical unity of contemporary culture. This new space-time announces what Francois Hartog terms a new regime of historicity, which he identifies as ‘presentism,’ focused on ‘a massive, overwhelming, omnipresent present that has no horizon other than itself, daily creating the past and the future that, day after day, it needs’ (Hartog 2009, 6) — a present that historicizes and museifies itself as it disappears (chapter four). The obsession of this present is thus heritage, the quest to make the past ‘authentically’ present again through conservation, restoration, and commemoration. This need to safeguard and preserve the past has replaced the moderns’ confidence in the future. Hartog draws two conclusions from the crisis of futurism. First, the historicization of the present makes potentially everything the object of the museified gaze (8), and second, the task of preservation has become the responsibility of the whole world community as the 1972 UNESCO Convention for the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage shows. Hartog’s twin temporalities, directed towards a present perceived as historically evanescent and a past regarded as universal heritage, are both central to the museum of the contemporary. The emergence of contemporary art since the 1970s likewise connotes for Rudolf Stichweh a new regime of historicity, defined by the dominance of the temporal (Stichweh 2014, 909). The term ‘contemporary art’ no longer refers to the most recent expressions of modern art. It refers to the art of contemporary art systems that operate in the present tense outside the modern distinction between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern. The contemporary is largely independent of traditions, which are now treated as a selective resource at the service of the continuous renewal of contemporaneity. This means that contemporary

24  From the modern to the contemporary art cannot be understood historically as the result of its own art-historical logic and memory. Although Stichweh sees this epochal shift as confined to the sphere of the arts, the mode of operation of contemporary art systems looks remarkably similar in practice to that of the system of sciences, defined by Stichweh as the sum of all ongoing research projects (910). Stichweh distinguishes between the modern system of world art and the contemporary system of global art. World art signifies the product of the process of aestheticization, whereby modern art and the museum incorporated artefacts from all parts of the world that became art by virtue of this incorporation. World art is premised on the difference between centre and periphery. Metropolitan centres collected and integrated the cultures of the world into world art, whose destination was the museum as the repository of all works of lasting value. The contemporary art system dispenses with the centre-periphery distinction to operate through a globally decentred network of hubs, which interact across spatial and socio-cultural distances (914). This network of hubs forms the switchboard of the contemporary that connects the local to the global and replaces routing through the privileged centres by a dynamic of global inclusion. The topical space of the contemporary is open to all forms and techniques of art and all positions and standpoints that aim and claim to present a critical view of contemporary society. The modern hierarchy of works and values has been displaced by an art of critical social, political, and ecological statements that demonstrate the relevance not so much of the (ever-changing) artworks as of the museum itself as the public space of the contemporary. In an art system that operates in the present tense of simultaneity and synchrony its one permanent feature is the empty space of exhibition and reception that reverses the normative structure of high culture in favour of the autopoiesis of the system. The museum is no longer created for works, for collections of permanent value; now ‘works’ (installations, events, performances) are created for the museum because only the public space of exhibition and reception can confer passing validation on the products of a system, in which ‘Everything is possible. Anything can be art’ (Danto 1997, 115). In Art History after Modernism Hans Belting explores the consequences of modern art’s deconstruction of its own central category: the work as supratemporal object (Belting 2003, 6). The avant-garde abolished not only itself in the process but also the modern idea of art history, governed by its own internal logic. We still do not understand, Belting states, what has taken its place (7). Even though we can describe many of the outcomes of the dissolution of the high culture of modernity, how these changes are to be interpreted remains open. Perhaps the most consequential aspect of Belting’s analysis is the absorption of art history, which had given historical order and meaning to the art of the past gathered in the museum, into cultural and social history. The contemporary museum ceases to be the temple of art history; its function has become the staging of the art of the past (or the present) as cultural history for a post-historical public (8). As Belting ruefully observes: ‘artists today use the history of art (against “low art” and popular taste) for cultural recollection of what the meaning of art has been.’ (11)

From the modern to the contemporary  25 The absorption of art history into cultural history transforms the time of art history into the space of the contemporary, governed by the hegemonic concept of culture. The linear succession of art history gives way to a global contemporaneity as the site of co-existing creative possibilities and worlds of art. The modern Eurocentric conception of world art is translated into the idea of global culture, for which each Biennale, Art Fair, Art Exhibition, or Event serves as a momentary realization. The aestheticizing homogenization effected by the modern museum gives way to the culturalizing homogenization of the contemporary museum that reflects the two faces of Hartog’s ‘new regime of historicity’: the cult of the present past of heritage and the commemoration of a vanishing present. In The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds Belting argues that with the spatialization of time in the contemporary museum the modern idea of the inter-national is replaced by the idea of the inter-cultural and consequently by a new search for the meaning of cultural identity in an inter-cultural world, whose preferred themes are migration, hybridity, citizenship (Belting, Buddensieg, and Weibel 2013, 229). Contemporary art thus finds its raison d’être in producing critical cultural statements destined for the museum, which functions as the public space, the contact zone for inter-cultural encounters, framed and packaged by the comparative gaze of curators, interested in challenging or confirming the social and cultural premises of their respective audiences. Belting’s emphasis on the plurality of art worlds goes further than acknowledging Stichweh’s decentred global network of hubs, it indicates his scepticism in regards to the universalizing implications of global culture. ‘Global culture is thus actually a phantom of the media’ (Belting 2003, 66). ‘The concept of world art needs to be grounded in a history of world art that does not and cannot exist as a common model of memory’ (Belting 2003, 66). And again, global art, ‘which belongs to everyone and no one, does not create identities of the kind that arise within a culture with common traditions’ (Belting 2003, 66). It is clear that global art does not and cannot have a common model of memory; it is clear that it cannot create common identities of the old kind, since its very function resides in the interrogation of identity in an inter-cultural world. As such, it acts at best as the critical self-reflection of an emerging global consciousness, at worst as the celebration of an illusory transculturalism. Global contemporary art and the global contemporary museum are not places of memory and identity, they are the imaginary spaces, within which the meaning of a globalizing culture can be imagined, explored, and contested — the culture of a world society in the making, no longer tied to a co-extensive national polity and culture. Of Markus’s three major tendencies of cultural modernity — aestheticization, scientization, and musealization — the third points beyond Markus’s own theoretical reflections to the paradigm change at the heart of the break between the modern and the contemporary: the radical transformations in historical and temporal consciousness triggered by the collapse of the modern idea of progress. How this plays out in relation to the past, the future, and the present is the subject of the following chapters: how the history of progress ended in the history of the present

26  From the modern to the contemporary (chapter three); how the historical past became heritage (chapter four); how the end of the modern subject in a post-human world is tied to the supersession of the novel by the future present of science fiction (chapter five); how the novel, the genre of European cultural modernity, in its spread across the globe carried the image of a modernizing future that transformed the modern concept of world literature into an emerging global literature (chapter six); how the art-historical museum mutated into the museum of the present (chapter seven); how the moderns’ philosophy of history has found a con-temporary reformulation in the idea of the absolute present (chapter eight).

References Belting, Hans. 2003. Art History after Modernism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Belting, Hans, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel (eds.). 2013. The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Böhme, Gernot. 2013. Atmosphäre. Essays zu einer neuen Asthetik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. 1999. Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard. Danto, Arthur. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hartog, Francois. 2009. ‘Time and Heritage,’ Museum International 57:3, 7–18. Lipovetsky, Gilles and Jean Serroy. 2013. L’esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l’age du capitalisme artiste. Paris: Gallimard. Malraux, Andre. 1976. The Voice of Silence (1951). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Markus, György. 2011. Culture, Science, Society. The Constitution of Cultural Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Stichweh, Rudolf. 2014. ‘ “Zeitgenössische Kunst.” Eine Fallstudie zur Globalisierung,’ Merkur 68:10, 909–915.

3 The past present History as trauma

Like many others I have long been fascinated by Walter Benjamin’s last enigmatic text Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History). Central to this fascination is the sense that this distillation of Benjamin’s thinking on history and time has not yielded all its secrets; only now are we beginning to recognize the logic and the force of his reversal of the founding faith of the moderns in the future. In giving meaning to history, the idea of progress elevated history to the History invoked by philosophies of history. In displacing religion History in turn gave meaning to time. Benjamin’s ‘explosion of history’ conceived as progress laid bare the problem of time. For Benjamin the challenge was this: how is time to be transformed from empty succession into Time, that is, into a notion of time capable of redeeming the past and overcoming historicism? If we can now see Benjamin’s theses On the Concept of History as marking the caesura between the modern and the contemporary, they also express the secret dream of the moderns to transcend transience. In this respect Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit found its immediate literary parallels in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and other major novels of the 1920s and 1930s from Thomas Mann’s novel about time, The Magic Mountain, and Robert Musil’s meditations on ‘the other state’ in The Man without Qualities, to the evocation of the time of mythical return in James Joyce’s Ulysses, John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance, or Mann’s Joseph novels. And just as these novels draw back from progressive time, so the arresting of musical time in Debussy and Scriabin heralds the destruction of musical progress in Schoenberg and Stravinsky — the theme of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music and the direct counterpoint to Benjamin’s last work (Roberts 1991). The radicality of On the Concept of History owes even more, however, to Benjamin’s reception of Ludwig Klages than to the acknowledged model of Proust. Klages’s doctrine of the power and reality of primordial images (Urbilder) in Vom kosmogonischen Eros (1922) is crucial to the methodological assumptions of The Arcades Project, as Richard Wolin has demonstrated (Wolin n.d.), but also to the philosophicalhistorical assumptions of Benjamin’s image of the past in On the Concept of History that Wolin leaves out of account. Indeed, we can read Benjamin’s famous ninth thesis on Paul Klee’s Angelus novus as the Angel of History as the very image and personification of Klages’s critique of Promethean historicism.

28  The past present Our way into and through the hermeneutic labyrinth of Benjamin’s thinking on history and time starts with a familiar source — Proust — and leads to an unrecognized model — Heinrich Mann. The binding thread here between the two writers, both born in 1871, is the relationship between the present and the past, more exactly, the centrality of the image of the past in A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) and in Die Jugend und die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre (1935, 1938) (Young Henry of Navarre tr. Eric Sutton. New York: Knopf, 1937; Henry King of France tr. Eric Sutton. New York: Knopf, 1939). In the main part of the chapter I explore the correspondence between Benjamin’s quest to redeem the forgotten past and awaken the dead and Proust’s quest to recover lost time together with Klages’s theory of images. I  want then to show how Benjamin’s actualization of the image of the past is realized in the final scene of Heinrich Mann’s historical novel on the religious wars of the sixteenth century in France, in order to argue that Mann’s and Benjamin’s urgent sense of danger gave rise to a new, anti-historicist model of reception that opens up not only to a new type of historical novel but also more importantly to a new conception of literary history and a new school of historiography, informed and inspired by Benjamin’s vision of history as trauma.

The return of the past: Proust Correspondence denotes a cognitive structure in Proust and Benjamin which is integral to their respective understanding of the task of the writer and of the historian. Proust’s intentions are presented at great length in Le temps retrouvé (Finding Time Again, Proust 2003), the final volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, prompting his great admirer and translator Benjamin to the acid comment: ‘he writes about the origin and the intentions of his work with a fluency and urbanity that would befit a refined amateur’ (Benjamin 2003, 353). The intentions of Benjamin’s final reflections on history, On the Concept of History, are far more enigmatic. A structural comparison between Proust’s notion of involuntary memory and Benjamin’s image of the past will indicate Benjamin’s appropriation and transformation of Proust and allow us to define the contribution Proust makes to an elucidation of Benjamin’s theses on history. Le temps retrouvé gives meaning to and fulfils the Proustian quest for lost time. The possibility of the recovery of lost time is adumbrated in the moment of involuntary memory. The episode of the madeleine early in the first volume opens the doors of memory, bringing back the childhood world of the narrator Marcel. The analysis of the meaning of this and other comparable episodes appears in the last volume, which was written at the same time as the first volume. It can only appear, however, at the end of the novel after the narrator-hero has been brought by the disappointments of love and the ravages of time to a sudden comprehension of the vocation that awaits him as a writer: to restitute and redeem the lost time of life by transforming life into art. Up to this point Marcel had believed that music alone was capable of synthesizing the impressions triggered by involuntary memory.

The past present  29 Marcel’s sudden insight comes when he grasps the presence of the past: not only does he live in time, he now realizes that time also lives in him. They are the same but also qualitatively different times. The one is destructive, devouring time, the other is the time of the experience of time. Involuntary memory offers the assurance that nothing is lost, that the past awaits retrieval, and reveals to Marcel at the same time his true, extra-temporal being, liberated from the fear of the future and death. The moment of involuntary memory carries with it the mystical experience of being and time. What defines Proust’s involuntary memory? It is the return of the forgotten. That is to say, the preservation and return of a past moment depends upon it being forgotten: Yes, if the memory, thanks to forgetting, has not been able to make a single connection, to throw a single link between it and the present minute, if it has stayed in its place, at its date, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the depths of a valley or at the very peak of a summit, it suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is an air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost. (Proust 2003, 178) Marcel seeks to determine the cause of the happiness released by these spontaneous memories. He concludes that these experiences all share the same crucial feature, the simultaneous sense of the past and present moment: The truth was that the being within me who was enjoying this impression was enjoying it because of something shared between a day in the past and the present moment, something extra-temporal, and this being appeared only when, through one of these moments of identity between the present and the past, it was able to find itself in the only milieu in which it could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say outside of time. (179) These extra-temporal identities that momentarily unite while preserving the difference between past and present, are characterized negatively by the fact that neither the present, as the realm of sensations that excludes the imagination — for Proust the sole organ of beauty (and for Benjamin the sole medium of the image) — nor the past, as the realm of imagination separated from the immediacy of sensation, can give access to these experiences that reveal the essence of things. Conversely and positively, the unique quality of these experiences lies in the paradoxical simultaneity of absence and immediacy, imagination and sensation, such that they convey an impression that is real without being actual, and ideal without being abstract. This coincidentia oppositorum is not within the power of intention,

30  The past present it lies beyond conscious will and remembrance. Proust calls involuntary memory the product of the ‘miracle of an analogy,’ which through its fusion of a past and present creates something ‘far more essential than either of them.’ It enables Marcel to ‘obtain, isolate and immobilize’ — for the space of a lightning flash — what can never be apprehended: ‘a little bit of time in its pure state’ (180). The corollary of this experience of time in the pure state is the extra-temporal ecstasy of being, beyond the observation of the present through the senses, the sterile consideration of the past through the intellect, and the expectation of the future governed by utilitarian calculations of the will (181). This ecstasy of being stands as the other of the negative dimensions of dissociated, that is, vulgar or profane time, split between past, present, and future. A sound, a smell, a taste is sufficient to trigger this miracle, which liberates the hidden essence of things. Thanks to the ‘heavenly food’ it receives, our true self awakens from its living death. For the true self the word ‘death’ has lost its sting, it no longer has any meaning. The being which had been reborn in me when, with such a tremour of happiness, I had heard the sound common at once to the spoon touching the plate and to the hammer hitting the wheel, or felt the unevenness beneath my feet common to the stones of the Guermantes’ courtyard and St. Mark’s Baptistry, etc., this spirit draws its nourishment only from the essence of things, and only in them does it find its sustenance and its delight. (181) Marcel’s awakening to his true self and to true reality is one with the mystic moment of the apprehension of time in its pure form. The resurrections of the past are so total that they transport him for a fleeting moment beyond the present to the contemplation of eternity (183). Time in its essence corresponds to the essence of things. That is to say, the lost time, the forgotten experience that is resurrected returns in transmuted form (real without being present, ideal without being abstract). The moment of involuntary memory thus prefigures the transmutation/transfiguration of the time of life into literature, the redemption, in other words, of the visible into the invisible world of meaning (what Mallarmé and Rilke understand as the orphic explication of the earth). Marcel recognizes that he is called to transform lost time into the recovered time of art, since art gives us the real and true reality, the true Last Judgment (188). Let me recapitulate the features of Proust’s account that are relevant to Benjamin. 1 The efficacy of the return/resurrection of a memory depends on its discontinuity with the present. Only a forgotten moment can preserve intact in a sealed time capsule its original temporal specificity 2 Involuntary memory is called forth by the miracle of analogy that establishes — in a lightning flash — a correspondence, a co-incidence between a past and

The past present  31

3 4

5 6 7

present moment that preserves the consciousness of temporal difference (Benjamin’s term is Zeitdifferential). This co-incidence is the condition of recognition True cognition is re-cognition of the forgotten Involuntary memory is characterized by a structure of reversal, whose function is to suspend and cancel the arrow of destructive time (Benjamin: the storm that blows from Paradise). Thus remembrance, resurrection, renewal, rebirth (terms used by Proust) signify the rescue of lost time The deep sense of renewal occasioned by return/resurrection depends upon the paradox of repetition of a unique past moment The renewal effected by re-cognition announces a change of state. Return and renewal stand for the transfiguration of time, lifetime, experience into the Last Judgment of art The experience of time in a pure state, brought about by the miracle of analogy that fuses past and present into something ‘far more essential than both,’ defines the ecstatic moment that momentarily cancels the irreversible separation of past and present, integral to the modern idea of progress (Koselleck 2004). This ecstatic moment of Jetztzeit becomes for Benjamin the sign and warrant of a new relationship between past, present, and future that anticipates what Francois Hartog and Henri Rousso call a new regime of historicity (Hartog 2016; Rousso 2017)

The return of the past: Benjamin The second thesis of Benjamin’s On the Concept of History is crucial to a comparison with Proust. It discreetly acknowledges a Proustian inspiration at the same time as it indicates what separates them. Proust is cited when Benjamin writes that ‘the kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us.’ The air that can be breathed again is the air preserved in a time capsule, the air that comes from the true, that is to say, the lost paradise. It conveys not happiness but the image of present/absent happiness, which is ‘indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.’ And since the only true paradise is a lost paradise, the image of happiness is the redemptive repetition that gives the experience of what has been lost. Redemption relates for Proust and for Benjamin to the not of the past, to what did not eventuate, to what remains from the past because it remains unfulfilled. Only the image of the forgotten, of the lost paradise can return and assert its claim on the present. In his essay, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Benjamin (2003) turns to Freud to explicate Proust’s distinction between involuntary and voluntary memory in the light of Theodore Reik’s observation that remembrance is essentially conservative as opposed to the destructive nature of conscious memory, an observation which is based on Freud’s ‘fundamental thought’ that ‘consciousness comes into being at the site of a memory trace.’ Consciousness possesses for Freud a protective function that is

32  The past present destructive of memory. Benjamin adds: ‘put in Proustian terms, this means that only what has not happened to the subject as an experience can become a component of the mémoire involuntaire’ (Benjamin 2003, 317). What has not happened to the subject is doubly lost and doubly preserved. Not only is paradise lost, it is forgotten; conversely, the memory of what was not is preserved by being forgotten. The site of a memory trace is thus the site of a possible return that can breach the protective wall of the present separating consciousness and the unconscious. What returns? With Proust it is a promesse de bonheur. With Freud it is trauma. Each can return ‘untouched,’ with their claim upon a forgetful present, because they were never experienced, that is, recognized, the condition for Benjamin of true experience (Erfahrung as opposed to Erlebnis). The cognitive structure of correspondence is thus necessarily re-cognition, the correspondence (in Proustian terms) of preserved sensation and present consciousness. Although Benjamin starts from Proust, he quickly enlists Freud for his purposes when he turns from individual to collective memory, from the experience of time to that of history. The theme of On the Concept of History is announced in the second thesis: There is happiness — such as could arouse envy in us — only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? . . . If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. (Benjamin 2003, 389) However, when we turn from the individual image of happiness and its claim to redemption to collective experience, it is not ‘the same,’ since the claim of past generations on our weak Messianic power is the claim to the redemption of past suffering, that is, of trauma. It is therefore not surprising that Benjamin distances himself from Proust’s narcissistic cultivation of the private self. Proust’s sole concern for personal redemption manifests, he says, the deterioration of experience (Benjamin 2003, 354, note 60). Proust’s lifework exhibits in this sense the logic of the novel as the vehicle of subjective experience, which separates it from the epic, that is, from collective forms of memory and experience. Nevertheless, Benjamin holds fast to Proust’s involuntary memory in the context of the modern atrophy of experience (Erfahrung) and to its structure as a model for the image of the past, just as in the Passagen-Werk, The Arcades Project, he seeks to apply Proustian

The past present  33 awakening to collective experience. And just as Proustian awakening is grafted in the Passagen-Werk onto Klages’s primordial images, as Wolin shows, so in turn Proust’s involuntary memory is grafted in On the Concept of History onto Klages’s theory of images. But in each case Benjamin makes his sources and models for his image of the past his own by transforming them into his personal amalgam of messianic Marxism or Marxist messianism — a revolutionary theology to which Proust is indifferent and Klages utterly hostile, since he regards revolution as an extreme instance of the madness that denies the primacy of the past in relation to the present. Nevertheless, we cannot understand Benjamin’s idiosyncratic construction of historical materialism without reading it against Klages’s exposition of the nature of ecstasy in Chapter 5 of Vom kosmogonischen Eros. The image of the past in both Proust and Klages is defined by a paradoxical simultaneity of opposites: sensation and imagination, immediacy and absence, nearness and distance are the signature of the ecstatic moment through which time is experienced ‘in a pure state’ (Proust). Since distance — or nearness — in space and time are identical for Klages, both space and time are defined by the complementary polarities of distance and nearness, past and present. Benjamin’s notion of aura, more exactly of auratic/ecstatic experience, derives directly from Klages’s fundamental distinction between object and image. The ecstatic moment liberates us from the world of objects into the higher reality of the world of images: thus, however distant the tangible object, the observer treats it as near; however close the intangible image, it appears as unattainably distant. Klages’s cosmogonic eros is an eros of distance (Klages 1988, 95–96), predicated on the higher but unreachable reality of the past. Like Proust’s involuntary memory, Klages’s image of the past is tied to a single instant of time. Because it does not belong to the world of things, the Urbild (primordial image) is always ‘absolutely momentary and therefore unrepeatably unique’ (Klages 1988, 85). In Benjamin’s rendition: ‘historicism offers the “eternal” image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past’ (Benjamin 4: 396). The unique experience belongs to the ecstatic moment in which distance in time and space is cancelled. Proust’s involuntary memory, Klages’s Urbilder, Benjamin’s aura, Jetztzeit, dialectical image, dialectics at a standstill, monadic constellation: they are all conceptual refractions of the ‘unique experience with the past’ that reconfigures the relation between the present and the past into the polarity at the heart of Benjamin’s philosophy of history. Benjamin’s image of the past — that itself involves, as will be seen, the reciprocity of involuntary image and actualizing citation — is defined by a time differential, just as aura is defined by a space differential. What comes to presence in the ecstatic moment of auratic experience is the consciousness of the polarity of the distant and the near, and in the ecstatic moment of involuntary memory the consciousness of the polarity of a past and present moment that constitutes the medium of Proust’s experience of ‘time in a pure state,’ ‘isolated and immobilized’ (Proust 2003, 179). To Proust’s experience of time held fast in the image of the past

34  The past present corresponds Benjamin’s dialectical image that holds fast, isolated and immobilized, the conflicting forces of dialectics at a standstill. This freezing of the continuum of history momentarily arrests the storm of progress that for Klages does not simply signify the denial and devaluation of the past but the destruction of the enduring reality of the past that alone gives substance to the present. As Klages puts it: ‘the past is filled to overflowing with reality’ (Klages 1988, 106). Compared with the reality of what has been (das Gewesene), the future is no more than a phantom of thought. The original sin of modernity is the work of Promethean man, who raised the future to the same level of reality as the past. Klages’s critique of the historicism of the moderns is essential to an understanding of Benjamin’s redemptive rescue of the past: ‘World history’ killed and kills with the ‘fantasy’ of the future the reality of what has been, robs the moment of its kernel through the destruction of its past content and tears apart the fruitful connection of the near and the distant. . . . It (the present) will have finally lost all its past, destroying at the same moment itself, because it will have lost all presence, for only in images of what has been can time appear and realize itself. (Klages 1988, 106) Let me note here in passing that when Klages speaks of robbing the moment of its kernel (den Augenblick entkernen) that resides in the fruitful connection of the near and the distance he illuminates one of Benjamin’s most gnomic statements from Thesis 17: ‘the nourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in its interior as a precious but tasteless seed.’ (Benjamin 4: 396). That the seed is tasteless is the condition of the historically understood: it supposes Proust’s separation of sensation and imagination. With the quotation from Klages in mind, we are now in a position to grasp the full intent of Benjamin’s image of the past, when he writes: It is not that what is past [das Vergangene] casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past, image is that wherein what has been [das Gewesene] comes together in a flash with the now [dem Jetzt] to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past [Vergangenheit] is a purely temporal and continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. (Benjamin 1999, 462) We can now return to the structure of correspondence in Benjamin and Proust. Benjamin builds on the cognitive power of the coincidence of two moments of time by replacing Proust’s understanding of coincidence as chance by the assertion of destiny. Every moment of the past is destined to its moment of recognition, just as every present moment, every now, is the now of a specific readability (Augenblick

The past present  35 der Erkennbarkeit, Thesis Five) of its corresponding past. This destined agreement is temporal through and through. It can be recognized and seized — or not. Every moment is accordingly construed as crisis and cairos, that is, as the site of decision, which can arrest the flow of time and hold fast the fleeting image of the past. As the image of redemption indicates, correspondence is modelled on at the same time as it is the model of an eschatological construction of history. Only the Messianic cessation of time at the Last Judgment will bring with it the restitution in full of the past to a redeemed mankind. To redeem mankind is to redeem its past. But what does Benjamin mean by the redemption of the past? Clearly he means the revolution of the oppressed, which will arrest and cancel the history of suffering and undo the oppressive course of history. The French Revolution and the revolutionary calendar, introduced by the Revolution to inaugurate a new time, are adduced as the historical model of the Messianic cessation of time in Thesis 15. The radicality of Benjamin’s reversal of modern historicism is highlighted by his counter-reading of the French Revolution: precisely the founding act of the new age of progress that drew a clear line of separation between itself and the ancien régime, becomes the act of re-volution. Benjamin opposes to the empty homogeneous time of progress a filled ‘original’ time, explicated in terms of the comparison between calendar and clock time, that is, re-volutionary (hence truly revolutionary) as against progressive (destructive) time. The re-volutionary time of the new calendar interrupts and explodes ‘the continuum of history’ to found the initial day of a new era: ‘the initial day of a calendar presents history in a timelapse mode. And basically it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance’ [Tage des Eingedenkens] (Benjamin 2003, 395). The day of remembrance memorializes the correspondence of past and present and acts as a ‘historischer Zeitraffer’ (literally ‘historical time compressor’): the time-lapse image of the telescoping of time into the coincidence of past and present moment. By the same token the task of the historian, the historical materialist, is to read history against the grain. Like the ‘Angel of History,’ the historian wants to awaken the dead. Retracing one’s steps, reading history backwards, is only possible, however, from the perspective of the Last Judgment. Only from this perspective can Benjamin unfold the ‘retroactive force’ of correspondence, whose signature is the refusal of the retrospective causality which ‘justifies’ historicism’s identification with the victors of history. The historian rescues the past in exactly the same fashion as the Revolution and the Last Judgment — through the act of citation — ‘the tiger’s leap into the past.’ Thus the French Revolution cites ancient Rome (Thesis 14). And, as we have seen, only for redeemed humanity will the past become ‘citable in all its moments.’ In the act of citation all the dimensions of correspondence come together. It is not by chance that for Proust the work of literature is the true Last Judgment. Just as the work embodies the step from involuntary memory to the conscious act of remembrance, so citation for Benjamin embodies the step from the involuntary image which flashes up in

36  The past present the moment of danger to its recognition, rescue, and redemption in the conscious act of recall of the historian. Thus Benjamin characterizes his method as citation: ‘to write history thus means to cite history. It belongs to the concept of citation, however, that the historical object in each case is torn out of its context’ (Benjamin 1999, 476). Citation stands both within and beyond history. The weak Messianic correspondence between the past and the present, such that each moment of the past carries with it a ‘temporal index by which it is referred to redemption’ (Thesis Two), is conceived, as we have seen, in the light of the Last Judgment, which provides the ultimate model of the historical correspondence between past and present actualized in citation. This means that only from the perspective of a Messianic cessation of time can the meaning of rescue and redemption within time, within history be grasped. But it also equally means, given the dialectical structure of correspondence in Benjamin, that the coincidence of past and present in the image of the past is itself equally Benjamin’s model for the Last Judgment. This is confirmed by a fragment belonging to On the Concept of History: For the revolutionary thinker, the peculiar revolutionary chance offered by every historical moment gets its warrant from the political situation. But it is equally grounded, for this thinker, in the right of entry which the historical moment enjoys vis-à-vis a quite distinct chamber of the past, one which up to this point has been closed and locked. This entrance into this chamber coincides in a strict sense with political action, and it is by means of such entry that political action, however destructive, reveals itself as messianic. (Benjamin 2003, 402) Benjamin’s messianic conception of revolutionary political action indicates that his conception of citation possesses its own model in the tradition of typological exegesis of the Bible. Gorgio Agamben has pointed out that Jetztzeit is directly prefigured in Paul’s understanding of messianic time as the being-contemporary with the Messiah in what Paul calls the time of the now, ho hyn kairos. Messianic time ‘has the singular capacity of putting every instant of the past in direct relationship with itself, of making every moment or episode of biblical history a prophecy or a prefiguration (Paul prefers the term typos, figure) of the present.’ The Benjaminian connection is evident when Agamben adds that this beingcontemporary, this capacity to relate past and present, makes possible the citation of history (Agamben 2009, 52–53). The type in biblical exegesis contains in itself the unity of pre- and post-figuration just as the historical object, actualized in citation, contains in itself its pre- and post-history as the signature of its monadic structure, that is, the configuration of opposing historical forces crystallized in the dialectical image. Benjamin’s messianic conception of history signifies the absolute antithesis to the historicism of modernity, above all to the modern secular, that is, the purely historical concept of time as progress. The alliance of historical materialism and

The past present  37 theology advanced in Thesis One indicates that Benjamin is working with a double reading of history: the perspective of the Last Judgment that stands outside of history but also at the same time the perspective of the Revolution within history, which inaugurates a new time, what Benjamin calls the true state of emergency (Thesis Eight), which will bring to an end to the catastrophe of progress that has culminated in Hitler, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the Second World War. As Willem Schinkel puts it: ‘ “progress is grounded in catastrophe” because it is the modern version of progress that turns the past into ruins and that, in its incessant striving for the new, mortifies what is no longer new. That “things are status quo is the catastrophe” because only within a mythical, naturalized conception of history can one cut off the status quo from its dialectical connections to history. Without dialectically reviving the messianic elements of the past, history becomes mythic, which is to say it becomes continuous and naturalized into a linear, and quite literal, progression’ (Schinkel 2015, 41). We are now in a position to recapitulate the key features of the complex of ideas tied up with the image of the past in Benjamin. By image-complex I mean the series of concepts, such as involuntary memory, dialectical image, dialectics at a standstill, redemption, citation, which correspond to each other. Thus for example in relation to On the Concept of History Benjamin notes the following: ‘the dialectical image can be defined as the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity’ (Benjamin 2003, 403). First, the past appears as an involuntary image that arrives unforeseen (unversehens) in the moment of danger: ‘articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it “the way it really was.” It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’ (Benjamin 2003, 391). The involuntary image is dialectical: it combines past and present in a unique fashion such that neither the past throws its light on the present nor the present on the past. Rather the image is the coincidence of past and present in the moment of its recognizability, and only thus can the past be seized. ‘For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in the image’ (Benjamin 2003, 391). Second, the present moment is charged with the task of recognizing its prefiguration in the past and redeeming it into a higher actuality, that is, into ‘the higher concretion of now-being (Jetztsein)’: In what way this now-being (which is nothing less than the now-being of the now-time [Jetztsein der Jetztzeit]) already signifies, in itself, a higher concretion — this question, of course can be entertained by the dialectical method only within the purview of a philosophy of history that at all points has overcome the ideology of progress. In regard to such a philosophy, one could speak of an increasing concentration (integration) of reality, such that everything past (in its time) can acquire a higher grade of actuality than it had at the moment of its existing. (Benjamin 1999, 857 translation altered)

38  The past present Third, Benjamin’s philosophy of history is ‘concentrated’ into the concept of Jetztzeit. It defines the present as pregnant not with the future but with the past. That is, a present that contains the always-possible messianic cessation of time and redemption of the unfulfilled past because it is the site of decision and thereby the site of history both as historiographical citation and as revolutionary action. The structural correspondence of these two dimensions of the image of the past appears clearly in Thesis 17: When thinking suddenly comes to a stop in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking is crystallized as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history; thus, he blasts a specific life out of the era, a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method, the lifework is both preserved and sublated in the work, the era in the lifework, and the entire course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in its interior as a precious but tasteless seed. (Benjamin 2003, 396) Fourth, citation signifies the revolutionary-redemptive actualization of the image of the past that at the same time prefigures the Messianic recognition and redemption of the past on the Day of Judgment. To quote again from Thesis Three: ‘of course only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past — which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments’ (Benjamin 2003, 390). If we ask which is the day of judgment — is it the Last Day, the present day, every day — the answer must be that they are all for Benjamin the day of the messianic correspondence of time and eternity, of Jetztzeit. And it is only because Jetztzeit, ‘as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abbreviation’ that the past can be cited (Benjamin 2003, 396). Finally, let me recall that the primary meaning of ‘to cite’ is to call or to summon to appear before a court. Correspondingly, to quote in the full sense means the summons to appear in order to bear witness, to testify. And citation à l’ordre du jour means to be mentioned in military dispatches, that is, to be worthy of official recognition. By cancelling the intervening distance of time and space, actualizing citation offers a model of reception that is antithetical to the relationship to the past integral to developmental history. Citation thus represents not only a messianic model of time but a messianic model of reception that extends from the historical novels of German exile literature to contemporary historical fiction, written in the shadow of history as trauma.

The past present  39

The image of the past: Heinrich Mann As opposed to Proust’s model for the return and redemption of the past, Mann’s historical novel of Henri IV of France may be read as a messianic actualization avant la lettre of Benjamin’s conception of history and of the task of the historian. The different relationship of the two novelists to Benjamin lies in their different conceptions of the image of the past. Proust’s image is involuntary and personal and it concerns happiness, Mann’s image of the past is collective and traumatic, dictated as with Benjamin by the acute sense of danger posed by Hitler and the Third Reich. Where Proust’s novel unfolds from the initiating episode of the madeleine, the purpose of Mann’s novel only finds its full expression in the Epilogue, which is to be read as the summation of a lifetime of struggle and battles. In this second coming of the King, an image of the past crystallizes to exemplify Benjamin’s ‘model of messianic time’ that comprises ‘the entire history of mankind in an enormous abbreviation.’ In the King’s final words across the centuries to us his life’s work is contained, in the lifework the epoch of the French religious wars of the sixteenth century, and in the epochal struggle between the French King and Philip II of Spain, between religious tolerance and tyranny, the contemporary struggle against Hitler for the future of Europe. The setting for the return of the King is a baroque apotheosis, in which he appears from a cloud for the space of a lightning flash (Du haut d’un nuage qui le demasque pendent l’espace d’un éclair, puis se referme sur lui). The King returns to address his ‘contemporaries’ — ‘Regarder moi dans les yeux. Je suis un homme comme vous; la mort n’y fait rien, ni les siècles qui nous séparent.’ (The speech is in French in the original.) The King who speaks to us across the centuries personifies the image of the past that flashes up — not, however, as Proust’s involuntary memory but as the image called back to life by the author as the medium and voice of the collective experience of danger: ‘et voyez le vieil homme qui n’a eu aucun peine à vous apparaitre, quelqu’un m’ayant appelé.’ (Mann 1964, 559) As the quotation makes clear — in exactly the same way as at the end of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus — in citing his protagonist, the author (le vieil homme, den alten Mann) is also cited. Both are summoned to appear for the moment of time that lasts no longer than a lightning flash, but which is a moment of Jetztzeit, of the messianic cessation of time. The King and his author appear before the tribunal of history to bear witness, to testify but also to judge, for we too are summoned in the moment of danger, since the image of the past disappears for ever if it is not recognized. Citation becomes one with the imperative to respond and to act. Moreover, this imperative can only be deciphered and redeemed collectively, as the King’s address makes clear: J’ai connu l’un de ces siècles, et qui n’était pas le mien. Je lui étais supérieur, ce qui n’empêchait pas d’être même alors un rescapé temps révolus. Le suis-je encore, revenue parmi vous? Vous me reconnaîtriez plutôt, et je me mettrais à votre tête: tout serais à recommencer. Ai-je dit que je ne désirais pas

40  The past present revivre? Mais je ne suis pas mort. Je vis, moi, et ce n’est pas d’une manière surnaturelle. Vous me continuez. (Mann 1964, 560) Both the King and his author address us. In 1938 the King’s posterity is here and now in the moment of danger, in which a past charged with Jetztzeit comes to presence. But Heinrich Mann, in exile, defeated again and again, is writing in 1938 for all too few contemporaries and for an unknown future Germany, where he will perhaps have become readable. As he liked to say after 1945, the Germans only publish his denunciation of German militarism in his novel Der Untertan, finished in 1914, after they lose a war. If the crux of the correspondence between Heinrich Mann and Benjamin derives from the urgency of the anti-fascist struggle, this historical moment also has important implications for a theory of reception. Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, which springs from the same acute sense of danger as the historical novels of German exile literature, invites us to read it as the theory that corresponds to the historical novels of exile. Precisely this correspondence and context, however, have received no attention in the vast literature on Benjamin. Here a comparison or better a confrontation between Benjamin’s On the Concept of History and Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937), written in response to the German historical novels of exile with particular reference to Heinrich Mann’s Henri Quatre, brings out in the sharpest form the two antithetical versions of historical materialism at stake here. The comparison between Lukács and Benjamin is not just of historical interest. Rather it measures the trajectory of historical fiction from progress to catastrophe — to quote from Perry Anderson’s reflections on the historical novel, in which Lukács and Benjamin figure as the still-defining poles of the theory of the genre from Walter Scott through to contemporary practitioners (Anderson 2011). The polarity remains defining because Lukács and Benjamin stand for two fundamentally opposed conceptions of the task of the historian that directly relate to the fundamental difference between the modern and the contemporary paradigms of the genre. For Lukács, writing in 1936/1937 at the high point of the Popular Front in France, the new type of historical novel of the German writers in exile needed to be measured against the classical exemplars of the genre. The historical novels of Scott, Manzoni, and Tolstoy achieved a true sense of historicity because they provided in their depiction of the evolution of the people through crises and struggles the concrete prehistory of the present. Only by establishing this living relationship of the past to the present is it possible to give expression to the movement of history itself (Lukács 1963, 296, 338). Lukács demands of the historical novel an organic relationship between past and present, given by the portrayal of the historical genesis of the conflicts of the time, and an organic relationship between above and below that is able to show the connection between the personal fates of the protagonists and the wider historical problems of the people. Although Lukács welcomed the revolutionary-democratic spirit of the historical novels of

The past present  41 the 1930s because it signaled the overcoming of the isolation and alienation of bourgeois writers from the great political struggles of the time, he had serious reservations about their turn to history in search of ideals and inspiration for the anti-Fascist resistance. By treating the great struggles of the past as a mirror, that is, as a parable of the present (Gleichnis der Gegenwart) (Lukács 1963, 338), any concrete mediation between the past and the present is vitiated. The result is an abstract connection that is ‘too direct, too intellectual, too general’ (Lukács 1963, 286). And this applies to the highest achievement of the new type of historical novel, Heinrich Mann’s Henri Quatre novels. As we have seen, Heinrich Mann’s hero is presented as the incarnation of the revolutionary-democratic spirit of the Popular Front and thus by extension as the incarnation of the spirit of the historical novels of exile. Above all, Mann’s parable of the present appears as the very image of Benjamin’s image of the past that flashes up in the moment of danger: a re-presentation that is ‘too direct, too intellectual, too general’ precisely because its purpose is actualization, political action here and now. Mann’s ‘tiger’s leap into the past’ remained, however, without echo. The revolutionary awakening that was to bring the destructive progress of history to a halt was powerless to stop the catastrophe of the Second World War. Benjamin’s explosion of history is held fast in the gaze of the Angel of History, frozen into the vision of history as trauma — prophetic, as J M Coetzee observed in 2001, ‘of the way in which history-writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime’ (Coetzee 2007, 64). And — let me note in passing — it is under the sign of catastrophe and the narrative device of time travel that the past present of historical fiction and the future present of science fiction have increasingly converged in the contemporary spectrum of speculative writing that is displacing the modern tradition of the realist novel (see chapter five).

The history of the present: Henry Rousso The ‘amazing renaissance’ of the historical novel since the 1970s that prompted Anderson’s interest, is remarkable for its overturning of all the tenets of the classical forms of the genre: ‘not the emergence of the nation, but the ravages of empire, not progress as emancipation but impending or consummated catastrophe’ (Anderson 2011, 28). Agnes Heller in her essay on the contemporary historical novel likewise insists on distinguishing the catastrophic history of the present from the realm of historical fiction: We do not perceive novels about the past of our present as ‘historical.’ A novel about the Second World War, for example The Naked and the Dead, is not a historical novel. Even less do we perceive novels about the Holocaust, for example Fateless by Imre Kertesz, as historical novels. Lukács’s necessary anachronism is impossible in novels about the past of our present. It is not just that we perceive a past story as relevant for the

42  The past present present, but the past of the present is deeply, unmistakably present in our present. It is not a closed chapter. (Heller 2011, 99) This is indeed true; Heller’s distinction, however, rests on a distinction between two modes of reception, the one, for which the past is past for the present, and the other, for which the past is present in the present. And for this second Benjaminian mode, the consciousness of the past-present time differential is the condition of historical re-presentation and re-cognition. It is this consciousness that informs what Heller calls the self-conscious anachronism of contemporary historical fiction. The novels of classical Rome or of the Renaissance discussed by Heller are intended as mirrors and parables of the present, precisely because their themes resonate with the traumas of the twentieth century. As Heller observes, contemporary historical novels bear witness to a history marked by omnipresent violence and its victims: ‘proscriptions, lynchings, pogroms, witch hunts, the hunting down of heretics, the murder of political enemies’ (Heller 2011, 101). And in so doing they testify to the contemporary self-understanding of the function of literature as bearing witness to the history of the vanquished. And in this sense these historical novels also belong to the past of our present because they demonstrate ‘a fundamental change in the perception of history itself: if history has no telos, if there is no universal progress or regress, things of the past can illuminate the present and vice versa, for things of the past can happen again in the present’ (Heller 2011, 95). In this fundamental change in perception, what is near and what is distant also change. Not only is the history of the present not identical to contemporary history, it means that we can have a greater proximity to ancestors of another time or place if they are rediscovered and given actuality in the present (Rousso 2017, 5). In a similar vein, Claudio Magris, reflecting on ‘the railway-lines of time,’ wrote in 1986 that events which occurred many years or decades ago may seem contemporary, while facts and feelings a month old can seem infinitely distant and erased: ‘it is as if it [time] were composed of a great number of railway-lines, intersecting and diverging, carrying it in various directions. For some years now 1918 has come closer to us, for the end of the Hapsburg empire, formerly obliterated in the past, has returned into the present as the object of passionate dispute’ (Magris 1989, 39). The key to this fundamental change in perception lies in the transformation of the moderns’ linear model of reception into the contemporary non-linear model, evident in the field of literary history and of course in the historiography of our present. What Benjamin contributed to the theory of history and the corresponding theory of the historical novel was his insistence on the unique moment of recognition and readability, given solely by the moment of danger. The immediacy of this moment in 1938 for Heinrich Mann or 1940 for Benjamin is now of course only a past, no longer actual, moment. And yet those moments also carry in their turn a historical index that refers them to an always-possible future redemption, a possible future citation à l’ordre du jour. And if we think of Benjamin’s theory

The past present  43 of history as equally a theory of reception, it follows that not only every moment of the past but also every work of literature carries its own historical index that refers it to redemption — as opposed to the conventional processes of reception that bury the ever present possibility of recognition and readability beneath the narrative continuum of literary history. On the Concept of History has now also become readable as a model for a critical counter-theory of reception that would also like to awaken the dead by reading literary history against the grain. In his introduction to A New History of German Literature David Wellbury cites the ideas of Benjamin on history as an essential inspiration for the volume’s transformation of the inherited structure and historicist assumptions of literary histories. The basic developmental form of the genre — ‘an overriding narrative divided according to periods or movements; the treatment of individual texts as exemplifying large-scale tendencies’ — subordinates the singularity of literary texts to their representative literary-historical function as expressions of the spirit of the age or nation, class interest, or aesthetic programme. Against this familiar literaryhistorical form, A New History of German Literature, like its direct model, A New History of French Literature (1989), is organized around the Jetztzeit of the encounter between the past moment of literary texts and the present moment of reception in the individual essays. The 180 chronologically dated essays from 744 to 2001 by some 150 contributors are intended as an invitation to readers’ own encounters as they navigate the volume’s ‘multiple trajectories of reading determined by the subject matter and the pull of the reader’s fascination’ (Wellbury 2004, xxi–xxii). If in an act of retroactive redemption we can now read Benjamin posthumously as the prophetic voice of the contemporary historical imagination, when was this now, when did the prophet become readable? Or to phrase the question differently: when does the history of the present begin and when does the history of the history of the present begin? In other words, when does the historical consciousness of a fundamental change in our perception of history begin? In Henry Rousso’s answer to these questions in The Latest Catastrophe. History, the Present, the Contemporary Benjamin occupies a pivotal role (Rousso 2017). Does the history of the present begin with the caesura of 1945 — as seen in a ‘certain consensus’ that the Second World War inaugurated a new contemporaneity characterized by pessimism rather than optimism (Rousso 2017, 11)? Or rather, as some French historians have argued, with 1940: ‘the matrix of the present time is no longer 1945 . . . but the years 1939–40, which sounded the death knell of a certain optimistic conception of History’ (Rousso 2017, 180)? Or is it the ‘complete catastrophe’ of the First World War that shattered the idea of progressive history at the same time as it gave rise to visions of the millenarian birth of a New Man ‘through extreme violence and absolute control over bodies, space, and time’ (62)? Or should we begin with the dead of the First World War who live on in ‘the perpetuation of mourning and the haunting sense that the past would be repeated’ — the negative memory that roots the history of the present in trauma and in the moral-political responsibility to remember (73)? And it is at this point

44  The past present that Rousso cites the famous lines on the Angel of History from On the Concept of History that express ‘in a few words of prophetic density the change in historicity of the two previous decades [Rousso is writing in 2002]. History is a gaze cast on the catastrophe, a debt to the dead. The victims, the vanquished’ (74). Benjamin did not live to see the completion of the catastrophe in the extension of the devastation of World War One, which was largely confined to the battlefields and to the soldiers, to the unprecedented physical and human destruction of World War Two, in which civilians became the primary targets of total war and the Holocaust the central reference of the contemporary culture of memory (Rousso 2017, 83, 85). In addition to the political-moral obligation to construct a collective memory of sacrifice after 1918 there now came after 1945 a juridification of the history of the present in the form of ‘the great tribunal of history’ that set in motion — and after each ‘latest catastrophe,’ 1956, 1968, 1989, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s — the ever-widening collection of documents and testimonies, directed to the juridical and judicial interpretations of a history that had only just ended (Rousso 2017, 144). This tribunal in permanence signifies that the past has become the site of action and contestation, concerning justice and atonement, reconciliation and compensation, whose temporal signature is the inapplicability of the statute of limitation to war crimes. It ‘belongs to a temporality in which it is not so much the present that dominates but rather the persistence of the past — or more exactly, of an insuperable, unprecedented, and therefore germinal event’ (145). Rousso does not mention what is perhaps the single most important genre of the history of the present and essential complement to the juridification of history: the literature of personal testimony from banishment, exile, prison, solitary confinement, the Gulag, the concentration and extermination camps, and the torture chambers of the twentieth century. All these witnesses to the house of the dead from Gramsci to Koestler, from Carlo Levi to Primo Levi, Alexander Watt to Imre Kertesz, Nadezhda Mandelstam to Evgenia Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn to Shamalov, Nien Cheng to Breyten Breytenbach, have left us unforgettable testimonies to the past that remains insuperable. If with Rousso and indeed by general consensus the history of the present begins with the Ur-catastrophe of the twentieth century, the First World War, when does the corresponding change of historicity begin? Rousso singles out the creation of European institutes and centres in the late 1970s, dedicated to the recent as opposed to the more distant past, including the ‘Institut d’histoire du temps présent’ in Paris, of which Rousso was a founding member. The 1970s was thus the decade of the change of paradigms, driven by the belated recognition that the very premises of the modern regime of historicity have been exploded by the sudden eruptions of violence and war since the French Revolution that have derailed the modern belief that it is the movement of history itself that gives meaning to history, that history is the agent of human action and progress (Rousso 2017, 38). Catastrophic history by contrast belongs to a discontinuous ‘view of history,’ deviating from the logic of a revolutionary modernity, which rested on the idea of

The past present  45 a continuity, a linearity, a fulfilment, moving in the direction of progress (Rousso 2017, 10). Postmodernism’s proclamation of the end of the grand narratives in the 1970s and 1980s remained caught, however, in a negative continuation of the moderns, already apparent in the repetition of the aporias of modernist critical theory in postmodern cultural criticism (Roberts 1991). The postmodernist moment, which sensitized us to the fact, as Rousso puts it, that ‘we are now living in a present devoid of meaning, deprived of a structuring idea of progress or a finality of History’ (147), appears in retrospect as the placeholder for the emergence of a new regime of historicity. And as Rousso’s book makes clear, this new regime of the contemporary signifies the reception and recognition of Benjamin’s explosion of history. Let me conclude with the homage to Benjamin and Proust in Rousso’s description of the ‘fiction’ governing the methodology of the new historiography: ‘historians of the present time act “as if” they could seize hold of time as it passes, freeze an image, and observe the transition between past and present.’ The fiction involved is that of treating the present moment as if it were already historical by endowing it with a temporal frame, a specific temporality that alone gives meaning. Rousso’s name for this temporal frame is contemporaneity, the contemporality of a present marked by the weight of the past and open to the uncertainties of the future (Rousso 2017, 4).

References Agamben, Gorgio. 2009. ‘What is the Contemporary?’ in What is an Apparatus? And other Essays, tr. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatelli. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 39–54. Anderson, Perry. 2011. ‘From Progress to Catastrophe. On the Historical Novel,’ London Review of Books 33:5 (28 July), 24–28. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Selected Writings 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coetzee, J. M. 2007. Inner Workings. Literary Essays 2000–2005. Sydney: Knopf. Hartog, Francois. 2016. Regimes of Historicity. Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Heller, Agnes. 2011. Aesthetics and Modernity. Essays, ed. John Rundell. Lanham: Lexington Books. Klages, Ludwig. 1988. Vom kosmogonischen Eros. Bonn: Bouvier. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1963. The Historical Novel, tr. Stanley Mitchell. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Magris, Claudio. 1989. Danube, tr. Patrick Creagh. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Mann, Heinrich. 1964. Die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre. Neuwied a. R.: Rowohlt Verlag. Proust, Marcel. 2003. Finding Time Again, tr. Ian Patterson. London: Allen Lane.

46  The past present Roberts, David. 1991. Art and Enlightenment. Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Lincoln/ London: University of Nebraska Press. Rousso, Henry. 2017. The Latest Catastrophe. History, the Present, the Contemporary. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schinkel, Willem. 2015. ‘The Image of Crisis: Walter Benjamin and the Interpretation of Crisis in Modernity,’ Thesis Eleven 127, 36–51. Wellbury, David. 2004. A New History of German Literature, ed. David Wellbury and Judith Ryan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolin, Richard. n.d. ‘Walter Benjamin Meets the Cosmics. A Forgotten Weimar Moment.’ www.law.wisc.edu/  .  .  .  /Wolin_revised_ 10–13_ Benjamin_meets_the_ cosmics (accessed 16 February 2016).

4 The present past History as heritage

Francois Hartog has coined the term ‘presentism,’ modelled on futurism, to describe the contemporary preoccupation with the present. He reads our focus on the present as the sign of the emergence of a new relationship to the past, the emergence, that is, of a new regime of historicity. Hartog’s understanding of historicity as it appears in successive epochs builds on Reinhart Koselleck’s semantics of time. Koselleck’s guiding question in Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (Koselleck 2004) was the following: how, in a given present, are the temporal dimensions of past and future articulated? Hartog reformulates Koselleck’s question to give a definition of regimes of historicity as the expression of ‘the modalities of self-consciousness that each and every society adopts in its construction of time and its perception’ (Hartog 2015, 9). At the heart of each regime is a construction of time that links together past, present, and future. Presentism signals a new experience of time, distinct from the last two hundred years of futurism. Of the modern regime of historicity all that remains after the explosion of progress is the crisis of time that has put past and future into question: ‘are we dealing with a past which has been forgotten or which is too insistently recalled? A future which has almost disappeared from our horizon or which hangs over us like an imminent threat?’ (Hartog 2015, 16) Questions reinforced by a present divided against itself: The present, in the very moment of its occurrence, seeks to view itself as already history, already past. In a sense, it turns back on itself in order to anticipate how it will be regarded when it is completely past, to turn itself into a past before it has even fully emerged as present. Yet this retrospective vision never steps outside the closed circle of its domain, the present. (114) Hartog’s description of the presentist mode of ‘living historically’ perfectly captures the ‘future present past’ of the selfie, just as the selfie perfectly expresses the ambiguity of presentism, because only the image (as Benjamin emphasized) can capture the ambiguity of dialectics at a standstill. As we saw in the last chapter, the crisis of time in the twentieth century announced itself in the wake of the First and the Second World Wars — Hartog

48  The present past refers here to Benjamin, whose aura, he writes, has continued to grow ever since the modern regime of historicity came under challenge. Like Rousso, Hartog traces the consciousness of a changing relationship to time and history to the 1970s and 1980, when the idea of memory, together with heritage, unfolded like a great wave (6). By memory Hartog means like Rousso a past that is ‘too insistently recalled,’ a traumatic past transmitted by the ‘shock waves of memory’ that obliterate the distance between past and present. By heritage Hartog means the staging of the past for the present, a past which has been forgotten and is now being artificially resuscitated. Memory and heritage together represent crucial signs and symptoms of our relation to time (11). Both involve a sense of the (arrested) present as its own ‘historical past’ under the sign of memory (trauma and commemoration) and of heritage (musealization). As María Inés Mudrovcic observes: ‘the diagnosis seems to be unanimous: we are living in a period in which the present lives off the past, in a kind of “present past” ’ (Mudrovcic 2014). But here the commonality ends: the ‘history of the present’ is quite distinct from the present past of heritage. Where Rousso’s past present insists on traumatic return, the present past of heritage amounts to a reduction of the past to a construct of the present. Hartog underlines the difference, when he writes of Benjamin that he is undoubtedly a man of the present but absolutely not of presentism (129). Hartog concurs with Pierre Nora’s verdict in Realms of Memory that the contemporary culture of memory, associated with sites of memory, signifies the end of memory-history and its replacement by heritage-history (Nora 1989). Precisely this loss of a historical relation to the past is the mirror of a present that celebrates itself in the endless now of a consumer society that daily fabricates the past and the future it needs (Hartog, 113). What Hartog calls the fault lines of the present appear in the fabrication of heritage in the vain desire to preserve ‘a past that has already disappeared’ (115). The very will to preserve and conserve a vanishing past and to arrest time only confirms the loss of a living relation to the past. In this sense heritage is post-historical. It comes after the grand narratives of modern historicism, after the history of the nation and the people, gathered now into the after-life of images of tradition that are called upon to serve as markers of national, regional, or local identity. The process of transforming history into heritage is carried by an understanding of social and cultural history as transmitted ensembles, as much applicable to intangible forms of life and practices as to physical monuments. The ambit claim of heritage and all that it encompasses is summed up in the mission statement of the University of Massachusetts Amhurst Centre for Heritage and Society: Heritage is the full range of our inherited traditions, monuments, objects, and culture. Most important, it is the range of contemporary activities, meanings, and behaviors that we draw from them. Heritage includes, but is much more than preserving, excavating, displaying, or restoring a collection of old things. It is both tangible and intangible, in the sense that ideas and memories — of songs, recipes, language, dances,

The present past  49 and many other elements of who we are and how we identify ourselves — are as important as historical buildings and archaeological sites. Heritage is, or should be, the subject of active public reflection, debate, and discussion. What is worth saving? What can we, or should we, forget? What memories can we enjoy, regret, or learn from? Who owns ‘The Past’ and who is entitled to speak for past generations? Active public discussion about material and intangible heritage — of individuals, groups, communities, and nations — is a valuable facet of public life in our multicultural world. Heritage is a contemporary activity with far-reaching effects. It can be an element of far-sighted urban and regional planning. It can be the platform for political recognition, a medium for intercultural dialogue, a means of ethical reflection, and the potential basis for local economic development. It is simultaneously local and particular, global and shared. Heritage is an essential part of the present we live in — and of the future we will build. (What is Heritage?) Understood in this fashion, heritage is an inherently inflationary concept with a corresponding spectrum of heritage policy programmes, developed by national and international organizations. These organizations include, to name a few of the most prominent, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, The International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management, the Organization of World Heritage Cities, the World Monuments Fund, the International Council of Museums. They have all grown rapidly since the 1960s. By 2002, the international year of heritage, the ever-expanding reach of the heritage industry had fused history, culture, and nature into one composite ensemble. The inflationary dynamic built into the concept of heritage is driven, however, by older and wider tendencies in cultural modernity. Just as the past is transformed into heritage, a process that at the limit becomes coextensive with any and everything, so in turn the transmitted ensembles of heritage are transformed into culture. This ‘culturalizing’ of the past — the attitude of culturalism — is not new, even if it has taken on a new quality in the heritage industry. It involves processes of decontextualizing aestheticization that Quatremère de Quincy had already perceptively dissected at the beginning of the museum age. He identified the crucial issues raised by museum collections as those of the displacement and the destination of works of art. These issues and their consequences for art were recognized by Goethe, when he spoke in the introduction to the first issue of his art journal, Propyläen, of Italy as a great body of art that as the very moment he is writing (1798) is being dismembered to be reassembled in Paris. Appealing to the cosmopolitan spirit of the arts and sciences, Goethe asks what can be done to create from the dispersed artistic treasures of Europe a new ideal body of art that can perhaps compensate for the present losses. Quatremère’s Letters to General Miranda concerning the displacement of art monuments from Italy breathe this cosmopolitan spirit (Quatremère 1989).

50  The present past Written in 1796 when he was in hiding under proscription by the Directoire, Quatremère’s letters were provoked by Bonaparte’s victories in Italy, which threatened the despoiling of Rome. Quatremère speaks like Goethe in the name of the republic of arts and letters, which belongs to Europe as a whole and not to individual nations and whose capital is Rome. A  new sack of Rome would be a calamity for the cause of civilization, since Rome is to us what Greece was to Rome. As city, as place, as body of art, Rome represents an irreplaceable totality that constitutes in all its parts a universal museum, whose integrity must be protected from dismemberment. This living unity of past and present in Rome signifies the continuity of culture from the ancients to the moderns, manifested in the ongoing archaeological recovery of antiquity, inspired and guided by papal policy. For Quatremère this ongoing archaeological recovery of antiquity amounts to a true resurrection, as opposed to the deadly discontinuity effected by the rise of the museum, in which the amassing of objects serves only to display the vanity of science, because only the preservation of continuity with the past offers the possibility of creating the new. Quatremère’s Moral Considerations on the Destination of Works of Art, written in 1807 but not published until 1815, denounces the museum as the negation of art’s social function and moral purpose. His rejection of modern attitudes to artworks, evident in commodification (the artwork as useful object), fashion (the artwork as useless object), and reification (the artwork as material object), clears the decks for an attack on the museum: ‘to remove them [artworks] without distinction from their social destination, what is this but to say that society has no need of them?’ (Quatremère 1989, 37) Art dies once the bonds tying it to society are severed and it is deprived of public use and of public interest. This is not only the fate of the art of the past removed to the museum but the fate that necessarily awaits present and future art. The enclosure of art in the museum means that the public is no longer in a position to comprehend the original causes that alone made and make art possible. Against the ‘vicious circle,’ which makes museums and living masterpieces mutually exclusive (36), Quatremère sets out the mutual need of art and religion: not only does art need religion as its destination, religion needs art for its beautiful illusion (55). The museum may conserve the body, but the spirit, the beliefs and the ideas that gave to artworks their being, has fled. This disinheritance enacts, on the one hand, the ‘de-divinization’ of art (55), the desacralization to which all art is subject in the museum; on the other, it fetishizes the artwork as aesthetic object, reconstituted by the historical ‘spirit of criticism’ that allows Venuses and Madonnas to share indifferently the same space. In other words, the virtuous circle of art and religion has now been replaced by the deadly union of art and knowledge, which had transformed the living body of art into the classification and chronology of decomposed fragments: ‘it is to kill art to make history of it; it is not to make history, but its epitaph’ (48). Writing two hundred years after Quatremère (that is, at the end of the modern regime of historicity opened by the French Revolution), Douglas Crimp resumes the logic of the museum: ‘art as we think about it only came into being in the nineteenth century, with the birth of the museum and the discipline of art history. . . . For us, then, art’s natural end is in

The present past  51 the museum, or, at the very least, in the imaginary museum, that idealist space that is art with a capital A. The idea of art as autonomous, as separate from everything else, as destined to take its place in art history, is a development of modernism’ (Crimp 1993, 98). The modernist spirit of conservation and preservation found its representative institution in the museum. The museum age expressed the separation of the present from the past at the heart of the modern regime of historicity, a separation that has now lost its self-evidence as the walls of the museum fall to become one with the present past of heritage. The whole spirit of heritage is built not only on Crimp’s ‘museum ruins’ but also on the very real ruins of the Second World War. Unlike Rousso’s traumatic history of the present, however, heritage’s citation of a past that has already disappeared can only offer a deficient mode of actualizing re-presentation. Instead of Benjamin’s ‘unique experience with the past,’ the restoration of urban centres and other historical sites turns them into self-citations: the self-sufficient demonstration of the transformation of the real into its own image, the image that serves now as their seal of ‘authenticity.’ The presentist relation to the past cancels Proust’s and Benjamin’s time differential by bringing the historically distant indifferently near. The ‘higher actuality’ of the image of the past is reduced to a self-referential image just as the higher actuality of Hegel’s remembrance is reduced to museal semblance. Heritage’s indifferentiation of history marks the conjunction of the two cumulative processes of decontextualization in the modern age: the aestheticization and scientifically-informed musealization of the past, wedded since the 1960s to the ever-accelerating growth of the tourist market. In their comprehensive survey and analysis of the ‘aestheticization of the world,’ Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy discuss heritage management in the context of the third and current period of the development of the aesthetic economy — le capitalisme artiste — in relation to consumer capitalism. To the first period from the 1840s to the Second World War belong the major components of the aesthetic economy, such as department stores, industrial design, haute couture, advertising, cinema, and the music industry. The first, restricted stage gives way to the second expanded stage of consumerism from the 1950s to the 1980s, marked by the increasing social and economic importance of the aesthetic dimension in design, fashion, advertising, and the cultural industries for the mass market. The present stage since the 1980s is that of the transaesthetic economy. By transaesthetic the authors mean the ‘excrescence’ of the art worlds and the multinationals of culture into a global aesthetic system, involving an ever-closer integration of industry, commerce, art, fashion, design, and marketing that has dissolved all the old distinctions between art and the market (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2013, 154–155). In similar fashion the old historicist cultivation of heritage has become today’s heritage industry. The two conjoined forces of aestheticization and musealization form the focus of Lipovetsky and Serroy’s analysis of heritage management. Whether the object in question concerns old town quarters, churches, castles, and palaces or the archaeology of factories, warehouses, barracks, and prisons, they have all been invested with a new function that is tied to culture, spectacle, and leisure.

52  The present past This re-investment of monuments of the ancient or the recent past with a new value preserves the old as the empty form that provides atmospheric settings for the aesthetic and touristic consumption of heritage experiences. The authors see this refunctioned return of the past not so much as postmodern as hypermodern, that is, as the sign of a new stage of the expansion of the logic of the aesthetic economy. The correlation of ‘post-historical’ hypermodernism with the expanding logic of musealization is evident in the reciprocity of new museums and old towns. This reciprocity is characterized by the highly advertised proliferation of new museums in support of urban regeneration and tourism. Their capacity to attract visitors in their own right makes the new museum into the cathedral of the museum-city and as such the iconic emblem and ‘apotheosis’ of the aestheticization of the world (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2013, 376–381). The transformation of history into heritage and at the limit of the world into the image and museum of itself provide striking illustrations of the dis/appearance of the moderns’ aesthetic categories, spheres, and boundaries into hypermodern transaestheticism, paralleled by the dis/appearance of the museum into the museum without walls. Malraux’s imaginary museum emerges at the turning point of dis/appearance, on the border between the modern and the contemporary, the national and the global. In pointing back to Hegel it points beyond the entropic crisis of time and culture in modernity as conceived by Heidegger and Adorno (see the discussion of Heidegger and Adorno in chapter one). If the heritage industry’s transformation of the world into the image of itself spells out the ultimate logic of Heidegger’s ‘Age of the World Picture’ and the transaesthetic economy of contemporary capitalism spells out the ultimate logic of Adorno’s culture industry, they also pave the way for the universalization of values inherent in the idea of World Heritage.

From the culture industry to the heritage industry The concept of the culture industry needs to be seen in the larger context of the cultural critique of modernity. From Rousseau and the romantics, from Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Wagner, and Nietzsche onwards, the normative critique of a market-based culture has seen it as symptomatic of the decadence of civilization, of the dialectic of Enlightenment, of the advent of one-dimensional man and the end of history, art, the subject, and experience. The completion of cultural modernity thus envisaged is not apocalyptic but entropic: defined by the progressive loss of critical distinctions whose vanishing point can be described as the convergence of utopia and dystopia. This is the fate of modernity qua modernism. The rest is silence, accompanied by the gesture to the wholly Other of a world trapped in materialism. Walter Benjamin by contrast takes as his focus the popular as opposed to the high culture of modernity. If, as he proposes, each age dreams the following, then the twentieth century is clearly the realization of the nineteenth century’s phantasmagoria. The display forms of the commodity, developed in the nineteenth century — the shopping arcade, the department store, and the universal exhibition — still provide the repertoire of today’s ‘themed environments’

The present past  53 (Gottdiener 1997). The combination of fantasy and technology characterizes the nineteenth-century grand opera no less than Hollywood, which draws its material from the mythology of popular fiction since the gothic novel. The eclectic architecture of nineteenth-century historicism, of which the most famous example is the castles of Ludwig II, finds its counterpart in the commercial exuberance of Las Vegas. Benjamin calls for a dream analysis of the nineteenth century in order to liberate us from the spell of commodity capitalism by uncovering the ‘correspondences between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbolic world of mythology’ (Benjamin 1991, 576). In The Arcades Project he set out to explore the flora and fauna that populate the second nature of the city and the commodity. The perspective opened up by the natural history of industrial capitalism offers all the material needed for a mythology of modernity. In a world of endless invention and novelty, obsolescence reveals the mythical face of technological progress, what Benjamin calls the ‘prehistoric shudder’ present in the forgotten bric-a-brac of the junk shop and captured in the strange and fascinating images of Surrealism, for which Max Ernst’s collages, drawn from nineteenth century engravings, provide a particularly good illustration. Benjamin used the temporality of fashion, which reveals the ever new as the ever same, to deconstruct the key historicalphilosophical categories of modernism: ‘progress’ and ‘decadence.’ Behind the eternal cycle of production and consumption, the ever new as the ever same, lies the Urgeschichte of modernity, the archaic dream world of mass culture. Benjamin stresses the other side of the culture industry, not the logic of bureaucratic planning and rationalization but the dream time of capitalism. Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle and Jean Baudrillard’s progression from the political economy of the sign to the society of simulation add a further twist to this vision of a sleep-walking society. Thus Debord echoes Benjamin when he writes: ‘the spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than the desire to sleep’ (Debord 1983, para. 21). The continuity of the whole cultural critique of modernity is given by the epigraph to Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, taken from the preface to the second edition of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity: ‘but certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence . . . illusion only is sacred, truth profane.’ Can cultural theory escape the modernist closure of cultural critique, with its gnostic categories — alienation, disintegration, reconciliation, redemption — and its normative oppositions — utopia and ideology, reality and appearance, authentic and the inauthentic experience (Erfahrung/Erlebnis)? Not forgetting of course the tried-and-trusted warhorse: use and exchange value, which has also collapsed into the indifference of Baudrillard’s simulacra? I want to propose a more open-ended account of the culture industry and its transformations, which I will examine with reference to the aesthetic economy and to the cultural heritage. It is no secret that the culture industry is flourishing today, indeed that it embraces ever larger sectors of the economy. The culture industry as analyzed by Adorno is only one readily recognizable aspect of the gigantic expansion of the institutions and apparatuses of cultural production since the Second World

54  The present past War and especially since the 1960s. Indeed, so central have the culture industries become to the economy that it is difficult to know where to draw the line. Let me just indicate some of the most prominent sectors which are becoming more and more enmeshed: the ever-expanding scope of the entertainment industry in all its branches and multimedia forms in the leisure society; the arts and heritage industries, e.g. festivals, museums, galleries, exhibitions, heritage sites, and theme parks, which are closely aligned with the tourism industry and its offshoot, museum building and heritage restoration as key means to urban revitalization; the lifestyle industries, catering for body and soul, in the society of mass individualization; and of course design as the indispensable instrument of the art and science of advertising from fashion to cosmetic surgery, from corporate images to shopping centres, the old/new universe of merchandizing brand names in the society of the spectacle. The global reach of the culture industry is perhaps most obviously evident in the way the ideology of consumption is becoming the ideology of an economically globalized mass culture. Debord had already identified in the 1960s the commodification of culture as the driving force of the economy since the Second World War (Debord 1983, para. 193). Thirty years later Alain Touraine accounted for these developments in his Critique of Modernity by calling post-industrial society the ‘programmed society,’ ‘defined by the central importance of cultural industries — medical care, education, information — in which the central conflict is one between the apparatuses of cultural production and the defence of the personal subject’ (Touraine 1995, 5). Programmed society is a society ‘in which the production and mass distribution of cultural commodities plays the central role that belonged to material commodities in industrial society.’ In this society ‘managerial power consists in predicting and modifying opinions, attitudes and modes of behaviour . . . it is therefore directly involved in the world of “values.” The new importance of the culture industries replaces traditional forms of social control’ (244). All of this signifies for Touraine the loss of mediations between the economy and culture. We could think here of the tendential collapse of those liberal, publicly funded institutions, designed to mediate between economy and culture, e.g. universities, museums, academies, public media, theatres, orchestras, under the pressure of the state and marketdriven symbiosis of commercialization and commodification with the attendant bureaucratic expansion of the apparatuses of cultural production and quality control. In relation to this expansion the inflationary use of the word ‘culture’ can be read as both the index and the imaginary other of the culture industries. Touraine’s ‘controlled society’ represents a mixture of the old and the qualitatively new. Gernot Böhme (Böhme 2003) likewise presents his concept of the aesthetic economy as both a historical continuation and as a critical revision of the paradigm of the culture industry articulated in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Böhme can be seen, however, as closer to Benjamin than to Adorno. Böhme takes up what we might term the unfinished business of The Arcades Project, which had already posed the question of Feuerbach’s ‘sacred illusion’: what takes the place of the distinction between essence and appearance? Nietzsche provided an answer when he observed in The Birth of Tragedy

The present past 55 that the abolition of the ideal world abolishes by the same stroke the real world. Henceforth the world can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. And as Benjamin reminds us, capitalism has always been as busy enchanting the world as disenchanting it. The Janus face of capitalist modernity is precisely that of the culture industry and its dream factory: the marriage of magic and the market, of aesthetic illusion and rationalization was born of the double spirit of capitalism: puritan (Weber 2000) and romantic (Campbell 1987). What distinguishes Benjamin from Adorno is that he can be understood as extending the concept of the culture industry from the commodification of culture to the culturalization of the commodity. The dream mythology of modernity is integral to the aestheticization of consumption and everyday life. Debord’s society of the spectacle and Böhme’s aesthetic economy complement each other. For Böhme the aesthetic economy is premised on the ubiquity of the aestheticization of the real and rests accordingly on aesthetic labour and the production of aesthetic value, in which display and staging comprise a new type of use value, centred around the manufacture of semblance, aura, atmosphere in relation to people and things, townscapes and landscapes. The concept of aesthetic value is conceived by Böhme as a third value in addition to use and exchange value, arising from a new attitude to the pleasure principle, which privileges desires and subverts the distinction between true and false needs. But could one not also say, extrapolating Böhme’s argument, that aesthetic value is tending to subsume the distinction between exchange and use value since it has become central to the symbolism of consumption, just as the very concept of the aesthetic economy calls into question the distinction between culturally mediated needs and desires? As Böhme observes: what emerges beyond the reality principle is the reality of images as the object of ‘imaginary’ investment. The aesthetic economy corresponds for Böhme to a new phase of capitalism brought about by the transition from an economy of needs, savings, and scarcity to an economy based on desires, and the end of class consciousness brought about by the overcoming of the historical split between consumers and producers in the society of mass consumption. Conspicuous consumption is no longer the privilege of a leisure class. Böhme’s aesthetic economy is predicated on the privileging of consumption over production as the driving force of the economy in the wake of the Keynesian revolution underlying postwar economic policy and unprecedented growth up to the end of the 1960s, culminating in the break with the Protestant ethic of deferred gratification and the swing to a ‘Romantic ethic’ (Campbell 1987), announced by the youth culture of the 1960s and the 1968 cultural revolution, which we can now see as defined not least by its role in the transformation of the spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Roberts 2010). The post-1968 aesthetic transformation of capitalism was already foreshadowed by Werner Sombart at the beginning of the century. In the Preface to Moderner Kapitalismus (1902) Sombart argued that it is time to replace the ‘ethical economy’ of socialism with an ‘aesthetic economy,’ corresponding to the new aesthetic culture being brought into being by the marriage of art and industry, which is overcoming the split between high art and the technical, decorative and applied arts (Lichtblau 1996, 232–242). What Sombart had not

56  The present past anticipated, however, was the marriage of the market, museum, and atmospheres to create in the heritage industry a new domain of the aesthetic economy. I am using the term ‘culturalism’ to cover the double face of the cultivation of the past, which appears most clearly in relation to the symbiosis of tourism and heritage. Now that cultural production has become central to the economy and the complementary pillars of cultural modernity — science/technology and art/ culture — have become the key growth factors of the new economy in the form of research and development and the culture industries, we can update Heidegger’s ‘Age of the World Picture.’ If, according to Heidegger, the essence of science/ technology lies in the reduction of nature to a standing reserve, then the essence of the culture industries lies now in the reduction of culture to a standing reserve, that is, to cultural heritage — a telos already inherent in the function of the nineteenth century museums of natural and art history, which combined the enlightenment project of ordering and classifying with the romantic project of gathering together the relics of the national past and the trophies of colonialism. The conservation, preservation, and marketing of historical sites exemplify the function of the heritage industry to reduce the past to heritage experiences, packaged as tourist destinations. This reduction and reification both effects and expresses the mutation of the historicism of modernism into contemporary thematism, the transformation of the relics of the past into an ever-expanding theme park, in which the originals become over time their own replicas. Of course there can be no heritage without heritage management and a corresponding bureaucratic drive to expand the empire of cultural heritage organizations (CHOs) by expanding the province of culture until it becomes at the limit the duplication of the world (a process that reflects the imperial logic of cultural anthropology and ethnology, whereby every social practice acquires its own ‘culture’). In addition to use, exchange, and aesthetic value, every artefact has or is acquiring a museum and heritage value, calibrated according to familiarity and obsolescence or age and rarity. This economically interesting expansion of culture and cultural heritage does not lack its ideological providers. When the President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities lamented ‘that governments and economic planners have failed to appreciate CHOs as dynamic contributors to the new information-based, globally influenced, knowledge economies of the twentyfirst century,’ we can be sure that the managerial plan for the new arts/humanities faculties of the future present is not far behind: the heart-warming R&D prospects opened up by the development of ‘cultural and social informatics,’ which will entail ‘new degree programmes, expert conferences, research collaboration with heritage institutions, technological industries and universities,’ together with the establishment of ‘cultural research precincts’ at the cutting edge of the interface between universities, CHOs, and the tourist industry. The President’s example for this productive synergy is extremely apposite: he collaboration of the Commonwealth of Australia Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, and the Australian National University in the development of a virtual reality immersion system, which is already being linked into national and state educational

The present past  57 curricula, thereby demonstrating ‘the dynamic integration of the cultural heritage and educational sectors’ (McCalman 2001). Behind these developments stands the following essential statistics: according to the 2018 ‘Global Economic Impact and Issue’ report of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), tourism made up 10.4% of GDP worldwide in 2017, and is forecast to rise to 11.7% of global GDP in 2028, amounting to 1 in 9 jobs globally, contributing 25% of global net job creation over this period. The travel and tourism sector is growing faster than communications, business services, manufacturing, retail, and distribution. That tourism has become the largest global industry and that World Heritage sites and heritage tourism are integral components point to another aspect of the cultivation of the past: the contemporary appeal of the word culture, which involves an appeal, however vague, to some kind of irreplaceable and inviolable value. I am using the term ‘culturalism’ to cover both the commodification of cultural heritage and the process that has led in the context of media-based globalization to culture becoming the general, decontextualized sign and repository of value and to the transformation of history into the imaginary museum of cultural expression. Particularly apposite here is the polar antithesis between fundamentalism and culturalism. Culturalism is constitutionally incapable of comprehending the present or past roots of fundamentalism. The destruction of statues of Buddha by the Taliban was not and could not be registered as a religious act of iconoclasm, any more than it could be connected with the iconoclasm that played such an important role in the end of pagan antiquity in the Mediterranean or in the birth of European Protestant modernity. The Taliban’s destruction of the statues was perceived globally as an act of destruction of the cultural heritage that belongs to everyone. (And here I should add that the giant statues of Buddha in Afghanistan only just missed being digitally duplicated by the multidisciplinary research project at Indiana University, the Cultural Digital Library Indexing Our Heritage, CLIOH.) Let us not forget, however, that this conception of a global heritage presupposes inter alia the early modern transformation of religious images, decisively reinforced by iconoclasm, into art, and the progressive aestheticization of nature (landscape painting, the English garden) and of history (the monuments and ruins of antiquity) as precursors of the contemporary transformation of art into culture. If modern historicism transformed cathedrals into museums and museums into cathedrals, the nineteenth century religion of art has now been replaced by culturalism and its virtual museum. CHOs have found their global mission as the curators of this global museum. I am referring to the statement issued by the International Council of Museums, a UNESCO organization, and the American Association of Museums at the first world museum summit in Costa Rica, April 1998. The statement takes the form of a syllogism: First, sustainable development is a process for improving the quality of life in the present and the future, promoting a balance between environment, economic growth, equity and cultural diversity, and requires the participation and empowerment of all individuals. Second, culture is the basis of sustainable

58  The present past development; and third, museums are essential in the protection and diffusion of our cultural and national heritage. (Weil 1999, 237) The new paradigm of culturalism, constructed around the alliance of ecology and heritage, the protection of the biosphere and the cultural sphere, fuses nature and history into the one cultural form of preservation. Manuel Castells argues that we have now reached the point at which nature is artificially revived: ‘this is in fact the meaning of the environmental movement, to reconstruct nature as an ideal cultural form’ (Castells 1996, 477), comparable, we may add, to the reconstruction of history as heritage. This new paradigm links up with the aesthetic economy: their common ground is the practice and theory of curatorship, by which I mean the management of what Benjamin called Ausstellungswert, the exhibition value, the display value bestowed on natural and manmade objects and ensembles by their atmospheric staging (mise-en-scène), understood in the widest sense of publicity, the power of the image and the power of imagineering (not by chance the name of the Disney design organization). The age of culturalism is the age of the symbiosis of the museum and tourism, its monuments are the architectural master works of the last half century: the Guggenheim New York, the Beaubourg, the Getty, the Guggenheim Bilboa, the Berlin Jewish museum, to name only a few of the mega-icons of cultural tourism, places of pilgrimage no less important to the local economy than the possession of particularly prized relics was in the medieval period. And like medieval religious enterprise it announces a new relation between culture and the economy beyond the antagonisms of the ‘culture industry.’ The massive growth of tourism over the last fifty years cannot be explained simply as a function of affluence and cheapness of travel. Our holidays have become our privatized holy days, pilgrimages to the sacred sites at the same time as they are being transformed by the power of technology and the power of the image. If tourism is impelled like the pilgrimage by the quest for the encounter with the aura of the ‘real,’ this experience of the ‘real’ cannot escape being measured against its image, its Platonic idea as it were, which perhaps only the tourist photograph can hope to capture. Experience in the aesthetic economy has become a devilishly complex phenomenon, as Feuerbach already lamented. That is to say, our holy days are also holidays from the reality principle. Where once the pilgrimage, the journey, the quest signified the metaphor of life-defining experience, today’s spiritual pilgrimages amount to a willingness to lend credence to the aura of sacred illusion. Let me conclude the discussion of the heritage industry with Julian Barnes’s entertaining double take on the dialectic of the authentic and the artificial in the age of heritage tourism, England, England. ‘England, England’ exemplifies the world as ‘picture, picture.’ Barnes gives a double gloss on the opening axiom of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: ‘everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.’ On the one hand, he gives us a ‘literal’ version of representation as theme park replication. On the other, title and work offer a parable on what art has always done, whether naively or sentimentally: the re-presentation

The present past  59 of the real. In the process he illustrates and ironizes the modern distinction between culture and culture industry, heritage and heritage industry. Barnes’s fiction, set in the near future, is framed by the heroine’s childhood experience of the loss of the signifier, the jigsaw puzzle of England always completed by her father, who habitually conceals the final pieces of the puzzle. One day her father disappears. Martha’s consequent crisis of trust, certainty, and selfidentity leads her to seek for the real in love relationships that fail her. She is predestined, however, for her role as CEO of ‘England, England,’ the theme park recreation of England on the Isle of Wight, presided over by the real Royal Family, which has migrated from an increasingly unsympathetic society. The success of the venture is explained by a French intellectual, a 68er from the last century: He understood, this old thinker, that we live in the world of the spectacle, but sentimentalism and a certain political recidivism made him fear his own vision. I  would prefer to advance his thought in the following way. Once there was only the world, directly lived. Now there is the representation — let me fracture that word, the re-presentation — of the world. It is not a substitute for that plain and primitive world, but an enhancement and enrichment, an ironisation and summation of that world. (Barnes 1998, 55) Barnes’s French guide explains our modern preference for the replica over the original, for the reproduction over the work of art — a preference that over time has turned the real thing into the replica — by the atavistic fear of direct unmediated experience that already drove the nineteenth century pioneer of heritage restoration, the French architect Viollet-le-Duc, ‘to abolish the reality of those old edifices. Faced with the rivalization of reality, with a reality stronger and more profound than our own time, he had no choice . . . except to destroy the original’ (54). The convenient availability of all the tourist attractions of England in ‘England, England’ has a disastrous effect on the economy of the parent island, dependent as it is on the tourist dollar. When Martha after many years retires to Anglia, as England is now known after the collapse of its economy, she finds a country without cars or TV, where villagers spontaneously reinvent tradition as a compensation for poverty and Martha at last ceases to search for the signifier. Does this signify that from postmodern ‘England, England’ and premodern ‘Anglia’ there is no way back to Debord and his sentimentalism. As Barnes’ reference to the old 68ers suggests, 1968 marked a turning point in critical theory, more exactly, a parting of the ways with regard to the whole idea of authenticity (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999, 546ff.). On the one side, Debord and Baudrillard sum up and suspend the continuity of critical theory from Schiller and Marx to Marcuse: the opposition of authentic and alienated existence ends in the suspicion of generalized simulation. On the other side, Derrida’s critique of Rousseau spells out the paradoxes built into the distinctions that underpin the critical theory of the moderns. A moment’s reflection tells us that nature is a construct of culture, that the naive is a sentimental

60  The present past concept, or that the unconscious, the paradoxical concept par excellence, is a construct of consciousness. And a second look at the self-critique of romanticism from Goethe’s Werther to Kierkegaard’s critique of aesthetic existence in Either/ Or documents the inescapable and self-destructive illusion of the quest for the authentic self, authentic experience, and authentic feeling. Let me try to reformulate my argument very briefly in relation to Heidegger’s vision of cultural modernity as the age of the world picture. Despite all the talk of ‘postmodernity’ it is necessary to stress basic continuities: the two basic organizing forces of modernity are still capitalist accumulation and the centralization of power through bureaucratic rationalization. Nevertheless, the discourse of presentism does indicate a widespread sense of cultural change. I  am trying to account for some salient aspects of this change in terms of a progression from the culture industry to the aesthetic economy and from cultural heritage to the heritage industry and their convergence in the aestheticization of consumption and of everyday life and leisure, registered in opposed fashion by Debord’s society of the spectacle and Böhme’s aesthetic economy. The aesthetic economy points in turn to the wider, long-term processes of aestheticization and its inseparable corollary, commodification, which are taking on a new quality and allow us to say that the age of the world picture is now predominantly the age of the world as image. The production of atmospheric illusion through (commercial) display and staging goes together with the cultivation of an aesthetic attitude in the context of urban capitalist commodity culture that opens the way for a virtualization of reality, whose ironic-aesthetic counterpart is the preference for the second-order copy over the first-order original. The virtualization of reality reinforces at the same time the production of sacred illusion, that is, the power of the image that takes us from Malraux’s imaginary museum to the culturalization of history in its double and ambivalent dimensions of global heritage and global heritage industry. Somewhat akin to Hegel’s World Spirit, World Heritage subsumes all cultures past and present into the spirit of what I am calling culturalism. As a new (ideological) paradigm, culturalism presents itself as the antithesis to (the utopia/dystopia of) modernism: it sets preservation against creative destruction, the irreplaceable values of the global natural and cultural heritage against their reduction to standing reserves. It is both the complement and the other of the heritage industry.

World heritage The reflections of Lipovetsky and Serroy on heritage management nicely introduce the post-historical implications of the relationship to art revealed in mass tourism. Aesthetic consumption today has little in common with bourgeois selfcultivation; historically informed contemplation has given way in the aesthetic economy to an unfocussed curiosity that is purely visual. Or to rephrase Lipovetsky and Serroy, art as such dis/appears into transaestheticism, prompting the authors to cite Hegel’s verdict on art in modernity that is has ceased to satisfy the highest demands of the spirit. Once everything has become aestheticized the

The present past  61 very fact of such a generalized aesthetic receptivity indicates that art has lost the power to touch us deeply (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2013, 448–449). But this is only half of Hegel’s story. The democratization of aesthetic consumption completes the modern process of decontextualization that made aestheticization possible and has now transformed history into heritage. Hegel’s ‘end of art,’ the end, that is, of the essential history of art is one with the homecoming of the spirit to its comprehended completion. At the end of this odyssey of the spirit stands World Heritage as the global ratification of Hegel’s European world history. And here Malraux’s museum without walls, as already indicated, mediates between Hegel’s museum and the post-historicist idea of World Heritage. The museum without walls, as conceived by Malraux radically universalizes the cultural legacy of the Enlightenment. It embodies the sum of the Hegelian completion of art history in its emancipation of the past into the simultaneity of all art and all times. It marks the point at which — after the exhaustion of the new, tied to the idea of progress — the arts of the present enter into a transhistorical continuum with the works of the past that have become art for us. As Malraux puts it: ‘Mona Lisa is of her time, and outside of time. Our reaction to her is not on the level of knowledge but of presence’ (Malraux 1967, 233). Malraux’s continuum of past and present rests on the elevation of art to a supreme value, once the supreme value of society vanishes (Malraux 1967, 66). That is, after art ceases to express the highest interest of society (Hegel’s highest demands of the spirit). Malraux’s museum is not only post-historicist it is post-Hegelian, even if his subsumption of the world’s art in the museum remains essentially Hegelian. Malraux’s argument is the following: up to the nineteenth century, art works represented something real or imaginary. The self-referential status of art could only emerge after the loss of a patron class and public. The progressive abandonment of representational illusion went together with the growing autonomy of art, whose destination now became the museum. And as the museum expanded, the inclusion of non-European arts revealed to artists new possibilities of freedom (71). European art no longer represented the whole history of art; the walls of the museum fall and the way to the resurrection of the past is open. After the regime of modern historicity, the contemporary looks to the past and not to a future that in threatening the present threatens the world we have inherited. To ‘live historically’ means to live from the past that we have given a second life. If the discovery of the past was the achievement of the moderns, it was integrated into the narrative of a Eurocentric universal history that can now be grasped, after Hegel, after progress, as the emerging universality of a truly global history. In Malraux’s words: we live in a world ‘in which each masterpiece is supported by the testimony of all others, and becomes a masterpiece of a universal art whose values, still unknown, are even now being created from the assemblage of all its works’ (231). The condition of the assemblage of all of humanity’s works into the one universal art is technological reproduction. Malraux understood the implications of this epochal secularization more profoundly than Benjamin. Reproduction not only enables us to gather together the art of different cultures, it permits the analysis and comparison of whole bodies of art (79). Reproduction is

62  The present past thus one of the most effective tools of intellectual abstraction that, in revealing a style in its entirety, relativizes it at the same time: ‘the past of art, which to Europe had been only the past of one style termed art, appears to us as a world of styles’ (182). The world of styles, assembled in Malraux’s museum into a universal art in the making, is the post-historicist expression, resurrected into the higher actuality of presence, of the sum of the world’s civilizations: ‘we think of every great style as the symbol of a fundamental relationship between man and the universe, of a civilization with the value it holds supreme’ (182). It is clear, however, that Malraux’s resurrection is possible only as a universalizing, hence relativizing and aestheticizing secularization. The gods that we resurrect are no longer divine. All that is sacred has been metamorphosed into art (180). This means that the condition of Malraux’s emancipation of the past presupposes our emancipation from the past. Thus to ‘live historically’ from the past is to live post-historically. And this applies to heritage: World Heritage signifies the emancipation from the past that is the condition of the assemblage of the world’s heritage into a post-civilizational sum of ‘the symbols of a fundamental relationship between man and the universe.’ And it is precisely this act of conservation and preservation that is the expression of the values, which are even now being created, of a post-civilizational world society, perhaps even a world civilization in the making. World Heritage therefore involves the whole complex of recognition, redemption, and resurrection as the silent premise of the cultural criteria employed in determining the ‘outstanding cultural value’ of nominated sites. The promotion of cultural heritage sites to the status of a universal value elevates them to the collective possession of humanity, in so far as they qualify as masterpieces of ‘human creative genius,’ deemed to bear ‘a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilisation which is living or disappeared’ (I quote from the UNESCO list of criteria for selection). The humanity to which these unique or exceptional testimonies refer is a humanity that is even now being created beyond all national, historical, religious, cultural, and civilizational differences. The transformation of the past into humanity’s heritage thus answers Malraux’s question as to the values of the universal art assembled in the imaginary museum. Malraux’s universal art, destined for a universal humanity, represents the sum and sublation of all the historical symbols of ‘a fundamental relation between man and the universe.’ We can now return — after Malraux, after Hegel — to Hartog in order to relate the concept and practice of World Heritage to the way in which past, present, and future are linked in the contemporary regime of historicity. The privileging of heritage in Hartog’s account of presentism is directly tied to our historical consciousness of the end of the idea and the age of progress. The devaluation of the future, which we no longer perceive as promise but as threat, has given a new, second life and meaning to an expanding and ever more valued past. The afterlife of Hegel’s Spirit is that of death and resurrection in the imaginary museum of World Heritage. When Hartog quotes Francois Lyotard’s definition of historicity as ‘humankind present to itself as history’ (Hartog 2009, 2), we must add that it is only in the presentist regime of historicity that cultural modernity (the first to understand

The present past  63 itself, as Markus observed, as one culture among others and precisely thereby as superior to all other cultures) is on the way to conceiving of a humankind present to itself as the subject of a universal global history waiting to be written. Hartog traces the origins of the ever-widening reach of cultural and natural heritage to the 1964 Charter of Venice of the International Commission for the Intellectual Cooperation of the Society of Nations and the International Council of Museums. He quotes from the Preamble of the Charter: Humanity, which is becoming more conscious of the unity of human values, considers ancient monuments as a common heritage and regarding future generations, recognizes itself responsible for their safeguarding. Its duty is to hand them on in the full richness of their authenticity. (Hartog 2009, 7) As we have seen, Hartog reads heritage as a primary symptom of the crisis of time: the product not of continuity but of a rupture that has trapped us in a present that is no longer the in-between time between the past and the future but our condition. This present is for Hartog ‘doubly indebted.’ It confines us to a present that has extended into the past and the future, that is, a presentism ‘that has no other horizon other than itself, daily creating the past and the future that, day after day, it needs’ (Hartog 2009, 8). By the same token, however, it is rewriting our relationship to the past and the future in a way that is itself doubly post-historical. It is post-historical in that it registers the end of the (philosophy of) history of the modern regime of historicity. But it is also post-historical in the Hegelian sense of remembrance that opens the possibility of transcending our presentist horizon in a more comprehensive consciousness of contemporaneity that redeems our doubly indebted present in the light of our collective responsibility for the preservation of our cultural and natural heritage and its conservation for the future. I return to the question of contemporaneity beyond presentism in the last chapter.

References Barnes, Julian. 1998. England, England. London: Jonathan Cape. Benjamin, Walter. 1991. Das Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Schriften Band V-I. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Böhme, Gernot. 2003. ‘Contribution to the Critique of the Aesthetic Economy,’ tr. Robert Savage, Thesis Eleven 73, 69–80. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. 1999. Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard. Campbell, Colin. 1987. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Information Age. Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. I. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Crimp, Douglas. 1993. On the Museum’s Ruins. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Debord, Guy. 1983. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black and Red. Gottdiener, Mark. 1997. The Theming of America. Dreams, Visions and Commercial Spaces. Boulder, CO: Westview.

64  The present past Hartog, Francois. 2009. ‘Time and Heritage,’ Museum International 57:3, 7–18. Hartog, Francois. 2015. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Lichtblau, Klaus. 1996. Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende. Zur Genealogie der Kultursoziologie in Deutschland. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lipovetsky, Gilles and Jean Serroy. 2013. L’esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l’age du capitalisme artiste. Paris: Gallimard. Malraux, André. 1967. Museum without Walls. London: Secker and Warburg. McCalman, Iain. 2001. ‘Museum and Heritage Management in the New Economy,’ Humanities Research VIII:1, 5–15. Mudrovcic, Maria Ines. 2014. ‘Time, History, and Philosophy of History,’ Journal of the Philosophy of History 8:2, 217–242. Nora, Pierre. 1989. ‘Between Memory and Time. Les Lieux de Mémoire,’ Representations 26, 7–24. Quatremère, de Quincy. 1989. Lettres au Général Miranda sur le préjudice qu’occasionnens aux arts et à la science le déplacement des monuments de l’art de l’Italie. In: Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages d’art. Paris: Fayard. Roberts, David. 2010. ‘From the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism to the Creative Economy: Reflections on the New Spirit of Art and Capitalism,’ Thesis Eleven 110, 83–97. Touraine, Alain. 1995. Critique of Modernity, tr. David Macey. Oxford: Blackwell. Weber, Max. 2000. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. and new introduction by Stephen Kalberg. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy Dearborn. Weil, Stephen. 1999. ‘From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum,’ Daedelus 128, 229–258. ‘What is Heritage?’ www.umass.edu/chs/about/whatisheritage.html (accessed 16 January 2019).

5 The future present Science fiction and the time of the novel

The ‘crisis of time’ denotes for Hartog a reordering of the relations between past, present, and future that signals the coming of a new regime of historicity. Writing in 2001 he identified the new historiography of memory and the cult of heritage since the 1970s as signs of the crisis of the modern regime, predicated on the separation of the past from the present and the subordination of the present to the future. Hartog takes the reunification of Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union after 1989 as the terminus of the two centuries since 1789 defined by the idea of progress. But, as we saw in relation to the ‘history of the present,’ the crisis of the modern regime of historicity reaches back to the Ur-catastrophe of the twentieth century. The ‘crisis of time,’ triggered by the outbreak of the First World War, mutated into the full blown ‘time of crisis’ after 1918: the critical moment of suspension between the world of yesterday and the unknown new. It is this in-between time that is evoked in the endings of a number of Germanlanguage novels published in the critical years after 1918. The novels in question from Heinrich Mann to Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin, from Hermann Broch to Elias Canetti are all defined by the caesura of the Great War, the caesura that precipitates the crisis of the modern age, of the modern subject, and of the novel. In Canetti’s Auto da Fe the sense of an ending becomes one with the end of the novel as the genre of the modern age and modern subjectivity. Canetti’s vision of the return of the modern individual to the crowd poses the question of the human and the posthuman, of sexuality and eros that finds a direct continuation over sixty years later in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised. Atomised ends with a meditation on the modern age, the time of the subject and of the novel. It recapitulates from the safe haven of a post-human, post-historical future present the crisis of civilization prophesized in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Canetti’s Auto da Fe at the beginning of the 1930s. The Epilogue to Atomised, which situates itself beyond the time of the novel in the brave new world of science fiction, is the focus of the last part of the chapter.

The sense of an ending The final scene of Heinrich Mann’s novel Der Untertan (1918), variously translated as The Patrioteer (1921), Little Superman (1945), Man of Straw (1947),

66  The future present is the unveiling of the statue of Wilhelm I  on the occasion of his centenary (1897), but Mann’s target is also the 1913 centenary of the Wars of Liberation. The speech of Diederich Hessling at the unveiling, modelled on the speeches of Wilhelm II, reveals German nationalism and imperialism in full rhetorical flight. The ‘Untertan,’ the Emperor’s loyal subject, becomes the inspired voice of Germany’s destiny, united by the blood and iron of the battlefield to form the covenant of the chosen people, led by the Emperor by God’s grace. The dark relief to this shining picture of Germanic glory is the hereditary enemy France. The war of 1870/71 was the judgment of history on the God-forsaken Empire of Napoleon III. God is our witness that Germany is not like this: ‘ “of all that we know nothing,” cried Diederich raising his hand to the witnesses above. “Therefore, there can never, never be for us that terrible end which awaits the empire of our hereditary foe.” ’ The appeal to the heavenly ally, however, is followed by a flash of lightning and the thunder clap, ‘which was obviously going too far,’ and finally the cloudburst (Mann 1931, 380). Diederich Hessling is left clinging to the speaker’s rostrum as the horsemen of the Apocalypse hold their rehearsal for the Day of Judgment. Once the clouds clear, however, Hessling recovers his confidence and it is with the feelings of Wilhelm I on the way to meet the defeated Napoleon III that he enters the house of the dying Buck, the last representative of the defeated and dying liberal cause in Germany. The novel ends with Buck’s deathbed vision of Diederich Hessling unveiled — as the Devil. Two months after the completion of the novel there followed the thunderclap of August 1914. In Heinrich Mann’s papers there is a letter of 1915 addressed to the ‘Untertan,’ apologizing for not taking him seriously enough. And in 1946 Heinrich Mann characterized Der Untertan as a novel that comes to new honours after every world war. Thomas Mann also ended The Magic Mountain (1924) with the thunderbolt of August 1914, which awakens the dreamer on the Magic Mountain: that historic thunder-peal that ‘fired the mine beneath the magic mountain and set the sleeper roughly outside the gates’ (Mann 1961, 709). War functions as the deus ex machina of the novel: Hans Castorp finds himself liberated, redeemed from the magic spell. Led by the ‘spirit of the narration,’ we follow the erstwhile sleeper into battle, anonymous in the anonymous mass, singing the leitmotif of the Romantic death wish, Schubert’s Der Lindenbaum. ‘Farewell, honest Hans Castorp. . . . Your tale is told. We have told it to the end’ (Mann 1961, 715). Thomas Mann collapses his narrative like a pack of cards. War as life that summons Hans Castorp is no ‘salvation,’ however, but the blind fate before which the novelist bows. Thomas Mann places the war between himself and his hermetic magic mountain; all its conflicts and debates are reduced to absurdity, cancelled by the hindsight of the thunderclap. Once again, as in Der Untertan, history writes the end, leaving the last questioning sentence of the novel — ‘Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?’ (716) Looking back, Serenus Zeitblom, the narrator, chronicler, and commentator of the times in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus

The future present  67 (1947), recalls his feelings following the defeat of Germany in the First World War, his historical sense of an ending: I felt that our epoch was ending which had not only included the nineteenth century, but gone far back to the end of the Middle Ages, to the loosening of scholastic ties, the emancipation of the individual, the birth of freedom. This was the epoch that I had regarded as that of my more extended spiritual home, in short the epoch of bourgeois humanism. And I felt as I say that its hour had come, that a mutation of life would be consummated, the world would enter into a new, still nameless constellation. (Mann 1949, 352) For the Austrian Hermann Broch 1918 is also a turning point of world-historical significance. His novel trilogy, The Sleepwalkers (1930–32), was immediately recognized as an apocalypse of the present with its presentation of the First World War as the culmination of the destructive course of western civilization and society, unleashed by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the industrial and political revolutions. Integral to Broch’s theory of history in The Sleepwalkers is his theory of values, expounded in the third part of the trilogy, 1918. Huguenau oder die Sachlichkeit (1918. Huguenau or Objectivity), in the ten interspersed chapters entitled Zerfall der Werte (Disintegration of Values). In the last of these chapters, the Epilogue to the whole novel, European history is presented as the history of the dissolution of the medieval world order, of the loss of unity of the one universal faith and value system, which set in train the whole process of the emancipation of the individual and the secularization of values, a process whose inescapable consequence was the setting free of an unbounded rationality. The resulting atomization of value systems leads finally to the nihilistic chaos of the revolution of 1918/19 following the German defeat. The revolution is the prelude to the ‘Revolution as such,’ the fearful dynamic of ‘Sachlichkeit,’ embodied in the novel in the figure of Huguenau, whose name combines the inhuman precision of technology and the Calvinist spirit of capitalism. But the revelation of the terrors of what Broch calls the cruel absolute — ‘the unleashing of reason’: the setting free of the striving for the infinite (manifest in the logic of technology but also in the very inflation of the currency) reveals also the pivotal moment between ‘collapse and ascent,’ ‘in this magic hour of death and conception,’ ‘between end and beginning’ (Broch 1932, 677). The Revolution is the zero point through which we must pass from the chaos of the old to the new value system. It is for Broch ‘the moment of the radical history-making suspension of time in the pathos of the absolute zero hour’ (689). As the culmination and self-destruction of the present epoch, the Revolution represents the final logic of western civilization and of the spirit of Protestantism. As Broch sees it, European history has reached its ultimate crisis with the atomization of values and the isolation of the individual. This is also the vision of the world presented in Canetti’s novel Die Blendung (Canetti 1935) written in Vienna at the same time as The Sleepwalkers. It was

68  The future present translated under the title Auto da Fe in 1946 in the UK and under the title La tour de Babel (Canetti 1949) in France. The English title refers to the suicide (the sacrificial act of faith) of the central figure, the scholar Peter Kien. The French title refers to the impossibility of communication between the novel’s figures that are all enclosed in the monomaniacal obsessions of their private languages. The world of ‘Blendung’ (blindness) is the monadic universe of the modern city in which love, contact, and communication have fallen victim to the radical isolation of the individual. Auto da Fe is divided into three parts. Part one, ‘A Head without a World,’ describes the world of Peter Kien, at 40 the greatest Chinese scholar of the age, owner of the most important private library in the city. Ensconced behind the windowless walls of his thickly carpeted library Kien has succeeded in isolating himself from all contact with the world. Kien, however, is overcome by the sudden impulse to marry his housekeeper Therese when he discovers her reading a book with her gloves on. But the entry of a woman into his library is the beginning of the end for Kien — it is the invasion of the body, of life, of greed. Therese, whose one thought is her husband’s supposed fortune, soon tires of him and throws him onto the street and into the ‘Headless World’ of part two: the underworld of criminals, cripples, prostitutes, beggars, and outcasts of the teeming city. It is the grotesque counterpart to the spotless order of Kien’s libraryparadise but also its mirror, for each of its figures lives, like Kien and Therese, in his private world of compulsive fantasy. Kien’s new companion is the ape-like hunchbacked dwarf, the Jew Fischerle, a fanatical chess player whose devotion to his ‘specialization’ parallels that of the scholar Kien to his books. Peter Kien finally falls into the hands of the ex-policeman and house-porter Benedikt Pfaff, who has become Therese’s accomplice. And this brings us to the third part, ‘The World in the Head.’ Kien is locked up in the porter’s lodge while Pfaff and Therese occupy Kien’s library on the top floor and it is there in the porter’s cell-cage that the psychiatrist George Kien discovers his brother Peter crouching in the dark amid scraps of food. The presence of George soon restores Peter to his ‘old self,’ Therese and Pfaff are banished, the library restored to its former state, and its master reinstated. George can hurry back to his own living library, his 800 patients in Paris, eagerly awaiting their beloved master. Once more alone, restored to the order and security of his books, Peter sets fire to his library and dies laughing in the flames. The three-part structure of the novel suggests the familiar eschatological schema of paradise, the fall into the world and paradise regained. Paradise, however, turns into the hellfire of the auto da fe, prefigured in Peter Kien’s dream of the Last Judgment near the beginning of the novel. Peter Kien’s suicide is the judgment on the head which tries to deny the world, on the dream of total isolation and autonomy of the individual. His fate becomes symbolic of the dangers threatening the individual in modern society cut off from others by suspicion and fear. In fact, Kien in his library, a head without a world, is only the most extreme example of the blindness of a society of individuals in which communication and love are no longer possible. Canetti defines the total and untenable negativity of this world of imprisonment in the self in terms of the longing for salvation,

The future present  69 expressed in the ‘private myth’ of each figure — a longing which can only be understood retrospectively in the light of George’s theory of the crowd, presented by him with all the fervour and enthusiasm of a millennial vision: ‘Mankind’ has existed as a mass for long before it was conceived of and watered down into an idea. It foams, a huge, wild, full-blooded, warm animal in all of us, very deep, far deeper than the maternal. In spite of its age it is the youngest of the beasts, the essential creation of the earth, its goal and its future. We know nothing of it; we live still, supposedly as individuals. Sometimes the masses pour over us, one single flood, one ocean, in which each drop is alive, and each drop wants the same thing. But it soon scatters again, and leaves us once more to be ourselves, poor solitary devils. (Canetti 1965, 461) For George the urge within the individual to become ‘a higher animal species, the crowd’ is the motive force of history. The discovery overwhelms him with all the force of a redemptive revelation. The world of civilization, the world of hopelessly isolated, fearful, and egoistic individuals, will be consumed by the irresistibly spreading conflagration, swept away by the deluge — ‘a single raging ocean’ — that will bring history to an end, cancel individuation and the division of sexes in the return to unity in the crowd. History ends in the return to the beginning, for the crowd is the origin and goal of human history, the oldest animal and the future of the earth. It is, as it were, the ultimate force of gravity, the one universal field of force of the world, which the head denies in vain. The private myths — the ‘world in the head’ — that haunt individuals are the blind expression of the attraction of the crowd that breaks through in Peter Kien’s reunion with his library in the flames of his auto da fe. This is the fate threatening the ‘lonely crowd’ of the modern city, unconsciously longing for release in an orgy of collective madness that cancels isolation. Auto da Fe is Canetti’s judgment on the world of disembodied abstraction that has turned the living into the dead and finds life only in death. The novel ends with the eruption of suicidal irrationality in the sphere of the purely rational — the library, as the epitome of a civilization that can only be reunited with the world in self-destruction. While the importance of Aldous Huxley for Michel Houellebecq has long been recognized — Atomised (Houellebecq 2001) and The Possibility of an Island (Houellebecq 2006) both engage with Huxley’s utopian fictions — the informing presence of Canetti’s novel in Atomised has not been recognized. Auto da Fe provides Houellebecq with the model and template for his critique of and radical alternative to Huxley’s Brave New World (Huxley 1932). Canetti’s novel, written in 1931/2 and published in Vienna in 1935, is exactly contemporary with Huxley’s Brave New World, written in 1931 and published in 1932. The theme of Auto da Fe and Atomised (Les particules elémentaires 1998b) is the longing of the ‘elementary particles’ of which society is composed to escape from the burden of individuation. The utopian (or dystopian?) vanishing point of both novels is the redemptive return to unity, which cancels the world of social and sexual division

70  The future present and death. The suicide of the novels’ protagonists symbolizes the suicide of Western civilization. Houellebecq works not only with the civilizational critique of Canetti’s novel but also with Canetti’s structuring contrast between two antithetical brothers. It is worth mentioning that Ernst Jünger’s utopia of a military state, Der Arbeiter (The Worker, Jünger 1932; Roberts 2009), was also published in 1932. Brave New World, Der Arbeiter, Auto da Fe present three striking anticipations of a posthuman world arising from the ruins of European civilization, a world in which the individuating and humanizing power of love has been replaced by Huxley’s mechanical-chemical sex, by Jünger’s military and Canetti’s collective eros. It is also worth recalling in this context Ludwig Klages’s definition of eros in Vom kosmogonischen Eros (1922) as ‘elemental or cosmic insofar as the individual being in its grasp experiences itself as pulsated or convulsed by an electric current analogous to a [vast] magnetic charge. . . . [This stream] transforms all events that separate bodies . . . into an omnipresent element of an enveloping and encompassing ocean’ (Klages 1988, 56).

Crowds, cancer, clones Atomised established Houellebecq’s reputation as a provocative and disturbing writer. Together with Submission (Houellebecq 2015) it remains his best-known and most challenging work, a savage satire of our contemporary sex-and-shopping society. At the same time it is also a speculative science fiction that sets the social satire, unfolded through the life story of the brothers Michel and Bruno, within the frame of a post-historical retrospective on the suicide of Western civilization and the end of humanity. Houellebecq’s narrative stance is that of the backwardlooking prophet, who presents a future past imbued with the stamp of historical necessity. Atomised thus works on two levels: the narrative frame constituted by the Prologue and the Epilogue, which give the interpretative key to the story of two brothers. Their story in turn illustrates the dead end of the West’s atomized society of individuals, which provides the premise and precondition of the ‘brave new world’ destined to replace humanity as we know it. As befits a speculative fiction, Atomised works with the categories of utopia and dystopia. If the lives of the brothers mirror in concentrated fashion Houellebecq’s vision of the negativities of contemporary society, the utopian other of this dystopia lies beyond humanity and history. The link between the two levels of the novel is given by the figure of Michel who realizes in wholly self-conscious fashion the necessity of leaving the world of individuals and individuality behind. Like the Buddha, Michel pierces the veil of illusion at the heart of ego-centred individualism and transcends the realm of desire and death. Michel’s liberation from the self-deceiving blindness of the will to life and power springs from compassion but it is informed by science, more exactly by the ‘new paradigm’ that will displace the materialism of modern science, and lead to a new era in world history (Houellebecq 2001, 5). This new era signifies a metaphysical revolution, that is, a radical, global transformation in the

The future present  71 values to which the majority subscribe (Houellebecq 2001, 4), comparable to the replacement of the pagan gods of antiquity by Christianity and the displacement of Christianity by the rise of modern science. ‘When Christianity appeared, the Roman Empire was at the height of its powers: supremely organised, it dominated the known world. Its technical and military prowess had no rival; nonetheless, it had no chance. When modern science appeared, medieval Christianity was a complete, comprehensive system which explained man and the universe’ (Houellebecq 2001, 9). And yet this did not prevent its downfall. The parallels to Auguste Comte’s ‘Law of the Three States’ of intellectual development from the theological to the metaphysical to the positive or scientific is clearly intended but with a twist that reflects Comte’s late thinking on social cohesion. Houellebecq’s third metaphysical revolution, of which Michel is the precursor, is presented both as the negative completion and as the utopian supersession of the era of modern Western science. On the one hand, the narrator states that metaphysical mutations tend to move inexorably to their logical conclusion. What could be more conclusive than the suicide of the individual and the self-extinction of humanity, of which we read in the Epilogue? On the other hand, the logic of scientific materialism, which ends in suicidal self-cancellation, opens the way to the new era in world history that is in fact beyond history, change, and time — a pure post-human utopia, which, it is suggested, reunites beginning and end, the theological and the scientific, and completes the circle of history. The references to the Buddha certainly suggest that the enlightenment that Michel seeks is as much religious as scientific. If Buddhist enlightenment breaks the blind power of karma, the endless cycle of desire and suffering, Michel’s ‘true significance’ (Houellebecq 2001, 3), which rests scientifically on his elimination of the genetic mutations inherent in sexual reproduction, amounts theologically to the undoing of original sin, through which death, suffering, and evil entered the world. Houellebecq argues that it is precisely the logic of scientific materialism that has laid bare death as the sole surviving deity in a cold and meaningless world by destroying the promise of Christian grace and redemption. It is this ‘universe of death’ (356) that drives Michel open-eyed to suicide and Bruno blindly to madness. The brothers’ abdication of the ego and of individualism announces the ‘last years of Western civilisation’ (81) and prefigures the self-extinction of humanity. The half-brothers, who have a mother in common, are constructed as polar opposites in the image of their respective fathers. Michel’s father, Marc Djerzinski, is a Polish Jewish outsider and loner, who ‘spoke to no one, befriended no one’ (28) and disappears mysteriously in Tibet while on a film assignment. Bruno’s father is a plastic surgeon, whose profession is to cheat and deny the aging process and whose sole interests are money and girls. Conceived as opposites, we can think of the brothers as the separated halves of a complete human being or conversely as the two extremes of the failure to achieve individuation: Michel is the head without body, Bruno the body without head. Michel’s utopia is reproduction without sex, Bruno’s utopia is sex without reproduction. Each has been abandoned by their common mother and brought up by grandmothers. This failure of parenting and with it the possibility of love of self and others — the

72  The future present ‘lost kingdom’ of part one of the novel — is for Houellebecq a symptom of the fatal cult of the self that has created a society in which selfless love has become impossible. The generation of grandparents was the last link to such altruism: ‘historically, such human beings have existed. Human beings who have worked — worked hard — all their lives with no other motive than their love and devotion; . . . In general, such human beings are invariably women’ (106). The lives of Michel and Bruno are defined by their opposed attempts to escape from the unbearable burden of selfhood. Bruno’s lifelong quest for sexual gratification seems finally to be satisfied through his meeting with Christiane. And yet, despite ‘the nights when they were one, each remained trapped in individual consciousness and separate flesh’ (240). Even the ultimate expression of the drive to be liberated from the self and self-consciousness in Dionysian orgy is shipwrecked on the ultimate logic of individual existence: death. As a child Bruno could not comprehend death (41). As an adult, in the grip of a midlife crisis, ‘death was still a long way off’ (73): ‘Bruno had never seriously thought about death and he was beginning to wonder if he ever would. He wanted to live to the end, . . . With his last breath, he would still plead for a postponement’ (142). Bruno, it is clear, remains imprisoned in the endless cycle of desire, whose vain goal is self-oblivion. His one passing moment of enlightenment (one of the ‘strange moments’ of part two) occurs with appropriate irony when, in his perpetual pursuit of sexual satisfaction, he visits the ‘Lieu de Changement,’ a holiday camp, which is a by-product of 1968, dedicated to creating an ‘authentic utopia’ (114). There he suddenly recalls a moment of escape at school between the History and Physics lessons. In this brief interregnum outside time and space, he had experienced peace and joy. Now, in the holiday camp, he realizes that for the moment he had ‘stopped wishing, he had stopped wanting, he was nowhere; slowly, by degrees his spirit soared to a state of nothingness, the sheer joy that comes of not being part of the world. For the first time since he was 13, Bruno was happy’ (154). This ‘authentic utopia,’ this ‘strange moment’ of Nirvana remains nothing, however, but an interlude, alien to his ‘separate flesh,’ consumed by sexual desire. The year is 1998 (the year in which Atomised was published), Bruno is 42 (the same age as his author), Michel is 40. This year is the turning point for both brothers and the vantage point from which the interweaving of past and present is narrated. Bruno meets and loses Christiane, who commits suicide after her diagnosis of incurable cancer. Michel meets his childhood love Annabelle again and loses her also to cancer and suicide. At 40, Michel can see no reason for going on with life. He takes leave of absence from his research position in molecular biology. ‘For years, Michel had lived a purely intellectual existence’ (138). He withdraws from the human world that had given him nothing but a ‘series of disappointments, bitterness, and pain’ to find ‘a happiness both serene and intense’ in the study of mathematics (77). The corollary of his retreat from the world is his hatred of nature. Already as a child, the television series ‘The Animal Kingdom’ had left him with ‘the unshakeable conviction . . . that, taken as a whole, nature was not only savage, it was a repulsive cesspit’ (38). His inability to respond to Annabelle’s love brings him to realize that he is cut off from life and emotions: ‘others

The future present  73 would experience happiness and despair, but such things would be unknown to him, they would not touch him.’ ‘He felt separated from the world by a vacuum moulded to his body like a shell, a protective armour’ (99–100). At 14 Bruno also comes to know a comparable sense of alienation, the ‘unearthly’ feeling that he recognizes when he reads The Trial: ‘Kafka’s slow-motion world . . . riddled with shame, where people passed each other in an unearthly void in which no human contact seemed possible, precisely mirrored his own world’ (70). Houellebecq ties the crisis of Western civilization to the whole movement of social and sexual emancipation epitomized by 1968: the triumph of the ideals of the entertainment industry in the 1960s: ‘individual freedom, the supremacy of youth over age and the destruction of Judaeo-Christian values’ (62), followed by divorce by consent and legalized abortion in the 1970s (80). The availability of the contraceptive pill fuels the sexual revolution that goes with the rise of individualism and the destruction of the family, ‘the last unit separating the individual from the market’ (136). By the summer of 1976 it was already apparent to Bruno that everything would end badly in frustrated desire and physical violence, ‘the supreme manifestation of this focus on the individual’ (184). Houellebecq found confirmation of his radical rejection of the ideology and practice of emancipation in the writings of the French sociologist Michel Clouscard (1928–2009), a Marxist close to the Communist Party. In Néofascisme et idéologie du désir [1973] (Clouscard 2008) Clouscard denounced May 1968 as a liberal counterrevolution against the interests of the working classes, the counter-revolution of capitalist consumption against the producers. This libertarian-liberal ‘revolution’ was carried by the creation of a market place of desires, whose effect was to devalue the Protestant work ethic and its reality principle and replace it with the pleasure principle of permissive consumption. What Houellebecq calls the sex-and-shopping society, in which human relations are reduced to market relations of winners and losers, was already the theme of his first novel, Extension de la domaine de lutte (Houellebecq 1994), translated under the title Whatever (Houellebecq 1998a). Clouscard coined the labels ‘bourgeois bohemians’ (bobos) and ‘libertarian liberals’ (lili) for the vanguard of the New Age and the New Left and its Youth Culture, who would become the denizens of the ‘bohemian city’ and its hi-tech clusters. The bourgeois bohemian is defined by leftism in politics and social and cultural values and rightism economically, a combination that was the key to the elitist discourse of liberation that Clouscard sees as originating in Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Beauvoir, a discourse that, lacking as it did a critique of the existing capitalist relations of production, cemented from 1968 on the split between the ‘progressive’ bourgeois intelligentsia and the working classes. Emancipation remained an illusion, masking the extension of the market to the sphere of desire, the sphere of intimate relations, underpinned and augmented by the inescapable power of advertising and its aestheticization of identities and commodities. ‘Creativity’ now promised a seamless integration of work and leisure, individualism and consumption, governed and staged by a ‘capitalism of seduction’ that has dissolved the difference between reality and the phantasmal.

74  The future present Bruno’s compulsive pursuit of pleasure makes him representative of the age and its self-destructive illusions, Michel’s pursuit of knowledge by contrast makes him the precursor of the coming metaphysical mutation. The meeting of the two brothers is placed at the centre of the novel. The subject of their conversation is utopia and dystopia: what is the other of the contemporary market place of vanities? Bruno, fresh from his encounter with Christiane at the Lieu de Changement, hails Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as having already anticipated in 1932 what we are still trying to create. In Huxley’s social world tragedy and extremes of emotion have disappeared. ‘Sexual liberation has come to stay — everything favours instant gratification.’ (187) ‘Everyone says Brave New World is supposed to be a totalitarian nightmare, a vicious indictment of society, but that’s hypocritical bullshit. Brave New World is our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against age, the leisure society’ (187). Michel reminds his brother that Huxley also became a major influence on hippy culture, both through his espousal of psychedelic drugs and through his rewriting of Brave New World in his final book, Island (Huxley 1962). For Michel, Huxley remains trapped like Bruno in the metaphysical revolution that gave rise to materialism and modern science. And here we have come to the point where the relevance of Canetti for Houellebecq becomes apparent: Huxley failed to grasp, says Michel, that individualism is not only, like rationalism, the product of modern science, it is also the enemy of rationalism’s optimism: ‘Huxley’s mistake was in not being able to predict the power struggle between rationalism and individualism — he crucially underestimated the power of the individual faced with his own death.’ ‘Sexual rivalry — genes competing over time — is meaningless in a society in which the link between sex and procreation has been broken. But Huxley forgets about individualism. He doesn’t seem to understand that lust and greed still exist — not as pleasure principles, but as forms of egotism’ (191). Michel’s critique is sharpened by his acute awareness of the blind Darwinian struggle for life in the animal kingdom, magnified in the senseless suffering and destruction caused by wars and revolutions, endlessly renewed by the ‘repulsive egotism’ and ‘violent tendencies’ of males, mirrored in Bruno’s typically masculine view of life as a ‘battle zone, teeming and bestial’ (246). In the age of scientific materialism death has become the ultimate truth of the individual, cast loose from social constraints, family, and religion. Death is the rock on which the brave new worlds of utopia come to grief. The brute fact of mortality, which for Michel, as for Canetti, is the root cause of cruelty and egotism, dooms any attempt to reunite science and religion (192). And just as death stands in the way of the fusion of science and religion, so conversely the inextricable fusion of sex and death defines and determines the dystopian human world of division. Bruno and Huxley belong to the old order. Michel is the bearer of the new paradigm, of the new Law that will bring about the ultimate metaphysical revolution of a world beyond division. As the Prologue announces: Now that the light which surrounds our bodies is palpable Now that we have come at last to our destination

The future present  75 Leaving behind a world of division, The way of thinking which divided us, Immersed in a serene, fertile delight Of a new Law Now, For the first time, We can retrace the end of the old order. (7) The vanishing point of Atomised is the self-transcendence of individuation: the abolition of sex and death, time, change, and imperfection that will reconcile science and religion, biology and Buddhism in the new Law that undoes the Fall, the original sin of sexual division. Houellebecq’s utopian corrective to Huxley is already envisaged, as we have seen, in Canetti’s novel. The original German title, Die Blendung, refers to the self-deception of the figures, blinded by their egotism to the mass, the crowd within. Canetti presents the individual as a fragment of the crowd — a poor solitary devil, a mere drop that unconsciously longs to be reunited with the ocean. This motif is recalled in the disappearance of Michel at the end of Atomised: ‘we now believe that that Michel Djerzinski went into the sea’ (365). Not only do Atomised and Auto da Fe share the same vanishing point — the suicide of the monadic individual, herald of the suicide of Western civilization — Atomised takes over the structuring contrast between two brothers, who are opposites in every respect. The main protagonist in both novels is the utterly asocial man of learning, who is incapable of human contact. Peter Kien is the leading Sinologist of his time, who has devoted his whole life to scholarship in his windowless library — the library-heaven to which he alone possesses the keys. Already as a child, Michel ‘feeds on knowledge’ (34). His refuge is the laboratory, where he is safely isolated from the demands and confusions of the world outside. Both, moreover, are absolutely rigid personalities. Peter the rock prides himself on his unchanging character; Michel, who has not changed since adolescence, ‘firmly believed in the concept of personal identity, some immutable core which defined him’ (75). Each identifies with the force of logical argument. For Peter the scholar, knowledge and truth are identical terms: ‘you draw closer to the truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.’ (Canetti 1965, 18) For Michel the scientist there is no place for Christian notions of grace and redemption or for humanist notions of freedom and compassion. ‘His worldview had grown pitiless and mechanical. Once the parameters for interaction were defined . . . actions took place in an empty, spiritless space; each inexorably determined’ (Houellebecq 2001, 104). Peter Kien escapes from the living present into the past, the realm of all that had once been alive and is now safely dead and hence no longer subject to change. Michel escapes into a vision of a pure, unchanging post-human world to come. Both men are profoundly alienated from the natural world, from the animal kingdom’s endless cycle of lust and greed, the realm of sexual division. Thus Peter dreams of a world without women — ‘Adam forgets, and of One,

76  The future present Two are made. What misery for all time!’ (Canetti 1965, 499) while Michel looks forward to a world without men (196). The greatest insult that Peter can hurl at his brother George is to say: ‘the truth is you’re a woman. You live for sensations. Let yourself go then, chase from one novelty to the next! I stand firm’ (Canetti 1965, 490). Peter, the man of unchanging character, has nothing but scorn for his brother, the actor, the mimetic personality who switches from impersonation to impersonation, surrounded by the admiring audience of his patients in the mental asylum of which he is the director. ‘George had started as a gynaecologist. His youth and good looks brought patients in crowds. . . . He took what fell into his lap and had difficulty in keeping up with his conquests. Surrounded and spoilt by innumerable women, all ready to serve him, he lived like Prince Gautama before he became Buddha’ (447). George’s vocation is to lose himself in the lives of others. His immersion in the mental worlds of his mad patients opens his eyes to the irrepressible power of the crowd, the mass in supposed individuals: ‘for one discovery alone George flattered himself and it was precisely this: the effects of the mass on history in general and on the life of individuals. . . . Countless people go mad because the mass in them is particularly strongly developed and can get no satisfaction’ (462). George has nothing but contempt for his colleagues: ‘of that far deeper and most special motive force of history, the desire of men to rise into a higher type of animal, into the mass, and to lose themselves in it so completely as to forget that one man ever existed, they had no idea. For they were educated men, and education is in itself a cordon sanitaire for the individual against the mass in his own soul’ (461). In Canetti’s novel supposed individuals are driven to madness or suicide by the mass-soul, the ‘crowd in the head.’ As George’s predecessor as director of the asylum puts it, madness is a punishment for egotism. Egotism manifests itself above all in the form of megalomaniac fantasies of power and increase — of money, food, women, books. For Michel egotism expresses the logic of our consumer society, ‘where desire is marshalled and organised and blown up out of all proportion. For society to function, for competition to continue, people have to have more and more until it fills their lives and finally devours them’ (Houellebecq 2001, 92). The ultimate logic of these fantasies of increase appears in Atomised as in Auto da Fe as dreams of crowds and power. Thus David di Meola in Atomised begins to identify with Napoleon in his fantasies of domination: ‘he admired this man who had rained fire and blood upon Europe and killed hundreds of thousands of people without even a fig-leaf of ideology or political conviction’ (250). In sum, the society of warring egos, as Atomised states in the Prologue, is a society lacking ‘love, tenderness and human fellowship’ (3). George Kien acts out the roles of Gautama and Buddha successively. Bruno and Michel personify this antithesis between blindness and enlightenment. As we have seen, despite his strange moment of illumination, Bruno remains on the level of Gautama in his quest for pleasure, in his desire to lose himself in a world of bodies, until, confronted by the shock of Christiane’s cancer, paralysis, and suicide, he takes flight from the ‘universe of death’ and seeks refuge in a mental asylum, where his sexual cravings are numbed and extinguished by a regime of

The future present  77 lithium. Michel follows the path of the Buddha. While he waits at the hospital for Annabelle’s death, his last link to human feeling, he reads a book of Buddhist meditation (340ff.). His sense of separation from human beings and compassion for their suffering reinforce his scientific quest for an alternative to the world of sexual division. Canetti and Houellebecq both radically question the society of individuals, the illusion of individuals as separate entities, as discrete objects in space, illusions protected by the self-deceptions of common sense. Thus in his last reflections and testament Michel muses on our separation in space. ‘Uneducated man . . . is terrified by the idea of space; he imagines it to be vast, dark and yawning. . . . Terrified of the idea of space, human beings turn in on themselves; they feel cold, they feel afraid. At best, they move in space and greet each other sadly when they meet. But this space is within them, it is nothing but their mental creation.’ ‘In this space of which they are so afraid human beings learn how to live and to die; in their mental space, separation, distance and suffering are born.’ Liberated from selfimprisonment, Michel realizes that love binds forever, that separation is another word for evil. ‘All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal’ (362). Michel’s words directly echo the premise of Canetti’s study Crowds and Power, the unconscious longing of the individual to escape from isolation: ‘man petrifies and darkens in the distances he has created. He drags at the burden of them, but cannot move. He forgets that it is self-inflicted, and longs for liberation. But how, alone, can he free himself? . . . Only together can men free themselves from their burdens of distance; and, this, precisely is what happens in a crowd’ (Canetti 1973, 19). The dual reference in Atomised to the ‘elementary particles’ of social theory and of physics allows Houellebecq to reformulate Canetti’s structuring opposition of the individual and the crowd in terms of the alternation of particle and wave in quantum mechanics. ‘Was it possible,’ Michel asks himself, ‘to think of Bruno as an individual?’ Even though he will suffer and die as an individual, his hedonistic worldview and the forces that shaped his consciousness and his desires were common to an entire generation (212). We find the same dual reference to atomized society and to atomic system in Michel’s endorsement of Comte’s insistence on ‘the reality of social structures as opposed to the fiction of individual existence’ (358) — an opposition that Michel compares to the replacement of an ontology of objects with an ontology of states: ‘in the ontology of states, the particles are indiscernible, and can be limited to an observable number. The only entities that can be named in such an ontology are wave functions,’ from which Michel derives his reconception of fraternity, sympathy, and love (358). Michel’s radical re-vision of molecular biology after he leaves his first position in elementary particle research is due to his familiarity with quantum mechanics: ‘biologists acted as though molecules were separate and distinct entities’ (19). Max Planck’s ground breaking paper of 14 December 1900 will be matched by Michel’s ground breaking reflections in the last months of 1999 in Ireland on ‘the very edge of the Western world’ (352). ‘One of the marks of [Michel] Djerzinski’s genius,’ Frederic Hubczejak would write many years later, ‘was his ability to

78  The future present go beyond his first intuition that sexual reproduction necessarily included harmful mutations. For millions of years, human societies had instinctively made the incontrovertible link between sex and death . . . Djerzinski, however, realised that it was necessary to look beyond sexual reproduction to study the general topological conditions of cell division’ (194). Houellebecq’s analogy between social system and atomic system extends to the self-destructive mutation of Western civilization that paves the way for the emergence of a new species ‘beyond individuality’ (371). The disorderly and destructive growth of cancerous cells not only exemplifies the harmful mutations inherent in sexual reproduction, cancer becomes the metaphor of the destructive turn of Western civilization. Thus, although Francesco di Meola, the father of David and one of the prophets and entrepreneurs of California’s New Age, which called ‘for the sweeping away of Western civilisation in its entirety’ (94), is still a handsome man, ‘his cells had begun to reproduce in haphazard fashion.’ The diagnosis is terminal: ‘the cancer was inoperable and he would continue inexorably to develop metastases’ (95). In turn, Michel’s work on the general conditions of mutation is juxtaposed with Annabelle’s cancer of the uterus that forces the abortion of her and Michel’s child and the removal of her sexual organs — a termination that foreshadows Michel’s asexual utopia. The logical conclusion of Michel’s reflections on the edge of the Western world is his own suicide. It is his conscious exit from humanity’s ‘universe of death’ (356). He, the enlightened one, has crossed to the other side: ‘he saw space as a thin line separating two spheres. In the first sphere there was being, then space, and in the second was non-being and the destruction of the individual. Calmly, without a moment’s hesitation, he turned and walked towards the second sphere’ (282). Of the three terms — cancer, crowds, clones — crowds is the key word. The crowd for Canetti is not simply masses of people in one place. It signifies a change of state: to become one with the crowd means liberation from the burden of existence as an individual. In the beginning was the crowd; it is the oldest animal, the genesis we carry within and deny at the price of isolation and suffering, madness and mass murder. As Houellebecq makes clear, the double aspect of the individual as a unique person and as exemplar of a social-historical collectivity calls for a new metaphysics, an ontology of states, which replaces the familiar atomic, billiard-ball model of discrete entities with that of wave functions. The other two terms of my heading, cancer and clones — the DNA of dystopia and utopia respectively — have in common the change of state that replaces the unique with the identical. Comparable to Canetti’s concept of the open crowd — ‘the urge to grow is the first and supreme attribute of the crowd’ (Canetti 1973, 16) — cancer unleashes a dynamic of uncontrolled cellular growth that feeds on healthy cells, evading in the process the naturally programmed death of cells. Cancer thus becomes the appropriate metaphor of the society of self-interest: just as cancer seeks immortality on the cellular level at the expense of the organism, so the egotism of individualism triumphs at the expense the social organism. As the end product of genetic breakdown, cancer is the antithesis of the elimination

The future present  79 of genetic dysfunction through the asexual reproduction of genetically identical individuals (whether cells or organisms) in cloning. Crowds, cancer, and clones may be defined for our purposes as the negation of differentiation and hence of the death of cells, organisms, persons. Crowds, cancer, clones: each presents a version of immortality at the price of individuation. Neither Canetti nor Houellebecq (nor Huxley) is interested, however, in simply reducing humanity and human history to biology, whether genesis with Canetti or genetics with Houellebecq. Biology serves as a metaphor for our fallen state: on the one hand the original sin of Adam that brought death, sexual division, evil, and suffering into the world, on the other the sin of egotism, whose consequences have only become fully apparent in the emancipation of the modern individual from all traditional social bonds and restraints. Between the cancer that consumes the isolated individual and the universal sympathy that binds the human clones together in a ‘magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal’ (Houellebecq 2001, 362) is an empty space, the space of the absence of truly human being that Canetti came to conceive as an endless capacity for self-transformation and Houellebecq laments as the lost kingdom of selfless love. In so far as we can speak of Canetti and Houellebecq’s brave new worlds, the other of the suicide of Western civilization they envisage serves to reinforce the impact of their savage depictions of the modern world of competing individuals. But to the extent that their realism exceeds the satiric intention the distinction between utopia and dystopia loses its purchase and the utopian vanishing point begins to look more and more dystopian, leaving the reader with the question — what is it to be truly human? What would a society be like that was built around ‘love, tenderness, and human fellowship’?

Epilogue: the end of the novel The title of the English translation of Canetti’s novel, approved by the author, highlights the direct connection between Auto da Fe and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Not only do the wanderings of Kien and Fischerle through the ‘world without head’ of the city recall those of Cervantes’s knight and squire, Canetti sets up a reciprocal relationship between the beginning and the end of the two novels. Don Quixote starts with the ‘inquisition’ by the secular and religious authorities, the barber and village priest, in the hero’s library and ‘punishment by fire’ of the books that have unhinged the mind of the noble knight. The novel as genre is born from this ‘massacre of the innocents’ and it dies, Canetti suggests, in the fire that consumes Kien and his library. The time of the novel and the time of its ‘mad subject’ have run out. This is precisely the theme of the Epilogue to Atomised. The novel’s Epilogue, the narrator tells us, belongs to ‘History’ as opposed to the ‘fictional reconstruction’ of the lives of the brothers Bruno and Michel. The fictional reconstruction thus functions as the novel, which is revealed in retrospect as a historical fiction, narrated some eighty years after Michel’s suicide in 1999 and framed by the Prologue and Epilogue of Houellebecq’s science fiction. The gap that separates Atomised from the story it narrates allows Houellebecq to

80  The future present present his novel of the end of the novel as a citation from the past, separated from the Now of History by a ‘fracture’ in time, a ‘fracture’ that mirrors Hartog’s ‘crisis of time.’ And like Hartog’s fracture of time, Houellebecq’s announces a new order of time and historicity, the metaphysical revolution that ushers in a new regime of historicity just as the metaphysical revolutions of the past had separated the time of Christianity from that of paganism, the ‘ancient literature of a Christian age’ from the age of materialism, and now enables us to ‘listen to this story of materialism and its time as an antique story of men.’ Beyond the threshold and horizon of their ‘universe of death’ (356) lies the new paradigm, the new religion that arises from the selfless eros of fraternity. This new religion of con-temporary fraternity that has given us a restored ‘sense of community, of permanence and of the sacred’ (376) will make possible the reconciliation of humanity through the establishment of ‘public opinion on a planetary scale’ (377) and of a future world government. The condition of this fraternal religion is the creation of a ‘new, intelligent species, made by man “in his own likeness” ’ (378). If this is the last word of ‘History,’ it is not the last word of Houellebecq’s meditation on being and time: History exists, it is elemental, it dominates, its rule is inexorable. But outside the strict confines of history, the ultimate ambition of this book is to salute the brave and unfortunate species which created us. This vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes, had such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome, it was capable of extraordinary violence, but nevertheless never quite abandoned a belief in love. This species which, for the first time in history, was able to envisage the possibility of its passing and which, some years later, proved capable of bringing it about. As the last members of the species are extinguished, we think it just to render this last tribute to humanity, a homage which itself will one day disappear, buried beneath the sands of time. It is necessary that this tribute be made, if only once. This book is dedicated to mankind. (379) Houellebecq ends not with the answer but with the question of his Prologue: what would a truly human society be like? The question belongs to the world of the novel but it finds its compelling expression in a novel that has become science fiction. The question of human being finds even more anguished expression in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro 2005). In Ishiguro’s brave new world of clones bred to serve the medical needs of the ‘human’ population, the clones are consumed by the hopeless wish to be recognized as human. Science fiction’s clones and cyborgs are still asking the same ‘post-human’ question as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The only but extremely important difference is that this question has now attained global resonance, as the number of translations of Atomised and of Never Let Me Go clearly testify, over 40 in the case of Houellebecq and over 50 in the case of Ishiguro. The importance of translation was explicitly recognized in the joint award of the Dublin Prize for Literature in 2001 to the author

The future present  81 and the translator into English of Atomised. Ishiguro and Houellebecq are leading instances of the globalizing of contemporary literature (chapter six) and of its contribution to the formation of ‘public opinion on a planetary level’ (chapter eight).

References Broch, Hermann. 1932. The Sleepwalkers. A Trilogy, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir. London: Martin Secker. Canetti, Elias. 1935. Die Blendung. Vienna: Herbert Reichner. Canetti, Elias. 1949. La tour de Babel. Grenoble, Paris: Arthaud. Canetti, Elias. 1965. Auto da Fe, tr. C. V. Wedgwood. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Canetti, Elias. 1973. Crowds and Power, tr. Carol Stewart. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Clouscard, Michel. 2008. Néofascisme et idéologie du désir. Mai 68, la contre-révolution liberale libertaire. Paris: Delga. Houellebecq, Michel. 1994. Extension de la domaine de lutte. Paris: Nadeau. Houellebecq, Michel. 1998a. Whatever, tr. Paul Hammond. London: Serpent’s Tail. Houellebecq, Michel. 1998b. Les particules elémentaires. Paris: Flammarion. Houellebecq, Michel. 2001. Atomised, tr. Frank Wynne. London: Vintage Books. Houellebecq, Michel. 2006. The Possibility of an Island, tr. Gavin Bowd. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Houellebecq, Michel. 2015. Submission, tr. Lorin Stein. London: Heinemann. Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus. Huxley, Aldous. 1962. Island. New York: Harper. Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2005. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber. Jünger, Ernst. 1932. Der Arbeiter. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. Klages, Ludwig. 1988. Vom kosmogonischen Eros. Bonn: Bouvier. Mann, Heinrich. 1931. The Patrioteer, tr. Ernest Boyd. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Mann, Thomas. 1949. Doctor Faustus, tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter. London: Secker and Warburg. Mann, Thomas. 1961. The Magic Mountain, tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter. London: Secker and Warburg. Roberts, David. 2009. ‘Megamachines Ancient and Modern: Ernst Jünger’s Totalitarian Conception of Work,’ Limbus. Australian Yearbook of Literary and Cultural Studies 2, 259–271.

6 The present future From world literatures to global literature

In his essay ‘Money and the Book: Kant and the Crisis of the Enlightenment’ György Markus unfolds the dialectic inherent in the process of the commodification of cultural products: It was commodification that destroyed the network of patronage relations which directly conferred an instrumental functionality upon works of high culture, just thereby made it possible for the Enlightenment to conceive of them as works of high culture: as embodiments of free, autonomous spiritual activities that alone can guide us towards universally valid ends. It was, however, this same commodification that immediately destroyed this illusion of the Enlightenment. (Markus 2011, 644) For Kant this crisis of the Enlightenment was nowhere more evident than in relation to the Enlightenment’s most important and powerful instrument for the exchange and dissemination of ideas: the book (Markus 2011, 359). The alliance between the book and the market, premised on the freedom to write and the freedom to publish and distribute books, provided the driving force of the Enlightenment. This book market produced the public and was reproduced by it, a virtuous circle reproduced in turn by Kant in his answer to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1784): ‘but that a public should enlighten itself is more possible; indeed, this is almost inevitable, if it is left its freedom’ — the freedom, that is, ‘to make public use of one’s freedom’ (Kant 1996, 17). What, however, does the self-enlightening public actually read? It reads, as one of Kant’s disciples lamented, sentimental romances, tales of adventure, gothic novels of ghosts and terrors (Markus 2011, 394). Perhaps there is another answer to the crisis of Kant’s vision of cultural modernity, an answer that lies in the dialectic of the commodification of the book and the commercialization of literature. In his ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,’ published the same year as ‘What is Enlightenment,’ Kant writes in the ninth and final thesis that ‘it is admittedly a strange and at first sight absurd proposition to write an history according to an idea of how world events

The present future  83 must develop if they are to conform to certain rational ends; it would seem that only a novel could result from such a premise’ (Kant 1991, 51–52). Kant’s discomfort at the public’s preference for light entertainment as opposed to serious theoretical works hardly suggests that the novel can come to the aid of the philosophical idea of universal history. This, however, is precisely the counter-thesis of Mariano Siskind. Siskind argues that the novel is the agent and medium of Kant’s cosmopolitan purpose (Siskind 2010). It was the spread of the novel — the modern genre par excellence, the genre of Gesellschaft — from its original centres in Western Europe that realized Marx’s prophetic words in The Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creation of individual nations becomes common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (Marx 1977, 224) To Marx’s prophetic words we should add his dictum that the anatomy of man explains the anatomy of the ape. The developmental process that produces world literature can only be grasped retrospectively. We need a global standpoint to gather the numerous national and local literatures under a universal concept of world literature corresponding to Kant’s idea of a universal history. It is thus Marx who reinstates Kant’s alliance of the market and the book. Marx’s ‘universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose’ is accomplished by the bourgeoisie’s relentless destruction of old local and national seclusions that compels all nations to adopt the bourgeois mode of production on pain of extinction. The cultural complement to the bourgeoisie’s remaking of the world in its own image is to be found in the globalization of the novel, whose cosmopolitan purpose and subject matter resides precisely in the emancipation from the old local and national self-sufficiencies outside of the world-literary market. And it is this accelerating globalization of the novel that has led to the revival of the idea of world literature in the academy over the last thirty years, interpreted by Siskind as ‘an attempt to conceptualize the global ubiquity of the novel since the mid-twentieth century’ (Siskind 2010, 338). This global ubiquity of the novel is not equivalent, however, to Goethe’s notion of world literature, predicated on reciprocal translation as a marker of the universal interdependence of all nations. It involves a different, second-order translation, whose medium the novel subjectifies and objectifies the process of cultural translation. But before we can explore the ramifications of the practice and idea of translation and its centrality to the constitution of national and transnational literatures

84  The present future (Part Two), we must first consider the historical typology of world literatures proposed by Alexander Beecroft. And, mindful of Marx’s dictum on the anatomy of man and ape, we must clarify the silent presupposition of all theories of world literature — the concept of literature itself (Part One). In Part Three I put forward an extended idea of translation that builds on Siskind’s argument on the globalization of the novel. If global literature, as distinct from Goethe’s world literature, is defined by the global ubiquity of the novel, it is because the novel functions as the intellectual reflection and cultural mediation of Kant’s Enlightenment and of Marx’s civilization in the bourgeois image.

World literatures Alexander Beecroft identifies six main literary biomes (literatures and their respective environments) in his Ecology of World Literature from Antiquity to the Present Day (Beechcroft 2014): 1 2 3 4 5 6

The local, based in a city-state (as in Greece or the Chinese city-state, both around 500 BC) A wider cultural unity of city-states — as with the Greeks The cosmopolitan, defined by the use of a single literary language over an extended area and time, as in the Roman, the Han Empire, or the Islamic Caliphate The vernacular, derivatives of the cosmopolitan language e.g. French, Italian, Spanish literatures from Latin The national, vernacular literatures combine with nationalism to produce the most familiar form of literature The global, as an emerging circulation of texts that transcends all borders

The first three of Beecroft’s six biomes belong to agrarian societies, where the political units are typically either smaller than the culture (local literatures of the city-state) or much larger than a culture: empires indifferent to linguistic and cultural boundaries and unified by the language of elites (cosmopolitan literatures). In between is Beecroft’s second category, the literature of a cultural but not political unity (e.g. the Panhellenic). Of these six, I am interested in the cosmopolitan, the national, and the global. I want to situate three epochs of literature — cosmopolitan world literatures, national literatures, and global literature — in their historical and social context: empires and civilizations, the nation-state, and the emerging world society of globalization. The cosmopolitan world literatures are predicated on the command of literacy by administrative and/or priestly elites. The historical civilizations of the world are built on the sacred writings, the classics of poetry, historiography, and philosophy in the world language of the civilization in question: Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek for Hellenic and Byzantine civilization, Latin for the Roman Empire and the Christian Middle Ages (AD 500–1500). In each case the civilization through

The present future  85 its language and corpus of texts exerts a powerful cultural influence beyond the borders of the empire — thus the reception of Chinese culture is defining for Japan and Korea; Sanskrit literary culture for the courts and rulers of South East Asia (Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia) and also for Afghanistan, Tibet, and the Silk Roads of Central Asia; Byzantine Greek radiates into the Slavic world from the Balkans to Russia (Moscow the Third Rome). In The Language of Gods in the World of Man: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Pollock 2006) Sheldon Pollock shows the unifying importance of language and culture, sacred and profane, to the legitimation of power. Culture (the command of literacy) defines status. Thus the clerisy, scholars, the priests, Brahmins, represent together with the warrior class the union of culture and power in the vertical hierarchy of premodern, agrarian societies. The role of culture, that is, of cosmopolitan literature, is in Ernest Gellner’s words ‘to reinforce, underwrite and render visible and authoritative the hierarchical status system of society’ (Gellner 1997, 20). Consider the absolute priority of education in China, where the sole path to power in the Empire lay through the examination system, based exclusively on the study of the Confucian classics and poetry. In Europe vernacular languages developed out of the Latin of the Empire and then of the Church, the universities, and the law. Even after the rise of vernacular and the emergence of national literatures, elite education remains tied to the study of Latin and Greek up to the twentieth century. The study of the classics long predates the study of modern languages, which only established their presence in the university in the late nineteenth century. Modern literary scholars are latecomers in the field. In fact, one could say that they are by-products of the progressive spread of universal education, which made formal education no longer an elite privilege but a precondition of effective participation and mobilization of the work force. Nevertheless, literary scholars are already a fast-vanishing breed: they are no longer needed as the keepers and curators of the national literary culture, which was once central to a modern school and university education. National literatures in Europe grew out of medieval Latin cosmopolitan literature but they are tied to the relatively brief period of the growth and consolidation of national states across Europe starting in the West in the sixteenth century (the Atlantic kingdoms, Portugal, Spain, France, England, the Netherlands), followed by the successors to the Holy Roman Empire — Germany and Italy, with national cultures but no state, followed in turn by Eastern Europe after World War One, and after 1990 by the successor states to the former Soviet Union. Thus Ukraine is at present involved in the difficult struggle to find its own national identity and literary history. Gellner (Gellner 1997) underlines how recent this spread of nationalism is. The Congress of Vienna 1815 was indifferent, indeed rather hostile, to the idea of nationalism or ethnicity. A century later the Versailles treaties after World War I were premised on nationalism as the self-evident principle of legitimacy after the demise of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires, despite the equally evident fact that national/imperial rivalries had precipitated World

86  The present future War One and destroyed the Empires that had gone to war. The outcome of the war and the unleashing of nationalism in the multiethnic societies of Eastern and South Eastern Europe led to ethnic cleansing and genocide in the killing fields of World War Two, and then again in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Nevertheless, although the post-1945 world stands under the sign of an accelerating globalization, it is still governed by the politically organizing principle of the nation-state. National literatures are one of the cultural creations and institutions of the nation-state. Literature in the modern national, as opposed to the pre-modern cosmopolitan understanding, no longer denotes the corpus of classical texts (sacred, lyric, epic or dramatic poetry, historiography, philosophy) but is confined to literary texts, just as the visual arts were separated from the whole field of artisanal craftsmanship to become ‘fine arts.’ The inherited prestige of the classical poetic genres was increasingly contested by the new genres of modernity, the genres of Gesellschaft as opposed to Gemeinschaft, above all by the novel, more generally by fiction at the expense of poetry and drama. The late seventeenth century querelle des anciens et des modernes was decided over the course of the eighteenth century in favour of the moderns and the new bourgeois spirit that divided into the rival world views of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, which remained central to an understanding of the culture of European Modernism from the French Revolution to World War One (chapter one). The outcome of the querelle confirmed the displacement of normative-classicizing standards of judgment by historical standards. The idea of national literatures is tied to the turn to history as the key to national-cultural identity. National literature is thus from the first a literary-historical project that draws on recovery and appropriation of the vernacular heritage from folk tales, fairy tales, ballads to medieval epics and chivalric romances as part of the scientific construction of national history. The Enlightenment understanding of history as a meaningful process of change and development set in train the historicization of the world’s civilizations, cultures, empires, and states (as the complement and corollary of the European voyages of discovery, trade, and colonization). The cultural institutions of the nationstate can be thought of as expositions of the historical-scientific-interpretative appropriation of the world, from the national past to the civilizations of Asia and the ‘primitive’ cultures of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. The organizing principle of the museum in all its different forms: fine arts, natural history, anthropology and ethnology, historical cultures, science and technology, resided in the exhibition of their respective contents as an unfolding development through time (chapter seven). From the second half of the eighteenth century art museums assumed the role of ‘guardians of national art heritage and colonial collections.’ As custodians of permanent collections museums demonstrated the selection, classification, and canonization of artistic production. And this was precisely the ordering function of literary history, first in the form of general survey and overview (cf. A W Schlegel’s lectures around 1800 on dramatic poetry that covered the ancients and the moderns), and second in the nineteenth century through the writing in parallel of national histories and national literary histories. East of the

The present future  87 Rhine cultural identity preceded and empowered the quest for national awakening. In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson attributes the emergence of national identities to print and fiction (Anderson 2016). The great age of literary history and of the museum was the long nineteenth century from the French Revolution to World War One. The parallel functions of the museum and literary history suggest that the transformation of the role of museums after ‘the end of art history’ (chapter seven) can help us to understand the end of national literary history and the transformation of the idea of world literature into the global contemporary. The Enlightenment idea of world history and world literature found its practical application, as indicated, in the cultural institutions of the nation-state, epitomized by the museum, and their function in the hermeneutic and scientific appropriation of the historical cultures and civilizations of the world. This ingathering of the world amounted to a collective act of translation with its dialectic of decontextualizing the Other and re-conceptualizing it within the developmental stages of world history. That is to say, this process of universalization involved an ongoing historicizing decontextualization, necessary to arrive at the master concepts of History, Art, Literature, etc. This is the decontextualization effected by the museum. Decontextualization goes together, however, with re-contextualization and this is one way of thinking of translation as the master metaphor for the de- and re-contextualization of texts (in fact the word ‘translation’ is the Latin translation of the Greek word ‘metaphor’) to form literature in the modern sense. Applied to world literatures, this act of cultural abstraction and appropriation under the universalizing concept of literature underpins Beecroft’s six literary-historical biomes. Like the modern concept of history, the modern concept of literature is born of its own self-division into distinct regimes of historicity. The traditional and the modern are separated by a crisis of time that divides the literatures of the past, oriented to the priority and authority of tradition (Beecroft’s first four biomes), from a literature oriented to the future, a literature that no longer recognizes or respects the traditional stratification of high and low genres, noble and popular speech, a literature that will progressively marginalize poetry in favour of prose, until fiction becomes the all-encompassing genre of modern society. It is this universalizing concept of literature that made it possible to create retrospectively national literary histories that reach from barbarian origins to modern civilization and to posit at the same time the idea of a European world literature from the ancients to the moderns as the complement of the singularizing concept of the nation and its culture based on a national language. World literature was thus brought into being with the constitution of national literary histories and reactivated in response to the perceived exhaustion of the national paradigm of literature, coincident with the transformation of the Eurocentric idea of world literature into the new global paradigm of world literature, paralleled in turn by the transformation of world history into global history. And just as world literature rises and falls with the national, so comparably the rise and fall of the idea of national literature is tied to the potent instrument of civilizing cultural transfer — translation.

88  The present future

The national and the transnational The nationalization of language, literature and culture in the age of nationalism appealed to the self-evidence of linguistic originality as well as the inescapable plurality of ‘national’ languages. The study of national languages and literatures in the university emerged chastened but unchallenged from the twentieth century’s apocalypse of nationalism. The postwar challenge to the humanities came from outside, driven by the demand for the rapid expansion of the university education in the 1960s. The demise of the University of Culture, based on the German model of Bildung, directly correlates with the accelerating globalization of the contemporary University of Excellence. Bill Readings argues that the integrity of the modern university is closely linked to the rise and decline of the nationstate, which it served by promoting and protecting the idea of a national culture. Now that national culture no longer needs promoting, universities are turning into transnational corporations, in which the idea of culture has given way to the bureaucratically-driven discourse of excellence (Readings 1996). Although literary scholars sense more or less acutely the exhaustion of the national paradigm as a basis for teaching and research, they have not perhaps fully grasped the blindness inherent in the nationalization of literary studies. It is a blindness that belongs to the institution and not to the object of study: writers and readers in English, French, Spanish, or Italian. Pascale Casanova dates the demise of the international republic of letters to Herder (Casanova 2007), in the forefront of the historicist revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that transformed our thinking about society and culture into a new nationalhistorical awareness, in which the archive of literary works was now conceived as offering an exemplary body of social and cultural documentation for the period and society in question. The Romantics’ cultivation of the native culture in no way excluded an interest in the foreign. On the contrary, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented opening to foreign cultures and civilizations in the form of translations and scientific study. And yet, even though comparative literature embodied the bad conscience of the national paradigm, translation remains the blind spot of the study of literature in its nationally institutionalized forms. The ideology of linguistic originality together with the expressive understanding of literature and culture as an inner, authentic essence combined to devalue the very concept of translation and with it the transnational, occluding the hybrid nature of ‘national’ identity. And yet, who could deny the fundamental importance of the transnational, evident in the central role that translation has played in the formation of national languages; the prime example for Europe must be translations of the Bible. The transnational involves, however, more than translation between languages. When we speak of English national literatures, we are already cutting ourselves off from literature in the United Kingdom and from literature in English. Thus, if we confine ourselves to the national, we cannot speak of literature in the British Isles, which includes literature in Welsh, Irish, and Gaelic.

The present future  89 If, on the other hand, we speak of literature in English, it is difficult to resist Bruce Clunies Ross’s argument that contemporary poetry in English belongs to a ‘language which exists as a cluster of variants, just as it was in the Middle Ages, but its range now extends beyond linguistic variations in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England to include affiliations with the postcolonial world and the United States as well as interactions with non-European languages.’ In its latest evolution as a world language, English is now to be understood as an extended range of variants comprising a single language, in which the vitality of writing in English derives not from a centre but from a globally devolved network of dispersed influences. In other words, the centre-periphery model, frequently used to frame postcolonial literature, fails to register ‘the polycentric devolution of the English domain.’ Although the British empire and present American hegemony go far to explain the global spread of English, they cannot explain the diverse developments of the English language or of poetry in English in the second half of the twentieth century (Ross 2004, 293–296). Writing of literature in India, Francesco Orsini distinguishes between the regional, the national, and the international, with their respective readers, publishers, journals, and public spheres (Orsini 2004). The regional encompasses writing in regional languages, the national refers to literature in English, and the international to literature in English that becomes part of global culture. Orsini takes exception to critics such as Casanova who stress the inequalities of globalizing literary practice over the last two hundred years. For all Casanova’s homage to the world republic of letters, she still operates within the national paradigm, in which only the most powerful cities (Paris and London) can bestow international recognition on writers from the periphery. Orsini prefers the interactive model of the two-way traffic of appropriation to the centre-periphery model. But when Orsini regrets that the planetary flows of media and migration exclude the regional literatures of India, he too retreats to the defensive posture of the periphery. If the local may be defined as that which resists translation, this in no way excludes a perspective that transcends the local. That is to say, regional, national, and international constitute different but not necessarily exclusive frames of reference. It is just as important to approach the global in terms of its national or regional appropriation — or rejection — as the national from a global perspective. That is, complex processes of cultural appropriation or rejection both presuppose and precede intralingual translation. Histories of literature have never really transcended the age of nationalism of which they were not only the products but equally culturally formative influences. They possess as their enabling and disabling birthright an imputed subject and a selective vision, in which a narrative teleology is allied to a centralizing perspective. The institutionalization of the study of literature in segregated departments was thus necessarily blind, for without this blindness how could a national corpus of works in English in the United Kingdom, in French in France, and so on be determined? A national literature stands and falls with its exclusionary boundaries, just as a colonial literature presupposes an imperial

90  The present future centre. And just as a colonial literature only becomes post-colonial through the deconstruction of the asymmetry of centre and periphery, and a national literature only becomes post-national through a deconstruction of its foundational assumptions, so a post-national literature can only become transnational by deconstructing the linguistic asymmetry of original and copy. Only then are we in a position to arrive at a concept of literature defined not in terms of national exclusion but of transnational inclusion, that is, a concept with the same global reach as painting or music. Departments of the visual arts or of music are as common as departments of literature are uncommon. For very obvious reasons, it will be objected. Even if we abandon the national raison d’être of departments of German, French, Italian literature, we cannot simply jettison the premise of linguistic originality, which is ignored but seldom queried by cultural or communication studies. There is no such thing as ‘language’ corresponding to ‘literature,’ other than as an empty generic signifier. What might Goethe have meant when he baptized the idea of (a coming) world literature at the very time that the modern idea of national literatures was establishing itself? The connection between national and world literature is clearly to the fore in Goethe’s anticipation in 1827 of a universal world literature in his discussion of the French reception of his recently translated Torquato Tasso: ‘I, for my part, would like to draw the attention of my friends to the fact that I am convinced a universal world literature is in the process of being constituted, in which an honourable role is reserved for us Germans. All nations are paying attention to us, they praise, censure, adopt or dismiss, imitate and disfigure, understand or misunderstand us, open or close their hearts: we must receive this all with equanimity, since the whole is of great value to us’ (Goethe 1986, 225). It is appropriate that Goethe sent a copy of his journal Ueber Kunst und Altertum, in which his thoughts on world literature appeared, to his English translator Thomas Carlyle, whose translation of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre had been published in 1824. In his accompanying letter to Carlyle, Goethe compares various forms of cultural translation to the exchange of currencies. The task of the translator is to act as mediator of this general intellectual trade, increasing mutual awareness by advancing mutual exchange. The translator as mediator thus plays the indispensable, if usually invisible, role in the coming into being of world literature. This invisibility corresponds to the denial of citizen rights to literature in translation in the national paradigm. We thus arrive at the concept of world literature by a process of exclusion, to be diagnosed as a persistent, inherited dissociation of the national from the world republic of letters. In turn, if we follow David Damrosch, we arrive at a definition of world literature in a similar exclusionary fashion: world literature is not a corpus of works, the imaginary sum of all national literatures, but rather a function of relations. It is, as it were, the relationality, the translatability inscribed into the act of translation. But before addressing the complexities of translation, of which intralingual translation is only a part, we must look at Damrosch’s definition of world literature. In the Introduction to What is World

The present future  91 Literature? Damrosch writes that world literature refers to ‘all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translations or in their original language.’ As a concept, world literature therefore signifies ‘not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material’ (Damrosch 2003, 4–5). In his Conclusion he proposes three defining characteristics: world literature is an elliptical refraction of national literatures; world literature is writing that gains in translation; world literature is not a canon of texts but a mode of reading, a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own time and place (Damrosch 2003, 281). The elliptical space of which he speaks is generated by the twin focuses of source and host cultures. The act of translation that produces the elliptical space encompasses, as Damrosch states in his Introduction, all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, in translation or in their original language. His second point is therefore the crucial one, which he elucidates as follows: ‘literary language is thus language that either gains or loses in translation, in contrast to non-literary language, which typically does neither.’ In the context of national literatures translation typically appears as loss, whereas in the context of world literature translation necessarily appears as gain in the sense that it is the means by which texts transcend their culture of origin (Damrosch 2003, 289). The ‘translational’ mode of reading thus generates the ‘great conversation of world literature’ in the minds of writers and readers, a mode of reading described as one of detached engagement. If we are to understand world literature as a function of translation, we cannot appeal, as Damrosch rightly insists, to Schleiermacher’s or Gadamer’s hermeneutic fusion of horizons. The translational mode involves rather a mutual estrangement of horizons, the enriching differential tension of the distant and the near, inherent in the two-way traffic of translation. World literature may therefore be conceived as the reciprocal of translation/ translatability, and if we are to avoid a circular definition of world literature, translation becomes the concept that demands definition, or rather unfolding, because we are dealing with a term whose semantic complexity exceeds its theorization. The following, by no means exhaustive list of meanings conveys something of the polysemy of the word, built around the root meaning of removing to another place: ‘to remove to heaven; to enrapture; to render into another language; to express in another artistic medium; to interpret; to transfer from one office to another (bishop); to transform; to renovate; to make new from old’ (Chambers Dictionary). Translation is the act common to paraphrase and parody on the one hand and to transcription, metamorphosis, transfiguration, and transubstantiation on the other. It embraces restatement, interpretation, and transformation, the three dimensions of intralingual translation, which are as much a cultural as a linguistic phenomenon. Mary Snell-Hornby thus understands intralingual translation as an interaction between two cultures (Snell-Hornby 1988). It is not by chance that translation forms the blind spot of a ‘national’ literature: it represents a differential conception of identity incompatible with all

92  The present future essentializing constructs of the nation. Lacking birthright and authenticity, literature in translation had the deficient status of hybridity, which ex negativo defined the self-understanding of comparative literature as the ‘international’ complement of the ‘national’ and tied its fortunes to the decline and demise of the nationalization of literary studies. I stress this exclusion of translation — against all historical evidence — in order to foreground the fatal equation of a national and a nationalized literature. The founding condition of the national is the transnational: the national emerges from the dialectic of self and other, starting with the translation and transmission of the sacred sources of cultural values. Precisely because the founding condition of the national is the transnational (and not an original, native corpus of texts as in historicism’s organic conception of culture), we may say that adopting the perspective of world literature changes everything and nothing, because it does not signify the identification of another canon or corpus of texts but rather another mode of reading applicable to ‘all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translations or in their original language.’ In this sense all reading and writing is comparative, just as all cultures and civilizations live from the ongoing process of transmission and translation. The transcendence of the local through translation plays a particularly important and recognized role for so called minor literatures with only a few readers or for writers who are cut off from readers through censorship. Everything and nothing changes in the light of world literature, as can be neatly illustrated in terms of the coexistence of capital and metropolis. The one functions as the political and cultural centre of a wider territory and acts as the regulator of the social hierarchy and as the custodian of the common heritage of a territorially defined population. As metropolis, the capital city functions neither as the centre of power nor as the source of identity but as the cosmopolitan site of multiple networks of exchange and heterogeneity: it is the place where migrants find their ‘natural’ destination (Querrien 2004). The diasporic migrant, the medium par excellence of cosmopolitan translation, finds his place in the interface and interference between identity and difference, capital and metropolis. As the centre of a national literature, the capital assimilates cultural interactions in terms of centre-periphery. As the locus of a globalizing world literature, the metropolis replaces the capital’s central perspective with a cosmo-centrism, articulated through networks of circulation. This coexistence of capital and metropolis is not new, it is in fact as old as Babel, but it has acquired a heightened significance as the mirror of the often-explosive struggles for national identity under the pressure of accelerating globalization. To interpret this struggle for identity as a clash of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington does, is a dangerously essentializing mistranslation of the inherent conflicts of identity within cultures and civilizations (Roberts 2003). Babel should serve, not as the parable of a lost original language, but as the mene tekel of all hubristic conceptions of identity as well as of their melancholy converse: the decadence theories of culture, in which the fall from plenitude manifests itself in the gulf between a lost original language of presence and its

The present future  93 evermore imperfect and distant translations. (This belief in the power of the original, not lost but betrayed, drives the religious fundamentalisms of today.) This phantasm of unity and homogeneity inhabits the normative distinction between original and copy and the hegemonic distinction between centre and periphery. Pluralism is admitted only in the asymmetrical form of derivation from a determining origin that denies reciprocity as the defining term of translation. Hence the tautology, as Derrida has demonstrated, of the definition of the nation by the appeal to the origin, entailing ‘a recourse, a re-source, a circular return to the source,’ that silently excludes the indispensable supplement of translation as the means to the simultaneous assumption and creation of the national status of a language and culture (Derrida 1992). Moreover, once we accept with Derrida the inescapable indeterminacy inherent in all acts of translation, then all asymmetrical constructions of the primacy of centre or origin are called into question. In this spirit Edouard Glissant proposes a poétique de la relation that replaces the centre-periphery model by the geopoetics of a world-system, composed of multiple interlocking worlds of linguistic singularities (Glissant 1990).

The globalization of the novel For all their advocacy of world literature, neither Casanova nor Franco Moretti truly grasps that translation deconstructs all unilateral constructions of global modernization. Although they set out to discover the lost transnational dimension of literature by reversing the blindness of the national to the transnational, they do not take the decisive step. Casanova’s extrapolation of Bourdieu’s literary field to the world republic of letters is still polarized between the unequal forces of centre and periphery. In her account Paris, at least until the 1960s, functioned as the capital of the world republic of letters and thus as the source of the accumulation of literary capital. Inherent in Casanova’s understanding of (the) literary capital is an unquestioned conception of contemporaneity as the moving index of what literary Paris declares to be avant-garde. This reduction of the transnational to Franco-centrism (that itself internalizes the reduction of the national to the capital) is quite incapable of arriving at an adequate model of world-literary space and time as the product of the traffic of translation across languages and cultures, national and political borders. Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ are likewise vitiated by the assumption of asymmetrical power relations, for which his model is not Bourdieu’s field of forces but Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory. Moretti derives his conjectural ‘law of literary evolution’ from a world-system that is one and unequal. Applied to the novel in peripheral cultures in and beyond Europe, the novel appears as the site of a compromise between Western formal influences and local contents. He concludes that the study of world literature inevitably involves the study of the struggles for symbolic hegemony across the world (Moretti 2004). The treatment of world literature primarily in terms of power relations is seriously flawed. It rests on a one-sided construction of the cultural and commercial relations that make up

94  The present future world history over both the long term and the shorter term of Western ascendancy during the last two centuries. William McNeill’s misleadingly entitled Rise of the West (intended as a counter to Spengler’s Decline of the West) convincingly demonstrates the existence of a world civilization, cemented by the continuous exchange of objects, technologies and ideas across Eurasia reaching as far back as recorded history (McNeill 1991). C A Bayly’s account of world history since the eighteenth century is an excellent antidote to the myopia of Eurocentrism and the model for Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Bayly 2004; Osterhammel 2014). S N Eisenstadt has developed a persuasive account of modernization engendering the emergence of multiple modernities as it has spread from its initial north European core to central Europe, North America, Russia, South America, and beyond. In place of Casanova’s or Moretti’s hegemonic perspective, Eisenstadt takes as his dynamic of modernization the endemic and irreducible conflict between totalizing and pluralizing visions of the world as the key to European identity and to the multiple modernities of world societies (Eisenstadt 2017). Global diversity does not disappear with globalization. On the contrary, premodern cultures, whether popular or elite, continue to exist, either through continuing popular support or through state subsidization of ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ cultural identities or even through tourism. Not only can and does the premodern coexist with the modern, the multiple modern cultures of the globalized world retain their unmistakable individualities in a constantly shifting balance between the native and the foreign. We must be careful therefore not to equate cultural modernization with Westernization or Americanization. Nor conversely should we confuse protection of the indigenous with modern national, racial, or religious fundamentalisms. Anti-modernism is an eminently modern attitude. Against all fundamentalisms it is essential to stress the centrality of translation, understood as a cultural phenomenon, to the interpenetration of the global and the local throughout history, an interpenetration that has progressively accelerated over recent centuries and taken on a new dimension, thanks inter alia to the revolution in communications in our lifetime. Roland Robertson’s outline of the successive phases of globalization since the fifteenth century helps us to understand this new dimension. He distinguishes between a germinal phase (1400–1750), an incipient phase (1750–1870), a take-off phase (1870–1920s), the struggle for hegemony (1920s–1960s), giving way to what he calls the present phase of uncertainty. The third and fourth stages from 1870 to the 1960s were governed by competition and warfare between rival national imperialisms, bringing about an ever-greater consciousness of the world as one in space and time and leading to the present problematization of cultural and civilizational identities, in which the ‘localization of globalization’ (‘glocalization’) renders all distinctions between the local and the global increasingly complex and problematic (Robertson 1990). Vytaulas Kavolis describes the consequences of these ongoing processes of the self-reconstruction of identity: ‘boundaries are blurred, contents interpenetrate, even central meanings become subject to contestations both within and outside of

The present future  95 particular civilizational-traditions-in-transformation, alien genres suggest themselves for uncovering native experiences. Bicivilizational, multiethnic identities or identity diffractions arise, either functioning imaginatively as workshops in critical translation or dissolving into the waste products of “cosmopolitan” consumerism.’ (cited Buell 1994, 295). Workshops in critical translation — what better description could we have of the contribution that literature can make to an understanding of globalization? On the basis of Beecroft’s typology we can distinguish between three historical stages in the development of the idea of world literature. First, world literature in the plural: the cosmopolitan literatures that form the unifying canon of (sacred) texts of the great historical civilizations (GreekHellenic, Chinese, Roman, Indian, East and Western Christian, Islamic). Priestly and bureaucratic elites are the bearers of the culture and its unifying language, separate from that of the mass of the population. Second, world literature in the singular: the product of the Enlightenment’s investigation and consciousness of the world’s literatures in the plural. It is a comparative, composite concept that is open to different readings. It can mean a) the corpus or the canon of the literatures of the past b) active interchange in the present, as with Goethe, with the literatures of other nations through translation c) the coming into being of a world literature, as with Marx, beyond the boundaries of local and national literatures. Third, world literature as global literature: it signifies a new, post-Eurocentric stage of world literature in tandem with the accelerating process of economic and cultural globalization over the past half century. Although Casanova’s terminus of 1960 for Paris as the capital of the world republic of letters (1800–1960) could be extended to the present for London and New York in terms of the rise of English as a world language, nevertheless, 1960 does signal the end of a European-centred world literature and correspondingly of a new stage of world literature as global. If ‘world literature’ and its correlate ‘world history’ are conceptual creations of cultural modernity, centred in Western Europe, ‘global literature’ and its correlate ‘global history’ (Mazlish 2004) correspond to the emergence after 1945 of a global system of ‘united nations,’ which has now grown to include some 140 new nation-states. Sebastian Conrad understands the new discipline of global history as a critique of all ‘container-based paradigms’ that seek to explain change internally (Conrad 2016). Thus John W Meyer and John Boli analyze the establishment of new nation-states as the result of the transfer — translation in the widest sense — of external, highly rationalized models of state construction (constitution, citizenship, administration, business regulation, legal systems, etc.), grounded in scientific and technological knowledge (Meyer and Boli 1997). There is one important proviso, however, to this process of the post-colonial transplantation of external models of nation-state building. A ‘national’ literature cannot be imported, even if there is a pre-existing canon of texts that can be retrospectively ‘nationalized.’ The creation of new ‘national’ literatures involves a different process of cultural translation that has found its paradigmatic form in the novel and

96  The present future a fortiori in the globalization of the novel. This above all has set in train a literary process of translation in both the direct and extended sense that unites Goethe’s sense of active literary and cultural exchange and Marx’s faith in the irresistible creative-destructive force of the world market to bring a global world literature into being. And this brings us back to Siskind’s argument that the global dimension of the novel has remained obscured due to the focus on the national parameters of the rise of the novel in parallel with the rise of the bourgeoisie and consolidation of the national state. The index of the global dimension of the novel can be read off from its ever-widening reception. It allows Siskind to rephrase Kant’s juxtaposition of philosophical history and novelistic narrative: ‘if philosophy conceptualized the transformation of the globe as the realization of the totality of bourgeois freedom (Kant, Hegel, Marx), the novel provided this philosophical concept with a visual reality, a set of images and imaginaries that elevated the fiction of bourgeois ubiquity to a foundational myth of modernity’ (Siskind 2010, 337). Siskind exemplifies his argument by reference to the elites of Latin America — ‘a Creole class torn by the contradiction between its cultural and economic attachment to Europe and its desire for political autonomy.’ ‘Latin American intellectuals immediately realized the important role that the consumption, production and translation of novels could play in the process of socio-cultural modernization’ (Siskind 2010, 339). This progressive universalization of the novel-form reflected the increasingly hegemonic reach of bourgeois culture, that is, the attractive force of cultural modernity’s emancipatory promise. Siskind can thus argue that the active process of reception of the novel-form — the act of translation in the wider sense — forbids dismissing the universalization of the novel simply as a function of colonialism. The ‘global expansion of modern institutions presupposes the universal realization of a political and cultural modernity.’ In this sense it is a universal desire that is represented in the universal form of the novel (342). If we accept Siskind’s insistence on the ‘active agency’ driving reception, it follows that the globalization of the novel cannot be reduced to the cultural subordination of the periphery to the centre: ‘that is why I mention notions of “importation”, “translation”, and “adaptation”, instead of thinking only in terms of “imitation”, “implantation”, or “imposition” ’ (342). Let me step back from Siskind in order to generalize the idea of translation. Translation, understood as the process of importation, translation, and adaptation of external cultural models, signifies the active agency at work in the formation, consolidation, and dissemination of all six stages of Beecroft’s typology of world literatures. In relation to Beecroft’s last two (bourgeois) stages of national and global literature, translation reaches a new level of self-reflexivity in particular in the novel as the form that simultaneously objectifies the process and subjectivizes the dialectic of modernization. Seen in this light, the novel is the complement and converse of the other great institution of cultural modernity — the museum. The museum translates the colonial periphery to the core, the novel translates the core to the colonial periphery. Beyond that, however, the museum is oriented to the

The present future  97 past in the form of the historical time-differential at the heart of the historicist selfknowledge of cultural modernity, which culminates in Hegel’s world history that consigned the gods and civilizations of the past to the museum to be resurrected as art in the higher actuality of remembrance. As the index of global modernization, the novel is oriented to the future. Here the synchrony of the non-synchronous produces the space/time-differential of self-knowledge in the periphery, to be played out in terms of the contradictions between the local and the global, receptivity and resistance. The novel form is thus the vehicle and bearer of the globalization of cultural modernity with a Kantian ‘cosmopolitan purpose.’ It acts as the medium of cultural translation that precedes, anticipates, and prepares for the economic and political transformation to come — or not — through incorporation into the capitalist world market. The agent of this cultural translation is the intelligentsia: the ‘enlightened’ protobourgeois fraction of the local ruling elites. They act as the vanguard, more usually as the substitute for an absent bourgeoisie. In their precarious position between future emancipation and present impotence and between externally driven change and its internal management, they are the ‘creoles’ of the local ‘creole’ elites (to generalize Suskind’s Latin American example). The self-reflexivity of the novel as medium and agent of cultural translation cannot be fully grasped until we recognize that the form and the content of the novel itself re-present the process in and for itself of cultural modernization, because both as form and as content the novel is brought into being as the genre of a world that has been set in motion. The protean, endlessly open and adaptable form of the novel has proved equal to the challenge of representing societies in the process of self-transformation (and of course caught, blocked, even destroyed by the attendant struggles). As regards content, the novel is the story of the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of a self-transforming subject in search of a world — the problematic individual of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, whose fate, as Hegel observed, is to conform to the prose of reality. The subject in search of a world (whose prototype is Don Quixote) — this, in the most general sense, is the content of the novel in all its endless variations. The novel as medium, agent, form, and content of cultural translation is thus predestined to precede, anticipate, accompany, and critique the dialectics of emancipation of a world set in motion by the irresistible forces of capitalist expansion. The novel-form as the modern genre, the genre of Gesellschaft, is itself the metaphor of translation, that is, of the whole process of the decontextualization and recontextualization that it shares with the museum. It makes world literature the cultural complement to world history, and now global history. The dynamic of cultural translation inherent in the globalization of the novel must be understood, as Siskind rightly insists, as a two-way process of actualizing adaptation, oriented to the present and future, which in creating new ‘national’ literatures gives rise to the plurality of literary worlds that make up global literature (see for Japan Myoski 1974; Shiranu and Suzuki 2002; and for China Tong 2011). The endpoint of the globalizing process would be the synchrony of a global literary system,

98  The present future co-extensive with the global market. At present we can point to the example of the open-border digital cosmopolitanism of Netflix, already operating in real time across the globe. The company has 139 million subscribers. It is present in 190 countries and its aim is not to sell the USA to the world but the world to itself. Netflix has discovered that many subscribers want to watch TV shows and films from other countries. Thus it commissions productions from all of its markets to the tune of $12 billion in 2018 and $15 billion in 2019. ‘Each new title carries subtitles in 26 languages, and the company is creating high-quality, properly lip-synced audio dubbing in 10 languages.’ Dystopian thrillers travel particularly well. The German thriller Dark (2017) made it into the Top 10 in 136 countries with 90% of the audience coming from outside Germany (Manjoo 2019). At the heart of the cosmopolitanism of Netflix is the practice of cultural translation. Gerard Delanty has perhaps captured best the centrality of translation to the globalization of modernity. Indeed with Delanty we can speak of the reciprocity, even identity, of cultural translation and cultural modernity: If cosmopolitanism entails the capacity to view oneself from the eyes of the other, then cultural translation might be the medium in which one views one’s own culture as foreign. This is a medium which is in particular a feature of modernity. While the capacity for translation has always existed, at least since the advent of writing, it is only with modernity that translation, or translatability, has itself become the dominant cultural form. . . . Modernity should thus be defined neither in the singular nor in the plural as such; it is a condition that arises as a result of universal translatability and expresses itself in the belief that every culture can translate itself and others. Modernity is specifically defined by a mode of cultural translation in which culture is itself a mode of translation. Modernity might be seen as a condition in which the form of culture is one of translation. The encounter of self and others, local with global, past and present takes multiple forms, determined largely by the forms of cultural translation influenced by civilizational patterns and historical interactions and conflicts. Globalization — as a process that intensifies connections, enhances possibilities for cultural translations and deepens the consciousness of globality — is the principal motor of modernity. (Delanty 2006, 54)

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The present future  99 Casanova, Pascale. 2007. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Conrad, Sebastian. 2016. What is Global History? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Delanty, Gerard. 2006. ‘Civilizational Constellations and European Modernity Reconsidered,’ in Europe and Asia Beyond East and West, ed. Gerard Delanty. London: Routledge, 45–60. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. ‘Onto-theology of National Humanism,’ Oxford Literary Studies 14:1–2, 3–23. Eisenstadt, Schmuel (ed.) 2017. Multiple Modernities. London: Routledge. Gellner, Ernst. 1997. Nationalism. New York: New York University Press. Glissant, Edouard. 1990. Poétique de la relation. Paris: Gallimard. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1986. Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Geary. Goethe Collected Works 3. New York: Suhrkamp. Kant, Immanuel. 1991. Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manjoo, Farhad. 2019. ‘Netflix is the Most Intoxicating Portal to Planet Earth,’ New York Times, 22 February. Markus, György. 2011. Culture, Science, Society. The Constitution of Cultural Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Marx, Karl. 1977. Marx. Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mazlish, Bruce. 2004. The Global History Reader. London: Routledge. McNeill, William. 1991. The Rise of the West (1963). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, with a retrospective essay. Meyer, John and John Boli. 1997. ‘World Society and the Nation-State,’ American Journal of Sociology 103:1, 144–181. Moretti, Franco. 2004. ‘Conjectures on World Literature,’ in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 148–162. Myoshi, Maseo. 1974. Accomplices of Silence. The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Orsini, Francesco. 2004. ‘India in the Mirror of World Fiction,’ in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 319–334. Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2014. The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of God in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Querrien, Ann. 2004. ‘The Metropolis and the Capital,’ Zone, 1–2 (1986), cited in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 20. Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roberts, David. 2003. ‘From Modernization to Multiple Modernities. Rethinking the Clash of Civilizations,’ in Eskalationen. Die Gewalt von Kultur, Recht und Politik, ed. Klaus Scherpe and Thomas Weitlin. Tuebingen: Francke, 195–210. Robertson, Roland. 1990. ‘Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as a Central Concept,’ Theory, Culture and Society 7:2–3, 15–30. Ross, Bruce Clunies. 2004. ‘Rhythmical Knots: The World of English Poetry,’ in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast. London: Verso, 291–318. Shirano, Haruo. 2002. Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, ed. Haruo Shirano and Tom Suzuki. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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7 The present for the present The museum of contemporary art

The aesthetic regime of art The distinction between modern and contemporary art emerged as an attempt to circumvent the paradoxes built into ‘the modern’ as an art-historical term. ‘Contemporary’ long meant the most recent modern art works, where ‘modern’ implied the very spirit of the new age. But, as Albert Kostenevich asks in the Introduction to the exhibition catalogue Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage, how is it that we are still using the term modern art in the twenty-first century to refer to the same impressionist paintings discussed by Joris-Karl Huysmans in his L’Art Moderne of 1883 (Kostenevich 2018, 21)? Once the idea of modern art becomes frozen in time we are left with the conundrum: how can there be an art more modern than modern? Or to rephrase the question: when did the modern cease to be modern and the distinction between modern and contemporary art come to mean the end of modern art? And what does the end of modern art signify for the holy trinity of modernism: the aesthetic regime of art, art history, the art-historical museum? These are the questions that will be explored in the present chapter. If the modern is the defining category of art history, it is because the concept of Art in the singular and the concept of History in the singular are both tied to the dynamics of a cultural modernity that understands and defines itself through its difference to the past. The standpoint of progress, the moving finger of the modern, was the condition of the construction of the art history of the past at the same time as it set the art of the present in motion. Emancipated from the religious and social demands and constraints of tradition, modern art was born from the idea of progress. This birthright makes the modern the ultimate category of art history — ultimate in the immediate sense that it is unsurpassable. What can be more modern than the modern and its latest vanguard? But what can be more self-defeating than the accelerating obsolescence of the new, whose endpoint is the total paradox of the museum intended solely for contemporary art? Modern is the ultimate arthistorical category, however, in the deeper sense that a progressive art gives itself meaning and defines itself through its telos. The destination of art is thus intrinsic to the aesthetic regime of art. For Hegel art had already reached its destination, ratified by its sublation as philosophical idea. Now that art can no longer claim our highest interest, it has become for Hegel merely art, that is, art that is merely

102  The present for the present aesthetic. And if aesthetic art is to put Hegel’s end of art behind it, it must find its own end in the ends of art. This is the point at which my Art and Enlightenment. Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (Roberts 1991) stopped: the impasse of postmodern theory struggling to come to terms with the end of the grand narratives of the modern age and its implications for art and for aesthetics. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music (Adorno 2006 (1949)) provided the paradigmatic text for the crisis of aesthetic modernism, not only because of its enormous influence into the 1960s, but because the paradoxes of Adorno’s negative aesthetics continued to haunt postmodernist debates. For Adorno the crisis of progress in the new music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky across the decade of the First World War laid bare the ‘progressive’ decline of the integration and mastery of musical time since Beethoven. Schoenberg’s attempt to realize the complete rationalization of music in his twelve-tone system (1922) led to the paradox of the simultaneous affirmation and destruction of musical progress. Debussy’s transformation of musical progression into soundscapes (that have become a staple of contemporary music) and Stravinsky’s Cubist juxtaposition of heterogeneous musical material from Petrushka (1908) to The Rite of Spring (1913) signalled ‘the retreat of time into space.’ Against Stravinsky’s wilful ‘regression’ Adorno identified with the (supposedly) immanent logic of Schoenberg’s ‘progress,’ which he interpreted as the self-sacrifice of authentic music, that is, he embraced in Schoenberg and Beckett what Gianni Vattimo calls the ‘suicide of art’: ‘in a world where consensus is produced by manipulation, authentic art speaks only by lapsing into silence and aesthetic experience arises only as the negation of all its traditional and canonical characteristics’ (Vattimo 1988, 56). Art’s destiny is to affirm its self-negating destination. Adorno’s negative aesthetics ends in the total antithesis of authentic art and the culture industry, an opposition that leads, as we saw in the first chapter, to a fatal overburdening of art with the task of social protest and political resistance that it cannot fulfil and the fatal overburdening of the ‘culture industry’ with the guilt of its complicity in an impersonal system of domination (Markus 2011, 631). If Adorno’s aesthetics represents the extreme pole of art for art’s sake, then its other, the idea of engaged art, also finds its destination in the avant-garde’s selfnegating goal of art merging and becoming one with life (Bürger 1984), already present in the young Wagner’s dream of the reintegration of art and life in the total work of art. In these two opposed ends of art Jacques Rancière sees an ongoing and persistent tension between the two great politics of modern aesthetic art: the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form. The first identifies the forms of aesthetic experience with the forms of an other life. The finality it ascribes to art is to construct new forms of life in common, and hence to eliminate itself as a separate reality. The second, by contrast, encloses the political promise of aesthetic experience in art’s separation, the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form of life. (Rancière 2009, 43)

The present for the present  103 Both these ‘politics of aesthetics’ bracket, however, the underlying reality of the market as the condition of modern art since the eighteenth century, or more exactly, as Benjamin recognized, the growing reciprocity of aesthetic and exchange value, so crucial to the progressive aestheticization of commodity production and consumption. This is the other end of art in the age of technological reproduction. In the words of Gianni Vattimo: The idea that aesthetic experience is decisively transformed in the era of mass reproduction, as Benjamin contends, represents the moment of the passage from a utopian and revolutionary meaning for the death of art to a technological one instead, which ultimately takes the form of mass culture. (Vattimo 1988, 55) In this version of the death of art — the disappearance of art into a ‘generalization of aestheticity’ (54) — art escapes its institutional confines through the advent of new technologies that enable and underpin the process of the aestheticization of life. Not only does this ‘disappearance’ of art reflect the explosion of the boundaries of art but more importantly, it brings to the fore the question of time at the heart of the idea of progress. As Vattimo writes, ‘faith in progress, understood as a kind of faith in the historical process that is ever more devoid of providential and metahistorical elements, is purely and simply identified with faith in the value of the new’ (100). And once progress is identified with the new, it is reduced to the eternal return of the new, that is, to precisely the temporality of the market place — fashion. And this brings us back to the impasse of aesthetic theory after the end of progress. In Art and Enlightenment (Roberts 1991) I argued for the necessity of paradigm change and turned to Leonard Meyer’s Music, The Arts and Ideas for an alternative reading of the consequences for the arts of the ‘demise of the idea of Progress’ (Meyer 1967, 146). His thesis is the following: ‘the paradigm of style history and cultural change which has dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century does not seem able to illuminate or make understandable the situation of the arts today’ (171). Writing in 1967, Meyer identifies the First World War as the watershed; art since then has brought to an end the preceding five hundred years of ordered sequential change. We have entered ‘a period of stylistic stasis, a period characterized not by the linear, cumulative development of a single fundamental style, but the coexistence of a multiplicity of quite different styles in a fluctuating and dynamic steady-state’ (98). This paradigm change from the time of progress to the space of multiple coexisting possibilities signifies in turn a new relationship between the past and the present: ‘the past, whether recent or remote, has become as available as the present’ (149). ‘Past and Present are chronologically separate but epistemologically equal’ (151). Hence the fluctuating steady state of the arts since 1914, in which the coexistence of styles has replaced the illusory temporal sequence of modernism and postmodernism and the repertory of available styles expands to include earlier Western art and the art of non-Western civilizations (173–174).

104  The present for the present Meyer subsumes art since 1914 under the idea of a fluctuating steady state, which involves a new configuration of past and present, emancipated from the futurity of progress or decadence. Meyer’s paradigm change can also be conceptualized, as Peter Osborne argues, within the framework of a transcendental aesthetics, given by the temporalization of history enacted by art over the last two centuries — transcendental because temporalization concerns the spatial-temporal conditions of experience. Art functions in this framework as ‘a kind of cultural “distillation” or “purification” of historical-temporal forms’: In the wake of the swift disposal — one might almost speak of a blessed obliteration of the belatedly discredited concept of the postmodern, and the revival of an interest in avant-gardes (and thereby in the critical legacy of Peter Bürger’s 1974 Theory of the Avant-Garde), art-critical discourse has begun to have recourse to a threefold historical scheme to encompass the art of the last two hundred years: avant-garde, modern and contemporary. One interesting thing about this schema is that, while it is in certain respects periodizing, nonetheless, at base, in their fundamental conceptual meaning, its categories denote not forms, movement or styles, but the prevalence of particular forms of historical temporality. (Osborne 2013, 30) Although Osborne replaces Meyer’s forms of historical style by forms of historical temporality, he arrives at a similar interpretation of the history of the present, in which the multiplicity of styles is defined as a multiplicity of times, in which the contemporary is understood as a ‘spatially determined, imaginary copresencing’ (32): ‘the coming together of different, but equally “present” temporalities or “times”, a temporal unity in dysfunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times’ (44). Osborne’s account is an apt description of the reordering of relations between past, present, and future that announces a new regime of historicity (Hartog). Contemporary art’s ‘disjunctive unity of present times’ presupposes, however, the museum as the privileged space of presentation, in which coexisting ‘forms of historical temporality’ have replaced the organizing perspective of art history. If we accept that the historical paradox of the Museum of Contemporary Art spells out the end of the epoch of aesthetic progress, it is also equally clear that the destination of modern art turned out to be the museum. Rancière’s great politics of ‘the resistance of form’ was absorbed into the ‘life of art’ preserved in the museum. And his other great politics of ‘the becoming-life of art’: what happened to it and its will to blow up the museum? It too ended in the Museum of Modernism. And that is why the two opposed ends, the two opposed politics or meta-politics of modern art ended up as witness to the frozen myth of modernism, propagated by the museum of modern art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Its separation of art and life celebrated the formalist history of a progressive modernism and perpetuated that history long after modern art had ceased to be modern by

The present for the present  105 assimilating the contemporary to the modern. In 2004 the chief curator of the exhibition Modern Contemporary Art at MoMA since 1980 could still insist that contemporary art ‘is collected and presented in this museum as part of modern art — as belonging within, and responding to, and expanding upon the framework of initiatives and challenges established by the earlier history of progressive art since the dawn of the twentieth century’ (Smith 2009, 27). MoMA could still deny in 2004 that the distinction between modern and contemporary art signified the end of European modernism, an end that was both prolonged and confirmed by the ascendency of American modernism after the Second World War. By 1970 American Pop Art and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes had ironically consecrated the fusion of high and mass culture and the marriage of art and commerce. This was the key moment for Arthur C Danto, the moment of ‘the end of art.’ Or perhaps we should say the moment of the endgame of modernism, evident across the arts, from Beckett’s novels and plays to the requiem for revolution in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1961), from John Cage’s experiments to Steve Reich’s minimalism or Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (1976). Since Warhol and Pop Art nothing has happened, says Danto, because the history of art is over. ‘Painting, as a vehicle of history, has had a long run. . . . Now, however, everything is possible. Anything can be art’ (Danto 1997, 115). Danto situates himself ‘after the end of art.’ Before we consider what comes after the end of art, it is worth pausing for a moment on this question of the end. MoMA’s frozen myth has now been consigned to history with the museum’s recognition that contemporary art has left this progressive art history behind. When MoMA reopened in 2020, the old chronological frame was retained, dividing the hundred years of modern art into early (European) modernism (1880–1940) and mid-century (American) modernism (1940–1980), followed by contemporary art (1980–) Only now is the contemporary finally separated from the modern. The reconfiguration of galleries and the rehanging of the collection now aims to refresh aesthetic experience by bringing together in one space painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, design, film, and performance just as the plan to rotate the entire collection over three years aims to offer fresh art experiences to returning visitors. The message of rotation is that modern art exceeds any one single canonic history. Even more, the end of the grand narrative of modernism has transformed the Museum of Western cultural modernity into the Museum of global multi-cultural modernity. MoMA is now opening its doors to all that it formerly ignored and excluded: female and minority artists and the art worlds of the global contemporary (Cotter 2019). This is the final confirmation of the process, in the light of which the spread of the urban cathedrals of modernism — the product of the Cold War triumph of modern art and of the international style — from the USA to Europe and the rest of the world can now be seen as the forerunner of the emergence of the global system of contemporary art. The current, long overdue metamorphosis of MoMA spells out the theme of the present chapter: the fall of what Rancière called ‘the plot of the Museum,’ that is, the end of art history and the art-historical museum and the rise of the

106  The present for the present contemporary museum (part two) and the end of the discipline of aesthetics and the emergence of a post-aesthetic discourse in relation to the contemporary art system and its globalization (part three). Conversely, the fall of ‘the plot of the Museum’ introduces a new temporality of art after art history and after aesthetics, in which the Museum has come to occupy the deciding space of definition. I say ‘the space of definition’ because I want to argue that contemporary art becomes coterminous with the institutional space of possibilities, in which, as which, and through which the plot of the Museum is re-invented and re-enacted. Rancière defines the plot of the Museum as a mode of rendering visible and intelligible the ‘life of art.’ The fact that the life of art is now contemporary, not historical, is the paradigm change that changes everything. What the contemporary Museum renders visible and intelligible is the life of art in and for the present: that is, it renders visible the autopoiesis of the system of contemporary art that operates in the present tense. And this is why I want to argue that the Museum’s space of definition usurps all attempts to define contemporary art as anything other than, in Alex Düttmann’s terms, pure activity (Düttmann 2020). The Museum’s space of definition looms so large because it is the space of pure possibility that emerges in response to the situation in which anything can be art (Danto). And when anything can be art, art becomes undefinable. In other words, the end of the modern aesthetic regime of art signifies the indifferentiation of its defining poles of art and life, autonomy, and heteronomy. The pure possibility of art becomes identical with the heteronomy of life, just as ‘pure activity’ is contemporary art’s ‘pure’ definition precisely because it is contingent on all the contingencies of reception at the same time as it embraces them all, whether positive, negative, or indifferent. For Düttmann the undefinability of contemporary art can therefore only be captured in terms of a ‘pure activity,’ which takes the definition of art and the idea of form to their very limit. ‘Art at the limit’ and ‘form at the limit’ coincide for Düttmann in the Installation, understood in a wide rather than a narrow sense as the very form of contemporary art because it suspends in pure activity not only the distinction between form and content but also at the same time the distinction between life and art, heteronomy and autonomy (Düttmann 2020). To Düttmann’s conceptualization of the collapse of traditional aesthetic criteria I would add the supplementary thesis that the form of the form of contemporary art is the Museum’s self-understanding as a space of possibility after the explosion of the institutional limits of aesthetic art, a space that has expanded to all possible recycled (heritage) sites from warehouses to factories, from schools to prisons, from banks to convents. If I insist on the new, usurpatory plot of the Museum it is in order to underline that contemporary art suspends its powers of self-determination in pure activity and seeks its self-determination in and through reception, as indeed it must in that its destination is in the present for the present. We observe the same logic of ‘presentism’ in the contemporary museum’s abandonment of its traditional role as guardian and guarantor of the works it exhibits to the determination of its own activity in and through market reception.

The present for the present  107 Contemporary art and the contemporary museum meet under the aegis of a relational aesthetics that places the idea of ‘encounter’ at the heart of the cultural narratives that have displaced the art-historical framing of art. The new curatorial presentation of art demands an ever-expanding discourse of ‘political’ statements and positions that has replaced aesthetic criteria by the ‘pure activity’ of reception.

The transaesthetic, transhistorical museum If the revamping of MoMA ratifies the exhaustion of the art-historical logics of modernism, Hans Belting draws the theoretical conclusion for the museum in Art History after Modernism: museums of contemporary art no longer function as explications of art history (Belting 2003, ix). Art history gave meaning and direction to art by gathering all the art of the past that neither knew it was art nor that it partook of art history into the exhibition frame of the museum. Cultural modernity is thus the age in which the artist lived with the museum, the age in which after Hegel artists had to create art’s own history in the form of the aesthetic revolution, the ideology of the avant-garde and progress (Belting, 132), the age in which modern art lived in thrall to and revolt against the idea of art history. The caesura of World War Two separated modernism in its classical, European form from its second, mid-century American reincarnation, which completed the avant-garde’s deconstruction of the concept of the ‘work’ by dissolving the boundaries between high and mass culture and between art and commerce. Art criticism today can no longer keep up with the rapidly changing trends of the art market (49). The consequences of the loss of the authority of art history on the art-historical museum are profound. I  want to highlight the demise of Art and of History in terms of the transformation of the art-historical museum into the transaesthetic and the transhistorical forms and spaces of the contemporary. These two forms and spaces co-exist, interpenetrate, and merge in the museum of contemporary art, in which art past and present is exhibited. I say contemporary, because all art has become contemporary in the transhistorical museum. The museum no longer exhibits art history, it stages in Belting’s words art history as a spectacle of cultural history for a post-historicist audience (8). Without the life force of progress, the arts no longer possess a framing historical narrative, other than in the form of recycling and remakes, in which artists today use the history of art in order to recollect — against the ubiquity of popular art and taste — ‘what the meaning of art has been’ (11). The contemporary museum is thus best grasped in its ‘momentary contemporaneity’ as a railway station (Belting 2003, 100), that is, as a site of arrivals and departures that looks back to the art-historical museum of Hegelian provenance and art’s modern destinations and forward to the transhistorical museum of departures. On the railway platform of the present (a figure central to Agnes Heller’s conception of the absolute present discussed in the final chapter) we look back to the art treasures of the past (Heller’s understanding of ‘living

108  The present for the present historically’) and await ‘the departing trains of the imagination’ (100) on the way to the new worlds of global art. The ‘momentary contemporaneity’ of the museum is the index of its ‘presentist’ historicity. In the museum, in which all art is now contemporary, ‘contemporaneity’ presents itself as two versions of the spatialization of time. On the one hand, the transhistorical museum transforms history into the space-time of co-presence. The time travel of the moderns (from eighteenth-century mock-gothic to nineteenth-century neo-gothic and twentieth-century neo-classicism, from chinoiserie to orientalism to primitivism) has given way to the time differential (Benjamin) of what has been called the ‘disjunctive synthesis’ (Giannini 2013, 240) of past and present in the transhistorical museum. On the other hand, the museum of contemporary art embodies the truth of the ultimate paradox of progress: the progress that consumes itself to finally reveal the identity of the ever new as the ever same. It operates with the temporality of fashion. The defining boundaries of aesthetic art that separated high from popular culture, artistic capital from market value no longer hold; the transaesthetic museum and the transaesthetic economy share the one space-time of the ever new. The transaesthetic museum has two distinct but practically inseparable meanings. It is transaesthetic in the wider sense that it denotes a change of regimes: historically, from the modern to the contemporary regime of historicity, aesthetically, from the aesthetic regime of modern art to the non-aesthetic regime of contemporary art (that, as Belting observes, may recollect what the meaning of art has been). The transaesthetic museum in this first, wider sense signifies the absorption of art history into cultural and social history (Belting 2003, 53), an absorption that is the key to the meta-politics of contemporary art across all its cultural and geographical diversity. The second meaning of the transaesthetic museum derives from Lipovetsky and Serroy’s use of the term in relation to the fourth, contemporary stage of the aestheticization of the world, ‘l’age transesthétique’ (Lipovetsky 2013, 27–34), in which the staging of spectacle, authenticated by the museum, serves the self-advertisement of the culture industry. The interpenetration of art and the economy in the contemporary museum expresses the reciprocity indispensable to the two sources of value in the aesthetic economy: art ennobles the commodity just as market value ennobles art, a reciprocity, consecrated by fashion (English 2005; Buskirk 2012). Fashion is the spirit governing the aestheticization of commerce and the commercialization of art in the ‘art business business’ (Warhol). But how could it be other now that fashion governs all of economic life? Lipovetsky and Serroy define ‘artistic capitalism’ as the generalized crossover between style and business, fashion and commodities, art and fashion trends. Artistic capitalism demands the perpetual renewal of products and their packaging in tandem with an ever faster turnover of advertising strategies, now that stylistic obsolescence, the hallmark of fashion, has penetrated all spheres of production and consumption from sport to the media, from design to food, from hotels to tourism and museums. Nothing, not even art itself, is now external to the marketing model of fashion. This means that we cannot understand

The present for the present  109 the transaesthetic museum (in its combination of the functions of art gallery and department store) if we do not recognize that the walls separating art and life have fallen and that the museum now functions as a privileged site and symbol of capitalism’s aestheticization of the world. Let me give a couple of illustrations of this process of crossover, in which industry becomes fashion and fashion becomes art (Lipovetsky, 94). The collaboration of artists in the design of luxury articles of fashion has brought Warhol’s transformation of everyday brands into artworks full circle. Calvin Klein appointed Raf Simons as its first chief creative officer in 2018 with the task of consolidating the company’s position as a leading global lifestyle brand. Simons’s big idea was to rejuvenate Calvin Klein by building Warhol into the brand vocabulary with Warhol flower paintings on Calvin Klein jeans and denim jackets and images from Warhol’s film Kiss on Calvin Klein underwear. Images from the Warhol disaster series of mangled cars and electric chairs will decorate ‘New Look skirts and twisted tank tops’ (Friedman 2018). Fashion’s cultural ennoblement derives above all, however, from the venues in which it is staged. The 2018 London Fashion Show at the National Portrait Gallery blended seamlessly into the exhibitions of fashion so favoured by the contemporary museum and sponsored by fashion houses. For the fashion show as itself art event location is indeed everything. In choosing Westminster Abbey cloisters as its setting for Fashion Week in 2016, Gucci indicated its ability to rival a royal wedding, while the fashion designer Christopher Kane’s show at the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in 2014 underlined the equivalence of art and fashion. Tate Modern reciprocated with its own fashion show in 2014, entitled ‘The Museum of Homelessness,’ in which the clothes on display were crafted from street rubbish (Guardian 2018). Glamour embraces ethics now that fashion has become a globally appealing medium to bring to life the new ‘core values’ of poverty reduction and female empowerment. As the newly appointed Director of the Met, Max Hollein, put it in relation to the upcoming Met show, ‘Contemporary Museum Fashion’: ‘on the one hand it’s a fashion show, on the other hand it will address complex social, political questions. Museums are one of the few places where you can have a complex cultural discussion in a nonpolemical way’ (Pogrobin 2018). Or should we read Hollein’s mission statement about the museum’s function to be ‘a major provider of understanding and different narratives to a global audience’ as a brazen self-reflection of the museum industry? That is the judgment of Karin Schubert, who views the embrace of the culture industry as the abandonment of the museum’s historical roots and intellectual purpose (Schubert 2000, 158). The new museum’s goal of ‘elitism for all’ in the form of a ‘democracy of spectacle’ has as its object the passive, infantilized consumer (159), not so different from Raf Simons’s assertion that in his obsession with superstars and famous people, Warhol was very democratic, just as Calvin is very democratic (Friedman 2018). The museum’s ‘elitism’ for every one and Calvin Klein’s ‘democracy’ are equally distant from Warhol’s ironic self-critique of art for everyone in the age of technological reproduction. Along with the university and other cultural

110  The present for the present institutions the museum has bought into the circular logic of the corporate market place: to survive, one must expand (176–177). And this expansion means grand new buildings, devoid of any relationship between form and function — what James Sterling said of his 1981 Staatsgallerie, Stuttgart, that it looks better without art, applies just as much to the other contemporary urban icons such as the Guggenheim Bilbao. In the age of fashion the permanent collection has been displaced by the drawing power of the temporary exhibition. Fashion’s ‘agenda of recasting content as style, re-inventing the art object as ornamental backdrop and reducing history to a mere source for periodic revivals’ (Schubert 2000, 169) reduces the permanent collection to a resource for temporary displays combined with borrowings from and loans to other museums. What Schubert calls the anti-historical programme of the new museum is what the museum of contemporary art sees, however, as its transhistorical purpose. The idea of the transhistorical is nicely captured in the self-understanding of the Amos Rex Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki which opened in August 2018: ‘Amos is an art museum where the past, the present and the future meet.’ This purpose defines the time and space parameters of the transhistorical. The museum becomes a time machine: ‘the goal will be for the past, present and future to produce unique experiences and surprising encounters.’ In addition, the museum becomes the space of possibilities: ‘the goal of the design has been to create as flexible facilities as possible to conform to the needs of ever-changing contemporary art’ (Amos Rex 2018). The museum can also be a virtual immersive time machine, as in the Venice Time Machine Project, which has pioneered the technologies and methodologies underpinning the European ‘Time Machine FET Flagship,’ a collaborative research project involving 240 institutions in 32 European countries and the USA. The Venice Time Machine aims to ‘reconstruct the shape of the city over its history, along with the evolution of its continental and Mediterranean networks over time. The project maps circulation of news, money, commercial goods, as well as migration of artistic patterns along the roads from Venice to the Netherlands, Germany or down to ports of the Black Sea’ (Time Machine 2018). The Time Machine’s aim to map  2000  years of European history represents a fascinating transposition of the aestheticization and scientization of the past in the Enlightenment museum into the realm of Big Data. This ambitious actualization of Europe’s cultural heritage through the historical evolution of European cities and their economic, cultural, and migration networks, mapped in space and time to form an historical-geographical information system, aims to extend through advanced Artificial Intelligence Big Data to the past and to make ‘our common past the Next Frontier.’ The project envisages a huge cultural, economic, and social impact for its ‘Large Scale Historical Simulator’ in the field of tourism, new forms of virtual reality, and Big Data mining and prediction using AI. Time machines are currently underway for Amsterdam, Barcelona, Budapest, Naples, Nuremberg, Paris among other cities. They have the function of bringing ‘the past

The present for the present  111 back as a common resource for the future,’ just as science fiction functions as a time machine to bring the future back as a common resource for the present. Both forms of the Historical Simulator, whether the AI-driven museum or the imagined AI of speculative fiction, merge past, present, and future into the one space-time of virtuality and possibility, in which cultural heritage becomes the future, the past the next frontier or alternately, imagined futures make the future present and the present past. We are thus looking at a new, expanded conception of the contemporary as defined by Terry Smith: The past-present-future triad divides us no longer, as contemporaneity includes within its diversity many revived pasts and wished-for futures, all of which are being lived out as live present. None are dead, all are possible, and (as distinct from the modern era) no overriding narrative is deciding which is dead. (Smith 2012) Smith calls the space of the contemporary ‘a site pervaded by provisionality and possibility,’ in which time has become multi-directional and multiple (Smith 2009, 195–196). If science fiction possibilizes the future present (chapter five) the museum possibilizes the past present, including of course the past of the museum itself by ‘liberating’ exhibition practice from the art-historical confines of chronology, context, and category. This liberation transforms the museum’s historical collections, as we have seen, into a standing reserve of potentiality. Thus the Frankfurt Museum of Applied Art defines itself on its website as a ‘space of possibilities’ (Möglichkeitsraum). It understands the exhibitions it mounts as narratives of cultural values and changing conditions of life, in which the historical method of displaying objects is superseded by ‘timely’ and ‘untimely’ reflections by means of the juxtaposition of objects in their differences. The aim of such ‘alienating’ cultural narratives, drawn from the resources of all departments, periods, and areas of the museum collection, is to invite negotiation and provoke debate (Museum Angewandte Kunst 2013). This privileging of transhistoricity over art-historical periodization, of curatorial praxis over historical scholarship highlights the liberation of the curator vis-à-vis what is in their care, a liberation that is open to opposed readings. Most obviously, it authorizes the curator, for whom the museum collection becomes raw material for the space of possibilities, raw material because it is alienated from its art-historical identity and location within the museum. The curator is now elevated to the role of stage manager, director, artist-author, and star of the show, tasked with riding the latest fashion wave in the competition for market success in the transaesthetic culture industry (Farago 2019). The arbitrary curatorial aspect of this alienating disposition over the historical collection under the market-driven compulsion to ‘avant-garde’ novelty is better read, however, I would argue, as the symptom of the exhaustion of the modern tradition of art as aesthetic art, as art

112  The present for the present history, and as aesthetics. In relation to the end of art history and the museum, what the liberation of transhistorical exhibition practice from the art-historical framing of chronology, context, and category demonstrates is a repetition of the very process that gave birth to the museum: the alienation constitutive of cultural modernity. The first alienation creates ‘art,’ the art-historical museum, and the aesthetic regime of art. The second reframes art within and as the space of possibilities. That is, it possibilizes art production and at the same time the ‘life of art.’ This second alienation represents a new stage of cultural modernity, no longer solely European and Western. It denotes a new consciousness of freedom, expressive of the globally generalized possibilization of the world. To alienate means to transfer (originally property) from one owner to another, to estrange. The museum is a time machine precisely because it is an alienation machine: it takes objects from their original meaning-giving context to effect a category change from artefacts to artwork or ethnological document and inserts them into an alien chronology. This triple act of estrangement is the modus operandi of museological translation, which we must distinguish from the universal practice of cultural transfer throughout prehistory and recorded history. It differs in that it objectifies such universal practices of cultural transfer in the form of a scientific alienation that involves recognition and dispossession of the Other. The self-recognition integral to cultural modernity remains deficient as long as it defines itself as superior in relation to the Other. Thus it is only with the end of progress that the art-historical museum can alienate and estrange its own historicist self-understanding by culturalizing and historicizing not only its original raison d’être but equally its own permanent collection of European art as art objects of one, now historical, culture among others, transformed into a resource for the new museum as the global space of cultural narratives and encounters. In this space the overthrow of the modern art-historical paradigm of chronology, context, and category exemplifies Benjamin’s anti-historicist method of actualization through citation and montage (chapter three; Roberts 1991, 214, 219) to create new transhistorical and transcultural constellations of objects and meanings. The new museum of cultural encounters operates as time machine, alienation machine, and above all cultural translation machine. The choice of Venice as the pioneer city for the European Time Machine project underlines the centrality of cross-border cultural transfers to the mapping of the European cultural heritage. The mapping of the flows of cultural exchange and influence in trade, objects, money, ideas, religion, arts, and technologies hold the key to the historical significance and the identity of Venice. At the same time, however, the translation of this history and identity into cultural heritage for the present continues the process of the historicizing culturalization that makes Venice’s history part of ‘our common past’ and hence via World Heritage part of the common past of humanity’s present. This is the logic of an enlightened cultural modernity, whose historical corollary was the culturalization and historicization of the great world

The present for the present  113 civilizations that now includes European civilization in its medieval Christian and its progressive modern form.

Global contemporary art We can now begin — with Belting and Stichweh — to draw the threads of the chapter together. Global contemporary art most certainly is not the destination that modern art intended but it is indeed its dispossessor and successor. It denotes the end of the regime of aesthetic art and its progressive historicity. I have already tried to indicate some of the most salient implications of the end of art history and of the art-historical museum. It is now time to ask whether aesthetics has a place in global art and in the global art system. I start with Belting’s crucial distinction between world art and global art: World art is an old idea complementary to modernism, designating the art of others.  .  .  . It continues to signify the art from all ages, the heritage of mankind. In fact, world art included art of every possible provenance while at the same time excluding it from Western mainstream art — a colonial distinction between art museums and ethnographic museums. World art is officially codified in international laws for the protection of cultural heritage and monuments. Global art, on the other hand, is recognized as the sudden and worldwide production of art that did not exist or did not garner attention until the late 1980s. By its own definition global art is contemporary and in spirit postcolonial; thus it is guided by the intention to replace the centre and periphery scheme of hegemonic modernity. (Belting 2013a, 178) Belting qualifies the concept of global art by describing it as composed of a plurality of art worlds (Belting 2013b, 246–254). We can qualify the two terms ‘world art’ and ‘global art’ further by inserting them into a larger historical process (which was also the focus of the previous chapter on world literatures and global literature), in which a plurality of art worlds, ranging from tribal cultures to the great historical civilizations, was unified under the modern aegis of History and Art into the one idea of world art and later world heritage, to give way in turn to the idea of global art, itself composed of a plurality of coexisting art worlds. The concept of global art thus combines in itself the unity and diversity of contemporary art production, which is historically distinct not only from the cultural meanings of traditional arts and artefacts in the non-Western world but equally from the aesthetic self-understanding of modern Western art. The historical sequence from multiple separate traditional art worlds to the one modern world art and on to the contemporary unity in diversity of the art worlds of global art may be understood as a sequence of transformations brought about by cultural translation: the translation of traditional cultural values into aesthetic value in the museum and in turn of aesthetic value into the cultural politics of the art worlds making up the

114  The present for the present global art system. The modern concept of world art takes on a new postcolonial significance, in which it serves as a focus and irritant for identity politics and as a resource for the cultural politics of individual contemporary art worlds. To put it differently: Belting’s new art worlds rise on the ruins of historical cultures and civilizations. The modern universalizing idea of world art opened the way to the art worlds of the past becoming the common historical heritage of humanity and that applies as much now to European civilization as to the rest of the world. Global art corresponds to a globalized world, in which ‘the West is encountering the same situation as other cultures. Entry into the global age where art production has become general not only marks a beginning but also an end, the end of the old world maps of art with its centre and periphery scheme’ (Belting 2013a, 184). The old world maps of art presupposed not only unequal cultural exchange but also unilateral translation into the aesthetic values of the centre. If the end of the art history that divided the world into the West and the rest has restored unity on another level, it is one, says Belting, in which art production finds its common denominator as cultural production. Moreover, once we recognize that the paradigm change from the Western modern to the global contemporary signifies the exodus of art from the confines of art history, the question whether aesthetics still has a role to play in relation to post-aesthetic art calls for an answer. The answer concerns the museum and the art market. If, as I  suggested, the destination of modern art turned out to be museum, this destination cemented the ever-closer symbiosis of modern art and the museum of modernism, especially after the Second World War — up to the breaking point when anything can be art (Danto), the point at which the argument for an institutional theory of art appears more and more compelling. George Dickie was the first who sought to account for this new situation by divorcing the classification of objects as art from any intrinsic properties of the art object. The object’s status as art object is conferred by the institution (Dickie 1974), that is, it is constituted through the collective activities and shared conventions of the art world, which comprehends the actors and institutional conditions that make art possible today, from art schools and artists to art critics, art dealers, galleries, museum and art fair professionals to auction houses, art investment advisors, and art market data companies. This socio-economic network of actors finds visible expression in the presentation of artworks in the institutional context of galleries, museums, biennales, art fairs, and so on (Becker 1984; Irvine 2007). It is no coincidence that the institutional theory of art appears at the point where the shared conventions of modernism lose their self-evidence. Here of course Warhol is a key figure in the crisis of the modern paradigm. But it is also the point at which the paradox of the museum of contemporary art becomes fully apparent. We have already encountered the reversal which makes the temporary exhibition the permanent function of the contemporary museum and the permanent collection a resource for transhistorical re-presentation, but the paradox of a museum of the new involves an even more profound reversal. The art-historical museum came into being as the institutional form of its contents: the collection of lasting

The present for the present  115 interest and value. The contemporary museum by contrast comes into being as an institutional form in its own right. The space of exhibition not only precedes its contents, it authorizes them. The objects exhibited are of interest and value precisely because they are of passing, that is, of topical interest for the present. What this authorizing power of the institutional form means in practice is the emergence of a new managerial class of curators that has occupied the definitional space left vacant by the collapse of the shared conventions of aesthetic art, a space that is now informed by the art market rather than by the art critic. Thus Sabine Vogel traces the rise of the influence of art criticism to its bridging role in New York after World War Two in response to the growing gap between historically oriented art history and the art market. The art critic’s interpretive role reached its limit, however, at the point that art production and the art market coalesced. In the eventdriven art world of today the art critic must therefore don a new institutional hat. Like the curator, s/he ceases to be trained in art history and becomes the observer of the self-observing global art system. Accordingly, the critic’s task calls now for analysis of the changes driving the system, changes that Vogel identifies as the displacement of style by the criterion of social relevance (Vogel 2013). Belting identifies the challenge to art history posed by the rise of new art worlds as the need for a narrative that also ‘takes into account the growing role of economics and the politics of art in describing art’ (Belting 2013a, 185). In relation to the global art world it seems premature to demand a new historical narrative. What is needed rather is a theoretical description such as that provided by Rudolf Stichweh (Stichweh 2014). Stichweh’s systems-theoretical analysis offers a cogent and concise account of the contemporary art world as a functional system of society, which foregrounds the temporality of its operations. I summarize his analysis. Stichweh starts from the distinction between the modern and the contemporary as an indicator of an epochal shift that he sees as confined to the sphere of the arts (art, music, dance, theatre, literature) but also includes, as we have seen, historiography. The dominance of the temporal connoted by the concept of the contemporary aligns the sphere of the arts with the sphere of fashion and mass culture, which have always operated in the present tense. The time consciousness of the contemporary differs from that of the modern in that it refers to the ongoing renewal of the contemporary in relation to its own operations and in relation to other systems. The highly selective recourse to tradition serves the purpose of the ongoing autopoiesis of the system. This reworking of the historical ‘life of art,’ whether in the theatre, or music, or literature, leads in turn to a growing diversity of equally present possibilities. The replacing of the orienting function of art history by the space of possibilities produces the reservoir, as Stichweh terms it, from which the contemporary art system renews itself. This reservoir of equally present possibilities constitutes in my terms the latency and contingency of the contemporary system (Roberts 1991, 163–183). It means that art today can no longer be understood by reference to its own history and memory. This liberation from the past opens the space of possibilities for playful, at their best exhilarating, at their worst wilful

116  The present for the present experiments at the same time as it commits the system to the treadmill of continuous renewal and continuous depreciation. Stichweh’s example for the ever-faster turnover and obsolescence of individual artists, styles, and trends: of the 1000 artists exhibited by leading galleries in New York and London between 1980 and 1990, only 20 appear in the 2007 auction catalogues of Sotheby and Christie. This temporalization of the system is refracted through the prism of social relevance, such that artists are called to take up political positions and produce cultural statements for exhibitions, events, fairs, festivals in order to further the inter- and cross-cultural dialogue between positions, themes, and generations. This cultural inclusiveness applies also to the inclusion of all forms, media, and techniques, from installations to videos and performance, which lay claim to a critical view of the contemporary. Stichweh regards the system of contemporary art with its emphasis on synchrony and contemporaneity as a prime example of a system that operates in the present tense and functions in a mode of self-observation that closely resembles the system of science. The longer history of the globalization of science is now being followed by the rapid globalization of contemporary art. If the science system may be defined as the sum of all ongoing research projects, this also applies now to the system of contemporary art as the sum of all ongoing artistic projects. The incorporation of what Belting calls new art worlds into the one global art world of institutional actors proceeds through the formalization of the diverse contents of earlier and different traditions. This is the process, which we have already discussed in relation to the museum and to the modern idea of world art (cf. world literature), whereby artefacts enter the modern system as ‘art.’ The centre incorporated the periphery by means of an alienation and appropriation that eliminated traditional context and content. The modern incorporation of traditional art worlds was thus the precondition for the contemporary dissolution of the asymmetry between centre and periphery, by means of which the local and the global become reciprocal poles of the global system of art. This reciprocity expresses the two-way flows of cultural translation, in and through which the unifying concept of art is filled with new post-aesthetic contents in a dialectic, which formalizes and globalizes local content at the same time as it culturalizes and localizes global form. I should add that if contemporary art can no longer be understood historically, this is another way of saying that the rise of the contemporary art system signifies the end of the world’s historical cultures and civilizations in what is now becoming a globalized cultural modernity. Stichweh concludes by comparing the modern and the contemporary systems of art. In the modern system the art centres of the metropolis were the sites of the integration of the world’s cultures into a central world system, in which art schools, teacher-pupil relationships on the one hand and art dealers, galleries, and collectors on the other sought to combine the old and the new in the name of art of lasting value, enshrined in the museum. The contemporary art system has replaced this hegemony of the centre by international networks which are linked

The present for the present  117 together by hubs, defined by Stichweh as the switchboards of a system that operates across the spatial distances and differences of geography and cultures. They form the heart of the system, which lives not from art of lasting but of passing value: ‘the system of contemporary art does not guarantee the works, which make up its ongoing present, it simply carries on: from work to work, from event to event, from temporary relevance to temporary relevance — and in this sense it is largely without history, because it operates in the present, in its ever changing actuality’ (Stichweh 2014, 915). This hub-based global system is gigantic. By 2008 it was made up of some 10,000 museums, 1500 auction houses, 250 commercial art fairs, over 200 Biennale or Triennale, and over 17,000 commercial galleries. Let me flesh out these figures with the findings of the Art Market Report for 2018. Sales in the global art market reached nearly $64 billion in 2017, of which 83% was accounted for by the three largest markets, the USA (42%), China and the UK at 21% and 20% of global sales. Overall, dealers had 53% and auction houses 47% share of sales. Of particular interest here is the dominance of postwar and contemporary art at auctions, amounting to 46% of sales by value as compared with prewar modern art at 27%. Whereas contemporary art sales for 2017 reached $6.2 billion, European old masters reached less than $1 billion, of which nearly half was due to the sale of a Leonardo da Vinci (at a contemporary art auction). In terms of economic impact the global art, antiques, and collectibles market employed some 310,000 in 2017 and was responsible for the employment of around 3 million people (Art Market Report 2018). In conclusion I would like to return briefly to the dialectic of Enlightenment and Romanticism that Markus identified as the motor of the ongoing vitality of cultural modernity. The dialectic between art and life that ensures for Rancière the ongoing vitality of the aesthetic regime of art has mutated, I contend, into the dialectic of the global and the local in the global art system. If there is one persistent thread to the cultural meta-politics of contemporary art, it is to be found in all the variations on the recurrent theme of identity politics as it unfolds between the poles of the global and the local. The dialectic at work here is integral to the life of a global cultural modernity, defined by the tensions between local and global identities, that is, between the Romantic identity politics of difference and the cosmopolitan politics of the one common humanity.

References Adorno, Theodor. 2006 (1949). Philosophy of New Music, tr. and ed. with introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Amos, Rex. 2018. https://amosrex.fi/en (accessed 9 January 2019). Art Market Report. 2018. ‘The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2018.’ www. ubs.com/English/Art (accessed 20 February 2019). Becker, Howard. 2008 (1984). Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Belting, Hans. 2003. Art History after Modernism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

118  The present for the present Belting, Hans. 2013a. ‘From World Art to Global Art: View on a New Panorama,’ in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, ed. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel. Karlsruhe: Centre for Art and Media; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 178–185. Belting, Hans. 2013b. ‘The Plurality of Art Worlds and the New Museum,’ in Belting, 2013a, The Global Contemporary, 246–254. Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Buskirk, Martha. 2012. Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace. London: Bloomsbury. Cotter, Holland. 2019. ‘MoMA, the New Edition: From Monumental to Experimental,’ New York Times, 5 February. Danto, Arthur. 1997. After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dickie, George. 1974. Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Düttmann, Alexander Garcia. 2020. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. English, James. 2005. The Economy of Prestige. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Farago, Jason. 2019. ‘Curation as Creation,’ New York Review of Books, 24 October, 17–19. Friedman, Vanessa. 2018. ‘Warhol and I,’ New York Times, 24 October. Giannini, Sarah. 2013. ‘J’est un autre,’ in Belting, 2013a, The Global Contemporary, 239–245. Guardian. 2018. ‘Location, Location, Location,’ The Guardian, 17 February. Irvine, Martin. 2007. ‘Introduction to The Institutional Theory of Art and the Art World.’ cct.georgetown.edu/Irvine (accessed 25 February 2019). Kostenevich, Albert. 2018. ‘Collecting Modern Art: Monet to Kandinsky,’ in Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 21–49. Lipovetsky, Gilles and Jean Serroy. 2013. L’esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l’age du capitalisme artiste. Paris: Gallimard. Markus, György. 2011. Culture, Science, Society. The Constitution of Cultural Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Meyer, Leonard. 1967. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in TwentiethCentury Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Museum Angewandte Kunst. 2013. ‘The Museum Concept.’ www.museumangewand tekunst.de (accessed 10 December 2018). Osborne, Peter. 2013. ‘Temporalization as transcendental aesthetics: avant-garde. modern, contemporary,’ Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 23. Pogrobin, Robin. 2018. ‘The Met Goes Beyond its Doors to Pick a Leader Who Bridges Art and Technology,’ New York Times, 11 April. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press. Roberts, David. 1991. Art and Enlightenment. Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Lincoln/ London: University of Nebraska Press. Schubert, Karin. 2000. The Curator’s Egg. London: Ridinghouse. Smith, Terry. 2009. What is Contemporary Art? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Terry. 2012. ‘Agamben and Nancy on Contemporaneity and Art.’ www.haa.pitt.edu (accessed 22 January 2019).

The present for the present  119 Stichweh, Rudolf. 2014. ‘ “Zeitgenössische Kunst.” Eine Fallstudie zur Globalisierung,’ Merkur (October), 909–915. Time Machine. 2018. ‘FET Flagship Venice Time Machine Project.’ https://timemachine. eu/ (accessed 10 January 2019). Transhistorical Museum. 2015/2016. ‘Research Project Frans Hals Museum Haarlem and Museum Leuven.’ lievengevaertcentre.be (accessed 19 January 2019). Vattimo, Gianni. 1988. The End of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vogel, Sabine. 2013. ‘Bridging the World. The Role of Art Criticism Today,’ in Belting, 2013a, The Global Contemporary, 255–260.

8 The absolute present Modern, postmodern, contemporary

The theme of musealization runs like a thread through these explorations of the history of the present. It is not only the other of the idea of progress, it is also the paradoxical truth of progress, for only with the reconceptualization of history as a teleological process did the past acquire a new and higher meaning as the necessary prehistory of the present. This new and higher meaning transformed history into philosophy of history. It attained its highest and ultimate expression in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit with its sublimation of the lived past into the comprehended past: the act of remembrance (Er-innerung) that raises the endless contingencies and catastrophes of history to the record of the meaningful progression of the Spirit to self-consciousness. This for Hegel is the absolute knowledge that grasps the eternity of Spirit as it looks back over the Spirit’s journey through time to the absolute present of knowledge. What meaning can we give, after the demise of the grand narratives of the nineteenth century, to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit and his conception of the Absolute Present? What can a theory of history offer us today compared with the promise and failure of philosophy of history? These are the questions that Agnes Heller sets herself in A Theory of History (Heller 1982) and in A Philosophy of History in Fragments (Heller 1993). In this last chapter I want to examine Heller’s interpretation of the sense of history in A Theory of History and of the sense of historical existence in A Philosophy of History in Fragments. What remains after the grand narratives? There remains historical consciousness, more exactly, the consciousness of historical consciousness that created the self-knowing consciousness of the philosophy of history. Here Hegel’s legacy remains unsurpassable, since the attainment of absolute self-knowledge signified that History has reached its destination: ‘Hegel told the real story. It is from the consciousness of the present that the story of historical consciousness can be told, because it is now that it has become “recognized” ’ (Heller 1993, 198). It does not matter whether the end of history is conceived as present, past, or future, whether it evokes homecoming, paradise lost and regained, or the principle of hope, the end is absolute knowledge — tragic, utopian, redemptive — here and now. It is the knowledge that absolutizes the present at the same time as it transforms history into History. But the History that is absolute knowledge also lays

The absolute present  121 a curse on historical consciousness. If absolute knowledge promises salvation it also demands faith, which is threatened by the reality of the inescapable facticity and contingency of our historicity. This split in historical consciousness between self-knowledge and acting in the world is spelled out in the retrospective gaze of the Owl of Minerva. The gods must die for the Spirit to complete its odyssey from its outward manifestations in art and religion to its sublation in thought. The Owl of Minerva takes flight as the sun sets. It sees what the historical actors could not see, the coming to self-consciousness of the Spirit across the centuries. Philosophy’s truth is post mortem; that is why Hegel insisted that philosophy possesses no master key to the present or to action. It comes too late to tell the world what to do: ‘philosophy cannot teach the state what it should be, but, only how it, the ethical universe, is to be known.’ ‘It is just as foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an individual could leap out of his time.’ As we know, Hegel’s warning in the Preface to Philosophy of Right fell on deaf ears, despite Hegel’s recognition that the loss of the external forms of religion had reduced the sphere of philosophy to a secluded sanctuary: ‘its servants compose an isolated priesthood that cannot go out into the world.’ ‘It is left to the temporal, empirical present to find its way out from this split, how it is going to do it, how it will develop itself, is a matter that does not belong to the direct practical concerns and tasks of philosophy’ (quoted Heller 1993, 182). That is also why Hegel remains unsurpassable. His absolute present divides the pre-modern world from the modern, action from knowledge, and naive from sentimental consciousness at the same time as it delivers the moderns over to ‘the temporal, empirical present’ of historicity. The result, as Heller puts it, is that since the French Revolution human being has become utterly historical: ‘moderns have shut themselves up in the prison house of historicity’ and have lost the key to their prison (Heller 1993, 194). How, after Hegel, after the End of History, can there be philosophy of history? But how, we may also ask, can we escape the prison house of historicity? The phantasm of the End of History haunted European modernity from the French Revolution to the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. Could not the absolute separation of knowledge and action be circumvented through a total revolution that would create the New Man and a new absolute? This, for Alain Badiou, epitomizes the spirit of the twentieth century, prefigured, as he sees it, in the challenge that occupied the nineteenth century: the will to overcome ‘the tension between historicism and the aesthetic absolute’ that inspired the avantgarde dream of the act that would realize the effective, the ‘absolute present.’ This revolutionary dream of bringing art to an end through the reunion of art and life anticipated the what Badiou calls the ‘hard core’ of the twentieth century — the totalitarian thirties and forties (Badiou 2012, 20, 58). Writing in the shadow of totalitarianism, Walter Benjamin captured the catastrophic course of history in his image of the Angel of History, for whom world history is telescoped into a vision of ruins piled upon ruins. Progress has become

122  The absolute present the end without end of history, the endless return of the same that only ‘the leap out of time’ could bring to an end. Against the terroristic end of history, consecrated by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Benjamin demanded nothing less than the revolutionary End of History that would explode the fatal continuum of destructive progress and release us from our imprisonment in a ruinous historicity. Historical materialism, as conceived by Benjamin, can only prevail over its enemies with the (hidden) help of theology. The destructive course of history will only be brought to a halt when time stands still and the present becomes the messianic moment of Jetztzeit joining past and present. The true Revolution will be the re-volution of time, which resurrects the dead. Hegel’s Owl of Minerva and Benjamin’s Angel of History flank the epoch of European modernism from the French Revolution to the Second World War. Each underscores our imprisonment in historicity at the same time as each gives absolute transcendent meaning to the present moment. What the philosophical gaze perceives when it surveys history is the living spirit that has separated itself from its empty shell — the charnel house of human actions; what the theological gaze perceives is ‘one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’ — a landscape of death, haunted by absence. ‘The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’ (Benjamin 2003, 392). Benjamin’s Apocalypse of History is the caesura that crystallizes past and present into a monadic constellation. In this structure the historical materialist ‘recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’ (Benjamin 2003, 396). In Benjamin’s model of Messianic time, which ‘comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation,’ the absolute present of knowledge is conceived as Jetztzeit (Benjamin 2003, 396). It compresses human history into the absolute moment of historical understanding, which is one with the demand for action, judgment, and justice. But how is the past to be redeemed? Redemption can be thought only from the vantage point of the End of History, whether it underwrites with Hegel the odyssey of the Spirit through history or identifies with Benjamin with history’s victims. Whatever the case, philosophy or theology of history must operate with a notion of the present ‘in which time stands still and has come to a stop,’ in short, the absolute present as an unlimited enterprise. But before turning to Agnes Heller’s construction of the absolute present as a ‘limited enterprise,’ I want first to indicate the contrasting ideas of remembrance in Hegel and Benjamin in order to set the scene for Heller’s postmodern understanding of the redemptive relationship between past and present in A Philosophy of History in Fragments. Hegel’s key to the prison house of historicity is remembrance, re-collection, through which lived history is reborn as knowledge and the blind historical procession of epochs is transmuted into stages of the phenomenology of the Spirit: together, the blindness of historical action and retrospective insight constitute history, defined by Hegel at the end of Phenomenology of Spirit as ‘the recollection and the charnel house of the Absolute Spirit,’ that is to say, the living Spirit that

The absolute present  123 rises from the ashes of the past. Only philosophical understanding can transform ‘the lifeless individual event’ into the eternity of Spirit. Benjamin’s key to the prison house of historicity is his notion of a present in which time comes to a stand and opens the way for mankind to receive the fullness of its past: ‘for nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history’ (Benjamin 2003, 390). Nevertheless, looking back Benjamin’s Angel sees only the charnel house of history. Remembrance can do no more than bear witness to the history of oppression. The awakening of the dead is tied to the ever present, ever fleeting possibility of Jetztzeit, which contains ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.’ The coming of the Apocalypse, in which political revolution is both prefiguration and type of the Last Judgment, has neither place nor use for Hegel’s Absolute Spirit: the suffering of the oppressed, not the deeds of the Spirit, will be re-called at the Last Judgment. For Hegel resurrection is re-collection, for Benjamin resurrection is the re-call that undoes time, the re-volution that announces the first and last day of the Revolution, the Day of Judgment that will inaugurate a New History. The philosophy of history is synonymous with the end of history. Can there be a philosophy of history after the collapse of the grand narratives? What does it mean to write after Hegel’s post mortem or Benjamin’s allegorical mortification of world history? What remains this side of the revealed truth of philosophy of history other than the knowledge that all that we are left with is historical consciousness? Not only does Heller’s A Theory of History (1982) precede A Philosophy of History in Fragments (1993), there is a telling exchange of roles: A Theory of History must shoulder the burden of a contemporary philosophy of history in the form of a theory of the stages of historical consciousness, and A Philosophy of History in Fragments must assume the burden of our postmodern historical consciousness. In the Preface to A Philosophy of History in Fragments Heller writes ‘A theory of history is the reflection upon, and the interpretation of, historical consciousness and its various manifestations. A philosophy of history is something different — it is one of the manifestations of the modern historical consciousness, and, as such, a kind of self-reflection.’ ‘Certainly, a theory of history is also philosophy; but it is not a philosophy of history’ (Heller 1993, vi). Even though a philosophical theory of history is not a philosophy of history, it defines the conditions of possibility of philosophy of history today, in that it places both the modern and postmodern European philosophy of history in the larger context of an emerging world-historical consciousness. In A Philosophy of History in Fragments Heller transforms the end of history into a postmodern re-vision of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit and a postmodern reflection on the world of culture. Here Heller looks back to the European legacy and beyond it to the imaginary museum of the world’s cultural heritage as the index of an emerging planetary consciousness sketched in A Theory of History. Thus to answer the question, how is a philosophy of history possible after the demise of the grand narratives, we must examine Heller’s rethinking of the Hegelian idea of the absolute present in relation to her postmodern philosophy of history in fragments and her contemporary theory of history.

124  The absolute present

Living historically: a philosophy of history in fragments Heller’s image for the end of history, more exactly its terminus, in A Philosophy of History in Fragments is the Railway Station: the history of progress that unfolded between Hegel and Benjamin ended when the train stopped at AuschwitzBirkenau. As the terminus of history, the railway station has become the metaphor of our absolute present (Heller 1993, 223) and as such it is the antithesis of Hegel and Benjamin’s absolute present. It stands neither for the reconciliation of reason and reality nor for the Messianic cessation of time but simply for the recognition and acceptance of our contingency after the apocalypse that engulfed Europe: ‘many things that Walter Benjamin divined as signs of this worldly salvation have actually been realized to the last letter as the funeral march of history passed from stage to stage. Time stood still in the concentration camps. . . . In the gas chambers the continuum of history was certainly exploded, and if there was a place where ‘the entire course of history has been preserved and sublated’ in its negative totality, it was the Gulag’ (Heller 1993, 73). For all that Heller’s present signifies the refusal of the illusions of flight into the past or the future — the temptation of archaism or futurism that Arnold Toynbee saw as symptoms of European civilization in crisis — the railway station does not mean that we have arrived at our destination, that we are at home in the present. To make our home in the present, that is the task posed by our inescapable contingency. Even the highest level of consciousness holds no promise of the resolution of all contradictions in or beyond history. Historical consciousness today simply ratifies the inescapable condition of a historicity that can no longer be redeemed in the name of origins or goal and in which the past and the future can be comprehended only as the past and the future of the present. Like the absolute present to which it is tied, historical self-consciousness is divided against itself. To the degree that we can speak of unity, it is a unity of unreconciled differences. A Philosophy of History in Fragments expresses in its title this knowledge of a historical consciousness divided between a European world history that has departed and a global history that is taking shape. If we accept that modernity is the world of self-reflecting historicism, its corollary is the modern sense of culture, which recognizes and knows the plurality of cultures. The corollary of cultural modernity in turn is the endless search for meaning. This makes hermeneutics the most adequate expression of the spirit of our historical consciousness. It offers not the Hegelian truth of history but an endless quest for meaning as the meaning of our historicity. Nevertheless, this quest is for Heller our spiritual quest: what we seek is not the truth but the continuation of the discourse about truth (Heller 1993, 206), now that Hegel’s Absolute Spirit is no longer the spirit of our congregation. Postmodern historical consciousness reveals itself in Heller’s analysis as seeking its identity in a reflexive historical consciousness that will allow us to escape imprisonment in the ever-new and ever-same present in and through our relation to the past. Heller looks to private devotion (Andacht) and public worship as the two

The absolute present  125 possibilities of giving meaning to our absolute present. Such a self-reflective philosophy of historical consciousness is in equal measure privileged and problematic: privileged as Andacht (piety of thinking) but problematic in that recollection is now merely private; problematic above all in terms of the hermeneutic transformation of the absolute spirit of philosophy of history into the unending quest for meaning, but privileged in that the attribution of meaning always contains the possibility of a renewal of the perennial sources of the free spirit of modernity. Private devotion and public worship thus embody the two possibilities of resurrecting and renewing the life of the past through which the past can be recognized as the past of our present. Andacht, as conceived by Heller, is perhaps best understood as the attitude that has the potential to transform the objective spirit of contemporary culture back into absolute spirit for the individual recipient. This act of recollection cannot resurrect the dead — ‘only shamelessly teleological history or unbashful messianism can do this’ (Heller 1993, 40). Nevertheless, the bringing of the past to presence exhibits the same process of spiritualization as in Hegel and the same structure of reciprocal redemption as in Benjamin. What Andacht seeks to bring back to life is the spirit that lived in art, religion, and philosophy, for it is here that re-collection and remembrance can come together in the present moment of re-presentation. ‘Andacht is the thread that binds together philosophy, religion and art; it is the spiritual disposition that can be actualized as “living spirit” every time that “the spirit of the congregation” is sympathetic to the close association between art, religion and philosophy’ (Heller 1993, 184). Re-collection does not make subjects identical with the spirit, since devotion remains personal and distinct from public worship. In public worship by contrast: ‘shared myths of people or of religious communities are the form of pure re-presentation; they do not need to resurrect the dead, since the dead died only physically, not spiritually’ (Heller 1993, 41). Although the collective experience of shared myths (in Europe’s case the shared master narratives of freedom) defines the difference between private devotion, tinged with nostalgia, and the communal spirit of public worship, both devotion and worship draw on the same act of spiritual presencing. The relationship between past and present that Heller has in mind is much closer, however, to Benjaminian than to Hegelian re-collection. Heller’s conception of Andacht reverses the relationship between past and present that we find in Hegel. The postmodern philosopher is compelled to acknowledge after the End of History that devotion is piety directed to the afterlife of the Spirit in a doubly paradoxical reversal of Hegel. As we have seen, moderns are cut off by self-consciousness from the immediacy of unknowing but living spirit. And that means that our form of self-knowledge is incapable of generating the living spirit of our own present. And that means, first, that we live from the afterlife of the Spirit: ‘our world does not originate new meaning; our spirit is spiritless, for it lives on borrowed meaning’ (Heller 1993, 189). Second and conversely, it means that the past lives in and from the self-knowledge that we

126  The absolute present give it: instead of making our epoch self-conscious, ‘modern theory, philosophy, and to an ever greater degree also art, rather make the past self-conscious’ (Heller 1993, 194). Heller reformulates Hegel through Benjamin’s model of reception. The self-knowledge of the past that we generate illuminates the ultimate paradox of a present that finds its self-consciousness in the self-consciousness with which we endow the past. In making the resurrection of the life of the past the form of our self-consciousness, we live historically. This secondarity means that we cannot speak of a hermeneutic fusion of past and present horizons. What is involved is rather as Heller sees it an act of transfusion: we infuse the life of the present with alien blood (Heller 1993, 202). It is at this point in the reconstruction of Heller’s philosophy of history that we must ask whether it is at all possible to speak of the absolute present as even a limited enterprise. Given that our present is contingent, imprisoned in historicity and divided against itself and that contemporary historical consciousness is neither single nor comprehensive, given that to ‘live historically’ means to re-live the absolute spirit in its historical manifestations, it is evident that our present excludes limits, since it opens up to the endless plurality of all past and present histories and their countless cultural worlds and hence to the endless labour of interpretation. Postmodern Andacht thus anticipates and opens the way to the contemporary transformation of history into heritage (chapter three); they are both manifestations of living historically. To recapitulate: if for Heller the spirit of our congregation seeks self-limitation and self-confirmation in its return to the Absolute Spirit of the Western tradition, this self-limitation is always in danger of losing itself in the imaginary museum of world cultures. If the world of our culture offers us the possibility of living historically both individually and in common in a way that revisits Benjamin’s ‘theology’ of history, the other worlds of culture confront us with the relativity of a culturally omnivorous present that includes everything. Heller envisages a third possibility of living historically — the symposium, the convivial experience of conversation among equals about culture. The symposium offers a narrow bridge of sociability between private devotion and public worship. It acknowledges and appeals to the Kantian spirit of sensus communis (see Heller 1993, Chapter 6: Culture, or ‘Invitation to Luncheon by Immanuel Kant’) but it also knows that the omnivorous spirit of cultural modernity can scarcely be contained by the self-selecting elitism and cultivation of shared tastes of the symposium. Insofar as democracy and hermeneutics express the spirit of modernity, our freedom to rethink everything that once was (Heller 1993, 189) is a mixed blessing, to say the least. The Owl of Minerva and the Angel of History must make place for the presiding spirit of cultural commerce, Hermes, the god of banquets but also the trickster god. Hermes, the god of exchange, of the rendering and receiving of meaning, has become the active principle of our ‘absolute spirit.’ In Heller’s words, ‘everyone has been busy for almost two centuries attributing meaning to all past and present practices’ (Heller 1993, 171).

The absolute present  127

Towards a conjectural history of the present: a theory of history A Theory of History and a decade later A Philosophy of History in Fragments are both attempts to rethink the possibility of philosophy of history after the demise of the grand narratives. They both seek to analyze the history of the present that began in 1914 and is defined by its traumatic legacy and the confusion of historical consciousness. The later text is a reflection on the history of progress that ended in Auschwitz, the earlier the attempt to conceptualize our absolute present — beyond Hegel and beyond Benjamin — in light of the successive stages of historical consciousness. At stake is the question of the present. We must therefore preface consideration of our divided present with Heller’s elucidation of historicity as such in A Theory of History. The present is first of all the time of time passing ‘just now’; ‘just now’ becomes ‘now’ once the present expands to include the present past and the present future. ‘Now’ is circumscribed, however, by our ‘being now’ between birth and death (Heller 1982, 36–41). Each such temporal present is at the same time a historical present. ‘Being now’ is always already situated within a regime of historicity and its determination of the relationship between past, present, and future: Every ‘just now,’ ‘now,’ and ‘being now’ is being together, Togetherness. We are together with those living, since we too are living, since we act and think for them and against them. We are together with the dead in so far as we tell their stories, and we are together with those not-yet-born in so far as they live in us as a promise or a faith. Togetherness is contemporaneity. (Heller 1982, 41) Hartog identifies three regimes of historicity, oriented to the past, the future, and the present respectively. Heller identifies six stages or regimes of historical consciousness (Heller 1982, 3–35). This is her starting point to her theory of history. It will be our conclusion because it is the key to the question of the absolute present that is common to all the stages of historical consciousness and central to the conundrums of our historical present since the First World War: ‘contemporaneity is the absolute (present) now. Those who are together now were not together in the past and they will not be together in the future. The past is the Togetherness of others, as is the future’ (Heller 1982, 41). Contemporaneity is the standpoint from which Heller reconstructs the stages of historical consciousness. Her reconstruction shares with Hartog’s regimes the reference to historiography as opposed to the history of events. It shares with philosophy of history the awareness of the non-identity of the absolute and the historical present, that is, the ‘progressive’ consciousness of the historical present as a cultural construct that is itself the product of the historical consciousness of the moderns. This historical consciousness was the condition of the philosophy of history, which relativized all past historical epochs in the name

128  The absolute present of their subsumption under the universalizing perspective of ‘truth-in-history’ (Heller 1982, 216). History’s truth, however, turned out to be the lethal truths of Europe’s warring ideologies since the French Revolution: rival versions of world history that ended in world wars. The history of our present is thus characterized by the confusion of historical consciousness, ‘generated by the First World War and intensified by the traumatic experiences of the Second World War, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the Gulag. . . . Powers which understood themselves as the repositories of the worldhistorical class or the world-historical nation populated the old Europe with concentration camps’ (Heller 1982, 28). Our historical present can no longer appeal to development or to future paradises after so many false promises. Doomsday prophecies have become sober forecasts, just as the hopes we placed in scientific and technological progress have mutated into blueprints for totalitarian dystopias or ecological catastrophes. Writing at the beginning of the 1980s, Heller singles out three positions representative of the confusion of historical consciousness, each an expression of the disintegration of the moderns’ philosophy of history: neo-positivism’s commitment to the sheer facticity of progress as usual, for which rationalization is an article of faith and rationality mere problem-solving; the negative totality of ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ and its vision of one-dimensional man trapped in unfreedom; the vitalist nightmare of the ‘Mental Hospital.’ In this third scenario — the ‘irrational’ complement of instrumental ‘rationality’ — alienated subjectivity finds its meaning in the surrender to private myths, religions and cults, in the embrace of madness and psychosis, and in self-assertion through violence and terror (Heller 1982, 30–32). This is the one, postmodern history of the present, born of the disintegration of philosophy of history. The other is a conjectural history of the present, carried by the postulate of a new kind of philosophy of history. The one inhabits the ruins of the modern age, the other discerns in the present age the birth of a new historical consciousness of contemporaneity. Togetherness is the concept that is common to A Philosophy of History in Fragments and A Theory of History. To recapitulate: Hegel’s Absolute Spirit comes to rest in the Absolute Present of self-knowledge and self-recognition. Each of the successive stages of the unfolding of the Spirit in history was carried by a collective consciousness of Togetherness. And yet, as we saw, the Spirit’s destination is philosophy’s ‘secluded sanctuary,’ reserved for the select few. And if, as Heller argues, postmoderns find their self-consciousness in re-endowing the Spirit with life, this form of ‘living historically’ has transformed the former collective life of Spirit into private devotion (Andacht), just as in comparable fashion the public arts of the past have come to rest in the decontextualized space of the museum. The fact that we can only recollect the life of the Spirit tells that we have lost the present as presence, as contemporaneity. Where being together has collapsed into the personal and private, there can be no worship in common (Heller 1993, 207). How then can we relate the Railway Station, the ‘metaphor of the absolute present’ of our common contingency (Heller 1993, 223), to a present that would be truly con-temporary? A Philosophy of History

The absolute present  129 in Fragments pauses at this threshold and passes the baton back to A Theory of History. The passage from postmodern historical consciousness to the global contemporary, from a fragmentary philosophy of history to a philosophical theory of history hinges on a third construction of the absolute present that presupposes the metaphor of the Railway Station but points beyond it, not to history’s future destination but to the task implicit in our absolute present. Here again our absolute present reveals its Janus face. On the one hand the Railway Station signifies the terminus of modernism’s philosophy of history, on the other hand it is the zero point that calls for a rethinking and reworking of modernism’s legacy in response to the insistent need to give meaning to our historical existence. This is the subject of the final chapter of A Theory of History: ‘Some Remarks about the Sense of Historical Existence.’ Theory of history cannot escape moderns’ imprisonment in history since the French Revolution, by which Heller means the closure inherent in seeking ‘the sense of historical existence’ in and through ‘the sense of history’ (Heller 1982, 218). Philosophies of history expressed the historical consciousness of an age in which beings have become self-conscious regarding the historicity of existence. But this means that truth in history is historicized truth, the inescapable paradox built into all claims to the absolute present. In replacing the philosophy of history by a philosophy about history, A Theory of History wants to sidestep the impasse of the philosophy of history, that is, step outside assumptions specific to the genre that Heller defines as follows: philosophy of history’s central category is the idea of universal history, which subsumes all particular histories; history is comprehended as change, interpreted as progressive, regressive, or cyclicrepetitive; causality operates on the level of history as a whole, not in relation to particular events, structures, or societies; the present is comprehended as the product of the past, just as human nature is conceived as a product of history. The historical character of the human condition determines truth as ‘truth-in-history’ or as ‘the truth of history.’ The ‘truth of history’ will manifest itself positively or negatively in the future. This future refers not to the unknowable future but to the future of the present. The absolute present of the philosophy of history contains not only the past of the present but also the future of the present (Heller 1982, 214–216). How does a theory of history differ? It too is grounded in the absolute present, which as with the philosophy of history contains the past and future of this present. It can lay no stronger claim to historiographical legitimacy than the philosophy of history since it does not put forward new information or new interpretations of past events. And like the philosophy of history it also treats the present in the light of the highest value that it discerns in history. How then can a theory of history escape the closure of philosophy of history’s short-circuit of the sense of historical existence and the sense of history? Heller’s answer is to divide the inheritance of the philosophy of history: A Philosophy of History in Fragments gives her interpretation of the sense of historical existence in terms of ‘living historically’ and A Theory of History gives her interpretation of the sense

130  The absolute present of history in relation to the future of the present. This division of labour allows us to relate Heller’s three renderings of the absolute present to three versions of the philosopher as public intellectual. Philosophy of history in the wake of Hegel is the province of the intellectual as legislator, as spokesman of the universal class (the proletariat, the bureaucracy), a philosophy of history in fragments is the province of the interpreter — to borrow Zygmunt Bauman’s distinction between modern and postmodern intellectuals (Bauman 1987). The future-oriented legislator speaks in the name of the universal, the historically-oriented interpreter as guide to the present age of the confusion of historical consciousness, from which a third version of the intellectual emerges as the theorist of the absolute present as contemporaneity. This third role of the public intellectual is neither that of the legislator nor of the interpreter but let me modify the all too neutral term ‘theorist’ by qualifying it in a Kantian vein: contemporaneity is to be grasped in the light of a conjectural theory of history with cosmopolitan intent. Such a conjectural history rejects any assumption of teleology immanent to history. The subordination of human action to the supposedly higher logic of history is not only untenable but immoral. A conjectural philosophy of history can claim no more for itself than the orienting force of a regulatory idea. As indicated, the starting point and premise of A Theory of History is the division of European historical consciousness into six stages, the first three of which refer to traditional societies and the second three to the stages of modern reflection on historicity since the Renaissance. Heller’s six stages are as follows: Stage 1: the unreflected generality of myth: humanity (generality) is everywhere the same, myth does not recognize any distinction between past, present, and future Stage 2: generality reflected in particularity: myth is replaced by philosophy, history, and literature and consciousness of history emerges with the Greeks and the Jews Stage 3: the unreflected universality of the myth of salvation: the Christian myth of salvation governs and gives meaning to history and demands belief Stage 4: the consciousness of generality reflected in particularity: the consciousness of a new beginning in history, of the rebirth of the past in the present (renewal of the Greek and Jewish legacy in the Renaissance and Reformation), and emergence of a comparative sense of history Stage 5: the consciousness of reflected universality: past histories are unified in the idea of world history. History becomes the universal key to human being in the form of the philosophy of history Stage 6: the consciousness of reflected generality as task: the task of overcoming the present crisis and confusion of historical consciousness through planetary responsibility Theory of history foregrounds what philosophy of history concealed in its ontologization of progress. It is not the immanent logic of historical change that gives

The absolute present  131 meaning to the present; on the contrary, it is the absolute present that gives meaning to the past, present, and future. Where philosophy of history inscribes its truth in history itself, thereby ascribing to itself the imputed consciousness of universal history, a theory of history undertakes a reconstruction that applies not to stages of real history but solely to their self-understanding as historicity (Heller 1982, 230): Philosophy of history has always dealt with the present: the ontologization of history was the imputed consciousness of the present. . . . Theory of history is equally a philosophy, even though an incomplete one. It deals with the present to a no lesser extent, but it is conscious of it. This awareness is nothing but the application of historicity to its own theoretical suggestions. (Heller 1982, 293) Where philosophy of history unifies the past into the prehistory of the present, a theory of history rejects this subsumption of the past to the logic of the present. Rather, in applying historicity to itself, theory of history understands the successive stages of historical consciousness as objectivations that once expressed the real life of historical societies. ‘The real life is gone, but not the objectivations produced by it; they can always be appropriated if the need for their reception exists.’ Such appropriations are value choices. This choice is governed for Heller by the value of freedom as ‘the general and all-encompassing criterion for theorizing histories’ (Heller 1982, 330–331): The theory of history committed itself to reflect upon itself historically, but this is exactly why it has to reflect on Togetherness as the absolute present which cannot be circumvented. I  accepted the obligation to understand all histories going by their own norms and not mine, but it is I who understand them, and the categorical framework, along with the set of values through which I understand them, are mine. (Heller 1982, 328) The connection between historicism and freedom, integral to Heller’s theory of history, finds to my mind its most illuminating elucidation in Otto Hinze’s critical reflections in 1926 on Ernst Troeltsch and the problems of historicism. These reflections also serve to introduce the paradoxes of cultural modernity to which Heller seeks answers in her philosophy and theory of history, a question to which I come back later. Hinze argued that modern historical thought since Vico, Herder, and Hegel developed as a cultural phenomenon rather than as political history (Hinze 1975, 377). By cultural history he understands the focus on development in relation to groups as against the focus on individual actors as the subjects of historical-political narratives. Development has as its collective objects the ‘national soul,’ the ‘objective spirit’ of institutions, economic production, etc. It is not sufficient, however, for the historian to relate to the historical object in

132  The absolute present terms of its own values, the historian must also take a position towards his object in the light of the values of his own time. Only such a ‘critical understanding of contemporary values leads to a cultural synthesis of the present’ (Hinze 1975, 409). When Hinze suggests that what is involved in constructing a cultural synthesis is comparable to Einstein’s theory of relativity, we can think of theory of history as the application of historicity to itself in A Theory of History as Heller’s Einsteinian turn. More specifically, Heller’s reconstruction of the stages of historical consciousness as the past-present of our present is intended as a creative and critical appropriation of the European cultural heritage in the light of contemporary values, that is, as Hinze observes, in the light of our principles of the comprehension and selection of ethical and cultural values. In defining this process of selection as the vital principle of development itself (Hinze 1975, 410), he leads us directly to the guiding idea of A Theory of History, when he states that ‘freedom is basically nothing more than the consciousness of freedom’ (Hinze 1975, 413). Heller takes her vital principle of development from the consciousness of progress as defined by R G Collingwood: ‘there is one other thing for historical thought to do: namely to create this progress itself. For progress is not a mere fact to be discovered by historical thinking: it is only through historical thinking that it will come about at all’ (Collingwood 1963, 333). If freedom is basically nothing other than the consciousness of freedom, then the consciousness of progress is nothing other than progress in the consciousness of freedom. This is Heller’s general criterion, according to which her historical reconstruction finds its meaning for us as the prehistory of our present, a present which imprisons us in historicity and yet lays claim at the same time to the privilege and primacy accorded to the present in philosophy of history. Our present is not just absolute in its contingency, it is absolute in relation to the past and the future, now that they can only be constructed as the past and future of our present. Hence the present moment of recognition of the past as the past of our present remains after Hegel the highest level of self-recognition of which a theory of history is capable (Heller 1982, 334). Such a (fleeting) moment of redemptive recognition is in turn the vital principle of Benjamin’s Jetztzeit. Before we ask how the division between ‘the confusion of historical consciousness’ and ‘the consciousness of reflected generality as task’ is to be understood, I want to return for a moment to the other division of consciousness highlighted in A Philosophy of History in Fragments, that between private devotion and public worship. Heller’s value choice is rooted in what she elsewhere calls master narratives about freedom as the arche of European culture (Heller 2011, 129–140). European thinking about freedom and our imaginary institutions of liberty and freedom have their sources in the Bible and Greek and Roman philosophy and historiography. Work on these master narratives (as opposed to Hans Blumenberg’s work on myth, since for Heller these master narratives are Europe’s living myths) is the means by which the European imagination has been able to renew its roots in a process of constant re-interpretation that feeds into the self-understanding of cultural modernity as the constant interrogation and contestation of values.

The absolute present  133 The question whether these master narratives of freedom can ever become the shared arche of humankind, of a single global ecumene (Heller 2011, 139) brings us back to the task of a necessarily incomplete theory of history. In the face of an open future Heller asks us to relate to it as our future-present age, by which she means the injunction ‘to construct our pasts as past-present ages and our future as future-present ages from the viewpoint of Togetherness conceived as absolute present’ (Heller 1982, 46). What does reflection on the absolute present of our Togetherness entail? In first place it entails recognizing that the past and the future do not justify anything. We can look to the past only for lessons and to the future only as a regulative idea. Second, Togetherness can only become contemporaneity through the value we attribute to Togetherness according to the consciousness of reflected generality. It is the task of radical hermeneutics to bring this generality to reflective consciousness by disclosing what the past and our present have in common, or more exactly, what comes to presence in the absolute present of Togetherness (Heller 1982, 46–47). Such a reconstruction derives, as indicated, not from history or from historiography but from a philosophy about history in the form of a conjectural theory, which posits a progressive development from the unreflected generality of myth to the consciousness of reflected generality as our task, without assuming that the present or the future represents the necessary consequence of history. The idea of freedom invites but does not compel a dialectical reading of the six stages of historical consciousness in terms of a historical dialectic of mythical closure and hermeneutic openness, where each stage of closure leads on to a new stage of enlightenment. Thus we have three stages of mythical consciousness: myths of origin (stage 1); the universal myth of salvation (3); and the universal myth of world history (5). And three stages of post-mythical consciousness: generality (humankind) reflected in particularity, giving rise to the idea of history (2); the consciousness of generality reflected in particularity, giving rise to the idea of comparative history (4); consciousness of reflected generality as task, giving rise to the idea of global history (6), a global history that can attain its full meaning only if it becomes one with the self-recognition of humankind for itself. To repeat: the idea of freedom invites but does not compel such a reading. What it does compel is the realization that the exit from history into time is not simply our fate but is to be grasped as our liberation from the fata morganas of philosophy of history.

From the postmodern to the contemporary At this point I must reverse course by returning to A Philosophy of History in Fragments because it both continues and revisits the conclusions of A Theory of History. If a theory of history finds its vanishing point in the future, a philosophy of history looks, as we have seen, to the past. How do both relate to living on the Railway Station, that is, to the decision to live in the present? Or, to rephrase

134  The absolute present the question in the light of the history of the present, how can the consciousness of ‘reflected generality,’ renamed ‘post-modern consciousness’ in A Philosophy of History in Fragments (1993, vii), be understood as contemporary? My guide here is the Preface to A Philosophy of History in Fragments, where Heller relates the genesis of her return to the problem of historical consciousness to her dissatisfaction with the fourth and last part of A Theory of History, ‘Introduction to a theory of history.’ The answers she gave in this last part to the meaning of history are weighed and found wanting. There she argued that we are not the goal of History (the History of the philosophies of history) but History is our goal (1982, 295). History as our goal entails the idea of progress as ‘gain without any losses’ (1982, 303), the need for Utopia, and hence understanding the sense of historical existence in terms of a self-conscious historicity oriented to the ideas of progress and Togetherness. It is telling that in A Philosophy of History in Fragments Heller finds the sense of historical existence ‘On the Railway Station,’ the title of her last chapter. A necessarily incomplete theory of history with respect to the task of reflected generality is replaced by a different kind of incompletion in a post-modern philosophy of history, no longer grounded in the future possibility of ‘History retrieved’ (1982, 281–298) but in the contingency of our imprisonment in historicity here and now. Central to the inconclusion of A Philosophy of History in Fragments is the recognition that the utopia offered in a theory of history is empty (1993, vii). It is a recognition that does not spare her other answers, for the History that is our goal can only be posited in conjunction with the ideas of Progress, Freedom, and Togetherness, ideas that come perilously close to being empty universals. However much one may concur with Collingwood and Heller’s identification of gain without corresponding loss as the criterion of progress, it nevertheless reduces progress itself, the historical reality of change with its inescapable dialectic of losses and gains, to an ahistorical or post-historical category. Progress in the abstract reduces in turn the historical struggles for freedom that gave rise to the master narratives of Europe to the retrospective consciousness of freedom and leaves the idea of Togetherness, as the task of our divided present, like Utopia, as a concept without content. The attempt to find an alternative to the philosophy of history in a theory of history remains caught in the halfway house of the post-modern in that it is still looking to giving a new meaning to the old concept of History (of the philosophy of history). The reformulation of ‘reflected generality’ as ‘post-modern consciousness’ in A Philosophy of History in Fragments likewise remains caught in this halfway house, as Heller’s title indicates. The present age has no place for systems or for grand narratives, hence Heller’s choice of the genre of fragments, a form whose limitations coincide with the walls of our prison house. This choice is not only a constraining necessity, it is at the same a liberating choice, more exactly, a liberating paradox that underwrites the dialogic construction and the deliberate inconclusion of the book. Written into this incompletion is the understanding of Togetherness as ‘the recognition of difference in a world where modernity has been (empirically) generalized. That means

The absolute present  135 that . . . people and cultures can share the same temporality’ (1993, viii). They can also share the common space of difference if they are ready to listen to others and their different worlds. In a world where modernity has become empirically generalized, or, as I  would prefer to put it, in a world where globalization has empirically generalized the modernization that provides the enabling condition of a modernity that recognizes difference, Togetherness is transformed into the open paradox of shared difference. Thus when Heller writes that ‘the strength of liberal democracy grows in proportion with the evaporation of universal narratives’ (1993, 234), the corollary of this strength is the capacity of the liberal-democratic imagination to ‘embody difference because it is embedded in a form of life’ (235). The idea of Togetherness as task acquires a practical-paradoxical structure in relation to the consciousness of the relativity of our world and of other worlds. Togetherness becomes the capacity to see ourselves from the standpoint of others and ‘thus have a world of our own and still know the world that is broader than the one we have’ (234). I distinguish modernity from modernization because what Heller calls ‘the liberal-democratic imagination’ is integral to cultural modernity and because its capacity to embody difference is at the heart of a form of life that can live with the dialectic of gains and losses in a world that has made progress its inherent principle. This form of life is one that lives with and from the paradoxes that define our absolute present: ‘we know that we are contingent, and it is because of that that our access to the Absolute is barred. We know that we are historical “products” and what we have produced is of short-term relevance’ (Heller 1993, 198). Or again: ‘The God of philosophy is dead; long live the philosophy of culture. Philosophy of culture is the philosophy of the omnivorous absolute spirit without identity’ (202). Our historical consciousness ‘encourages interpretation, quotation, re-thinking, re-dreaming’ (209), with the result that irony ‘begins to underscore all speculative and theoretical forms and modes’ from Derrida and Rorty to de Man and Luhmann (213). Irony and paradox respond to this dialectic of loss and gain in a way that can best be described as the capacity to live with the dialectics of progress, that is, a consciousness that can make its home in the absolute present of the Railway Station. On the basis of these comments I would like to suggest that Heller’s resolutions to the two paradoxes of progress central to her reading of historical consciousness today falls short of the paradoxes in question. The first, as diagnosed by Markus, concerns Hegel’s deeply paradoxical concept of modernity: ‘the only society which makes dynamic progress into its own inherent principle, and thereby “ends history”, can progress only on the basis of a dead cultural tradition, a tradition which its development robbed of spiritual creativity and forced into the merely private sphere’ (Markus 2011, 413). Although Heller rejects the tragic inflexion of Markus’s reading of Hegel, Heller accepts his diagnosis at the same time as she reverses it in A Philosophy of History in Fragments. We give meaning to our historical consciousness by giving our self-consciousness to the past. This is her paradoxical answer to the Hegelian paradox of progress.

136  The absolute present It falls short, however, in that it defines the dialectics of cultural modernity too negatively as loss rather than as the reflexivity that embraces the dialectic of loss and gain and is itself this (unhappy) consciousness. Second, in A Theory of History she addresses the possibility of progress after the demise of progress in terms of the conception of progress as paradoxical in itself that she shares with Collingwood, a paradox that we have the possibility of realizing and practically transcending by recognizing that Togetherness (as the index of the progress of freedom) is nothing other than the consciousness of Togetherness. If Togetherness is to be more than an empty concept, we need to go back to Heller’s idea of shared difference, that is, the capacity to see ourselves from the standpoint of others and ‘thus have a world of our own and still know the world that is broader than the one we have’ (1993, 234). And here I would add that the idea of shared difference is the living form of cultural translation (chapter seven), just as cultural translation in the widest sense is the lifeblood of cultural modernity and the medium of Togetherness. It is worth dwelling a little longer on the paradox of cultural modernity as defined by Markus. If, as he says, this is a paradox bequeathed to us by Hegel, it is not the paradox central to Hegel’s own philosophy of history. The philosophical reconciliation that he proposed in the Phenomenology of the Spirit asks us to affirm the tragic course of human history as the charnel house of the Absolute Spirit. The tragic union of blindness and higher meaning that constitutes history has no reconciliation other than in re-collection, Er-innerung, the ‘higher form’ of the panorama of history’s contingent actions and events. The paradox that Hegel bequeaths to us, however, is that of a dead, completed tradition as the precondition of cultural modernity. Whether we see this tradition in the light of recollection or simply as the museum of the Spirit, it denotes the completion and end of Absolute Spirit, the end, that is, of the tragic paradoxes of the human condition that found their enduring expression in the arts, religions, and philosophies of the past. Our paradox, however, is no longer tragic precisely because modern society has made progress its inherent principle. The contemporary spirit of our congregation is ironic rather than tragic, carried as it is by the consciousness of the dialectic of gains and losses that can no longer appeal to the grand narratives of progress. The resolve to live in the present, to make the Railway Station our home, is the resolve to live with irresolvable paradox: to refuse, that is, the reduction of the paradoxes of progress either to a terminal dialectic of Enlightenment or to a regressive dialectic of Romanticism (Roberts and Murphy 2004). In Dialectic of Romanticism Peter Murphy and I distanced ourselves from these rival modernisms in terms of a third interpretation of progress, in which we located the criteria of progress in the reciprocity of change and continuity in relation to tradition and in the reciprocity of the rival currents of Enlightenment and Romanticism in relation to the ongoing vitality of cultural modernity. Finally, there are two key ideas — one in A Philosophy of History in Fragments and one in A Theory of History — that are open to an extrapolation that remains implicit in Heller’s argument. Let me introduce my comments on the

The absolute present  137 two ideas in question by going back to the reflections on presentism of Francois Hartog. As we have seen, the Railway Station signifies the terminus of History, our exit from History into time and imprisonment in the iron cage of historicity. Exiled from History, postmoderns experience the sense of historical existence as the secondarity at the heart of historical consciousness. For Hartog this sense of secondarity expresses itself in the ‘universalization of heritage’ (Hartog 2005, 10), to the point that the perception and production of heritage in the heritage industry is approaching the limit at which everything becomes heritage, that is, the point at which the present is historicized and museified as it occurs: ‘a present already past before ever completely happening’ (Hartog 2005, 15). Hartog formulates Heller’s paradox of the secondarity that lends consciousness to the past in the following fashion: ‘the most authentically modern today would be the historical past, but according to modern standards. Only the facades are preserved’ (Hartog 2005, 9). Heller’s paradox of secondarity is perceived, as we have seen, as our constitutive lack, that is, as the inescapable condition of our historicity. It is a condition that is intrinsic to historicism and thus intrinsic to the modern condition since the eighteenth century or from Hegel at the latest. Nevertheless, our secondarity was not perceived as problematic as long as the ideas of development and progress held sway. That our secondarity is now perceived as problematic does not mean, however, that the idea of progress has dissolved. On the contrary its sway is still evident when we regard living historically as deficient. We fail to grasp the real significance of historicism, we fail to see that the enduring ‘progress’ that defines historicism is retrospective: it lies in the discovery, recovery and revaluation of the past, a past that is at the same time our creation. And only if it is understood as such, can it become the past of our present. The past as our creation is the outcome of an endless labour of interpretation, which continues to enlarge and to enrich the world we live in to a degree that would have been inconceivable even 100 years ago. In retrospect the real paradox of modern historical consciousness is that it mortgaged the present to the investment in an ever-receding future. Let us replace that paradox with the more productive paradox that sets against the secondarity inscribed into the reduction of history to heritage the Hegelian counter-perspective of heritage as World Heritage, that is, as the recognized past of our present and as such integral to a full sense of contemporaneity that is capable of integrating dynamic change and continuity. The reversal of perspectives that I  am suggesting here acquires added relevance in a globalizing world. The advent of European modernity, which was one with the advent of historicism, signalled the end of Europe’s pre-modern Christian civilization just as in turn modernity’s global impact signalled the crisis of the world’s historical civilizations. By the same token, however, historicism’s creation of the relativizing concept of civilizations, whether surviving or defunct, opened the way to their transformation. The crisis of the world’s civilizations was the condition of their resurrection in the new form of the comparative history of civilizations. In the same way we can argue that Hegel’s Absolute

138  The absolute present Spirit lives its afterlife (in civilizational plural), now that the religions, arts, and cultures of the world have entered the historical mode of existence (Redner 2013). In a similar fashion Hartog shows how the progressive generalization of heritage, from cultural to natural to living to intangible heritage, is an important practical and symbolic presage of an emergent self-consciousness of humankind, defined by Lyotard as ‘humankind present to itself as history’ (quoted Hartog 2005, 9). As we noted in chapter four, this universalizing consciousness is spelled out in the preamble to the 1964 Charter of Venice of the International Commission for the Intellectual Cooperation of the Society of Nations and the International Council of Museums, which states: ‘humanity, which is becoming more conscious of the unity of human values, considers ancient monuments as a common heritage and regarding future generations, recognizes itself responsible for their safeguarding.’ If we are to think of global society as a new, emerging civilization (a much disputed question), it will be a civilization, whose Absolute Spirit is made up of the history of the world’s civilizations, that is, a new type of civilization that could lay claim to the consciousness of reflected generality through its acceptance of responsibility towards the past and future of our natural and cultural inheritance. Human history is embedded in the immensely longer scientific history of the planet as opposed to the brief records of human history. The deep time of planetary consciousness places human history in a new frame of understanding and responsibility that is critical to the historical self-reflection of world society. Both kinds of history, however, the deep time of planetary history and the relativizing-universalizing hermeneutics of historicism belong together as the legacy of the Enlightenment. But it is only now under the pressure of the multiple threats to the planet posed by human development from climate change to pandemics that planetary consciousness has become the inescapable counter-balance to human evolution that makes conservation the key to both histories: the imperative to conserve our natural and cultural heritage (Redner 2013, 353–361) and to preserve the planet is the duty of our ‘doubly indebted present’ (Hartog) to the past and the future. This Togetherness is that of a global contemporary modernity.

References Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Century. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2003. Selected Writings 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collingwood, R. G. 1963. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hartog, Francois. 2005. ‘Time and Heritage,’ Museum International 57, 7–18. Heller, Agnes. 1982. A Theory of History. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Heller, Agnes. 1993. A Philosophy of History in Fragments. Oxford: Blackwell.

The absolute present  139 Heller, Agnes. 2011. Aesthetics and Modernity. Essays by Agnes Heller, ed. John Rundell. Lanham: Lexington Books. Hinze, Otto. 1975. The Historical Essays of Otto Hinze, ed. Felix Gilbert. New York: Oxford University Press. Markus, György. 2011. Culture, Science, Society. The Constitution of Cultural Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Redner, Harry. 2013. Beyond Civilization. Society, Culture, and the Individual in the Age of Globalization. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Roberts, David and Peter Murphy. 2004. Dialectic of Romanticism. A Critique of Modernism. London: Continuum.

Index

absolute present 3, 120–123 absolute spirit 13, 22–23, 120 Adorno, Theodor W. 10, 27, 54, 102; culture industry 8, 52; modern culture, conception of 13; negative theology 10 aesthetic colonization 16 aesthetic consumption, democratization of 61 aesthetic economy 55 aestheticization 2, 5, 16, 18–20, 22, 25, 51–52, 55, 57 aesthetics, politics of 103 Agamben, Gorgio 36 alienation 13, 112 Amos Rex Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki) 110 Andacht (piety of thinking) 125 Anderson, Perry 40 Angel of History (Benjamin) 27, 35, 41, 44, 121–122, 126 Angelus novus (Klee) 27 anti-modernism 94 Antinomies of Culture (Markus) 16–17 Apocalypse of History (Benjamin) 122 apotheosis 52 Arbeiter, Der (The Worker, Jünger) 70 Arcades Project, The (Benjamin) 53 Art and Enlightenment. Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (Roberts) 102–103 Art History after Modernism (Belting) 24, 107 Atomised (Houellebecq) 65ff Auto da Fe (Canetti) 65ff Badiou, Alain 121 Bakhtin, Mikhail 7 Bauman, Zygmunt 130

Bayly, C A 94 Beecroft, Alexander 84, 96; literary biomes 84; typology of world literatures 96 Belting, Hans 24, 107, 113, 115 Benjamin, Walter 1, 3, 7, 10, 27, 31–38, 52, 55, 121–123; actualization of image of past 28; Ausstellungswert 58; dialectical image 37; Jetztzeit 27, 31, 33, 122, 132; messianic conception of revolutionary political action 36; model of messianic time 39; philosophy of history 33, 38; theory of history 42–43 Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Nietzsche) 7, 54–55 Böhme, Gernot 18, 20, 54; aesthetic economy 55, 60; argument, aesthetic value 55 Boli, John 95 Brave New World (Huxley) 65 Broch, Hermann 65, 67 bureaucracy 53, 88 Cage, John 105 Calvinism 67 Calvin Klein 109 cancer 78–79 Canetti, Elias 65, 69, 77 capitalism 19; aestheticization 20, 109; artistic 19, 108; Calvinist spirit of 67; commodity 53; consumer 51; industrial 53; of seduction 73; spirit of 55; transaesthetic 19; transaesthetic economy of contemporary 52 Carlyle, Thomas 90 Casanova, Pascale 88–89, 93 Cassirer, Ernst 11 Castells, Manuel 58

Index  141 centre-periphery model 89 Christian Middle Ages 84 citation 36 civilization: decadence of 52; European 70, 114; Western 73, 75, 78 Clouscard, Michel 73; bourgeois bohemians (bobos) 73 Coetzee, J M 41 coincidentia oppositorum 29 Collingwood, R G 132 commercialization of art 108 commodification 16, 18, 50; of cultural products 57, 82; of culture 55; market for cultural goods 16 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx) 83 “Conjectures on World Literature” (Moretti) 93 Conrad, Sebastian 95 consciousness: mythical 133; postmythical 133; of reflected generality 133 contemporaneity 2–3, 63, 108, 111; global 4 contemporary art, cultural meta-politics of 117 contemporary culture 5, 15–16, 101 Crimp, Douglas 50–51 Cultural Digital Library Indexing Our Heritage (CLIOH) 57 cultural heritage organizations (CHOs) 56 culturalism 49, 56–58 culturalization 49, 112 cultural modernity 2, 4–6, 9, 11, 16, 19, 21, 56, 96, 98, 107, 112, 124, 126, 131; Adorno’s conception 13; aestheticization 5, 25; Lukács and Markus’s theory 10; musealization 5, 25; paradox of 136; scientization 5, 25; theory of constitution of 2; Western 5; with Westernization 94; Western Marxism 5 cultural translation 83, 95–96, 98, 112–113, 116, 136; agent of 97; to the exchange of currencies 90; practice of 98; process of 83, 95 culture: authentic 7; exchange 96; history 48; imperialism 22; industry 8, 52–60; institutions 22; market-based 52; of modernity 6, 17; of narcissism 20; objectivations 8; paradoxical unity of 21–22; ‘primitive’ 22; production 114; relation 11; theory of modern 5 Culture, Science, Society (Markus) 6, 15 Damrosch, David 90–91 Danto, Arthur C 105

Debussy, Claude 102 decontextualization, historicizing 51, 87, 97 de-differentiation 16, 18, 20 Delanty, Gerard 98 de-objectivation 17 Derrida, Jacques 93 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer) 54 Dickie, George 114 Dictatorship Over Needs (Feher) 6 disenchantment 13 diversity, global 94 Döblin, Alfred 65 Doctor Faustus (Mann) 39, 66–67 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 7 Düttmann, Alex 106 Ecology of World Literature from Antiquity to the Present Day (Beechcroft) 84 economic modernization, global 2 ecstasies of present 3 Einstein on the Beach (Glass) 105 Eisenstadt, S N 94 England, England (Barnes) 58–59 enlightenment 13, 15, 20 Enlightenment 86 Essence of Christianity (Feuerbach) 53 ethnology 86 Europe, reunification of 65 exhibition practice, transhistorical 3 Feher, Ferenc 6 Finding Time Again (Proust) 28 Frankenstein (Shelley) 20 French Revolution 35, 121, 128 fundamentalism 57; religious 94 Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (Koselleck) 1, 47 futurism 3–4, 23, 47, 124 Gellner, Ernst 85 generality (humankind) 133 generalization of aestheticity 103 Gesellschaft 83, 97 Gestell 13 Glass, Philip 105 Glastonbury Romance, A (Powys) 27 Glissant, Edouard 93 global art 113; see also world art globalization 98 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 110

142 Index Hartog, Francois 2–3, 23, 62; historiographical model 2, 104; presentism 2, 23–24; progressive generalization of heritage 138; twin temporalities 23; universalization of heritage 137 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 3, 7–8, 96, 120; absolute spirit 13; dialectic of enlightenment 8; modern society 5 ‘Hegelian Conception of Culture, The’ (Markus) 8 hegemonic modernity 113 Heidegger, Martin 8, 13 Heidelberg Aesthetics (Lukács) 9–10 Heller, Agnes 2–3, 6, 41–42, 127–131; absolute present 3; Andacht 125; stages of historical consciousness 127–128, 130; theory of history 131 heritage 48–49; history 48; indifferentiation of history 51; industry 52–60; policy programmes 49; universalization of 137 historicism 27; European 2; Promethean 27 historicity 2, 47, 65 historicization, relativizing 16 history, reconceptualization of 120 Hitler-Stalin Pact 37, 122 Hollein, Max 109 Horkheimer, Max 54 Houellebecq, Michel 65, 69, 72–73, 77, 81 humanity, self-extinction of 71 Huxley, Aldous 65, 69–70 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 101 hybridization 20 hypermodernism, ‘post-historical’ 52 impoverishment, spiritual 9 India 89 individuation, self-transcendence of 75 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 27 institutionalization: of art 12; of literature study 89 intellectuals 15 inter-cultural encounters 25 International Commission for the Intellectual Cooperation of the Society of Nations 63 International Council of Museums 49, 57, 63 International Council on Monuments and Sites 49 Ishiguro, Kazuo 80–81 Island (Huxley) 74

Jetztzeit 1, 27, 31, 122, 132 Joseph and his Brothers (Mann) 27 Joyce, James 27 Jünger, Ernst 70 Kant, Immanuel 2–3, 7–8, 82–83, 96, 126, 130; enlightenment 84; humanity’s cosmopolitan future 3; modern society 5; self-enlightening public 8; universal history 83 Kavolis, Vytaulas 94 Klages, Ludwig 27, 33–34; object and image 33; Urbilder 33 Klee, Paul 27 Koselleck, Reinhart 1–2 Kostenevich, Albert 101 Language of Gods in the World of Man: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, The (Pollock) 85 Latest Catastrophe. History, the Present, the Contemporary, The (Rousso) 43 leisure society 74 libertarianism 73 Lipovetsky, Gilles 19, 51, 60 literature, postcolonial 89 Little Superman (Heinrich Mann) 65 Logic of the Cultural Sciences, The (Cassirer) 11 Lukács, György 6, 10; absolute 10; concept of form 10; culture, problem of 7; The Historical Novel 40; Marxist thinking 7; revolutionary-democratic spirit 40–41 Lyotard, Francois 62, 138 Magic Mountain, The (Mann) 27, 66 Magris, Claudio 42 Malraux, André 3, 61; imaginary museum 52; spirit of art 22–23 Mann, Heinrich 28, 39–42, 65; Henri Quatre 40–41; image of past 39; Man of Straw 65; messianic actualization avant la lettre 39 Mann, Thomas 27, 65 Man without Qualities, The (Musil) 27 Marat/Sade (Weiss) 105 Markus, György 2, 5–7, 82; Antinomies of Culture 16–17; commodification of cultural products 82; contemporary global modernity 15; elucidation of paradigm of production in Marx 6; postMarxist theory of cultural modernity 6; reconciliation of normative structure

Index  143 15; regulative framework 12; structure of validity 11; theory of high culture of classical modernity 5–6, 8, 11 Marx, Karl 96; civilization 84; practicalsocial rationality 6 Marxism and Anthropology. The Concept of ‘Human Essence’ in the Philosophy of Marx (Markus) 6 Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage (Kostenevich) 101 McNeill, William 94 memory 47; conscious 31; involuntary memory 30–31, 37; negative memory 43; shock waves of memory 47 metamorphosis 91 Meyer, John W 95, 103 minor literatures 92 modern aesthetic art 102 Moderner Kapitalismus (Sombart) 55 modern individuals 9 modernism, European 3, 105 modernity: aesthetic art 12, 102; culture as the realization of the highest values 12; de-divinization of world 12; intellectual culture 15; moving ratio of 4; paradoxical conception 9; science 12; technology 12 MoMA 105 monuments, re-investment of 52 Moral Considerations on the Destination of Works of Art (Quatremère) 50 Moretti, Franco 93 Mudrovcic, María Inés 47 multiethnic identities 95 musealization 2, 5, 16, 21–22, 25, 51, 120; scientifically-informed 51 museums 9, 96, 106; art-historical 107; momentary contemporaneity of 108; permanent collections 86; transaesthetic museum 108 museum of contemporary art: aesthetic regime 101–107; global contemporary art 103–117; transaesthetic, transhistorical museum 107–113 Musil, Robert 27 nationalism 89 ‘national’ languages 88 national literatures: in Europe 85; translation 91 natural history 86 Netflix 98 Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro) 80 New History of German Literature, A (Wellbury) 43

Nietzsche, Friedrich 7–8, 12, 52, 54–55 novel: self-reflexivity of 97; global ubiquity of 83 objectivation 11 On the Concept of History (Über den Begriff der Geschichte) (Benjamin) 27–28, 31–32, 36, 43–44 Organization of World Heritage Cities 49 Orsini, Francesco 89 Osborne, Peter 104 Osterhammel, Jürgen 94 Owl of Minerva (Hegel) 122 periodization, art-historical 111 Petrushka (Stravinsky) 102 phantasmagoria 52 Phenomenology of the Spirit (Hegel) 120, 122 Philosophy of History in Fragments, A (Heller) 120, 123, 128, 134 Philosophy of New Music (Adorno) 27, 102 Planck, Max 77 Pollock, Sheldon 85 postmodernity 60 Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 56 Powys, John Cowper 27 presentism 2, 47–48 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin) 7 programmed society 54 Proust, Marcel 27–31; involuntary memory 28, 32–33; narcissistic cultivation of the private self 32; sense of the past and present moment 29 public opinion on planetary scale 80 public sphere, virtuous circle 8 Quatremère de Quincy 49–50 Rabinow, Paul 4 Rancière, Jacques 102, 105 rationalization 13, 15; competitive 16 Readings, Bill 88 reception, anti-historicist model 28 recontextualization 97 redemption 36 Reich, Steve 105 reification 13 Reik, Theodore 31 rematerialization 17 return/resurrection 30–31 revolutionary-democratic spirit 40–41

144 Index revolutionary-redemptive actualization 38 Rite of Spring (Stravisky) 102 Robertson, Roland 94 romanticism 13, 15, 20, 52; ethic 55; identity politics 117 Ross, Bruce Clunies 88 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 52, 59 Rousso, Henry 1–2, 41–45 salvation, universal myth of 133 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 9 science fiction and time of novel 65; crowds, cancer, clones 75–79; end of the novel 79–81; sense of an ending 65–70 scientization 2, 5, 16–17, 19–20, 22, 25 Scott, Walter 40 secondarity 137 Second World War 37 self-citations 51 self-consciousness 8, 42, 72, 120, 124–126 self-determination 8–9 self-enlightenment 9 self-image 20 Serroy, Jean 19, 51, 60 sex-and-shopping society 70, 73 sexuality: and eros 65; gratification 72; liberation 74; revolution 73 Shelley, Mary 20 Simmel, Georg 8 Simons, Raf 109 Siskind, Mariano 83, 96 Sleepwalkers, The (Broch) 67 Smith, Terry 111 Snell-Hornby, Mary 91 social history 48 social totality 6 society of culture 5, 15, 17 Society of the Spectacle, The (Debord) 53 Sombart, Werner 55 species-essence 6 Stichweh, Rudolf 115–116 Stravinsky, Igor 102 suicide: self-cancellation 71; of Western civilization 69 System of Transcendental Idealism (Schelling) 9

tautology 93 theatralization 19 Theory of History, A (Heller) 122–123, 127–129, 134 Theory of the Novel (Lukács) 7, 97 time: apprehension of 30; differentials 3; semantics of 47 Time Machine Project 110 togetherness 135 totalitarianism 121 Toynbee, Arnold 124 transaestheticism 19, 108 transcription 91 transfiguration 91 Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, The (Osterhammel) 94 translation/translatability 91–92, 94 transubstantiation 91 Ulysses (Joyce) 27 unity, spiritual 8 universalization, progressive 21 Untertan, Der (Mann) 65 Urbild (primordial image) 33 utopia, authentic 72 Vattimo, Gianni 103 virtualization 60 Vogel, Sabine 115 Wallerstein, Immanuel 93 Weber, Max 8 Weiss, Peter 105 Wellbury, David 43 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Goethe) 90 Wolin, Richard 27, 33 world art 25, 113 world heritage 60–63 world history, universal myth of 133 world-literary market 83 world literature(s) 84–87, 91, 95 World Monuments Fund 49 world-system theory 93 World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) 57