Okwui Enwensor Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence

8/9/2019 Okwui Enwensor Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence

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2/15

MODERNITY

ND

POSTCOLONI L

M IV LENCE

Okwui ENWEZOR

FROM GR N MODERNITY

TO

PETIT

MODERNITY

THERE I S A DUAL NARRATIVE that is often taken to be

characteristic of modernity: the first is the idea ofits

unique Europeanness and the second is its translat

abilityinto non-European cultures. This narrative ar

gues for the mutability of modernity thus permit

ting its export and enhancing its universal character

while putting a European epistemological stamp

on

its subsequent reception. The travelling charac

te r

of

this dimension

of

modernity as export under

stands modernity as emerging from Europe sayfrom

the mid-fifteenth century

and

slowly spreading out

w ar d like a million p oi nt s of li ght i nt o the patches

of darkness that lie outside its foundational centre.

M oderni ty i n t hi s gui se w as p ro ject ed as

an

instru

ment ofprogress. The guiding concepts often associ

a ted with i t - instrumental r ati ona li

the

develoJ -

men of sm - emerge

1

the debate e een

theological and scientiJic [ca on and provided thc

foundation for the period of European Renaissance

and Enlightenment in which two structures of pow

er and domination

that

marked the Middle Ages

feudalism and theological absolutism - collapsed.

Scientific rationality

and

individual property that

formed the basis ofcapital accumulation were trium

phant. This colla e shift d

the

~ c l e s o f sovereign

power from

the

heolo

I

to

~

The chiefprinciples of secularism - individualliber

ty political sovereignty democratic forms of govern

ance capitalism etc. - defined its universal charac

te r and furnished its master narrative. Thus emerged

the rightness ofthe European model no t only for its

diverse societies

but

also for

other

societies and civ

ilisations across the r es t of the world. Most impor

tantly the export ofEuropean modernity

became

not

only a justification for bu t a principal part of global

imperialism. Among serious critics

the master

nar

rative made the claims of universality susceptible to

epistemological and historical distortion when de

ployed in

the

service of European imperialism. There

is g oo d r easo n for

the

criticism. Some historians on

the right such as Niall Ferguson have argued that

modern European imperialism specifically that of

the British Empire was actually a good thing

not to

be regrl;ltted as it bestowed a semblance ofmoderni-

ty on those privileged enough to have been recipients

o f the E pire s civiHsing zeal. So on the one

hand

there s gr n 10dernlty its Europl;lan mani

festation . reason an progr S and on

the other

is

what could be called petit .odernlty which rep

re cnts the export

kin

rt of quotation which

some would go so far as to designate a mimic moder

nity through its various European references.

t

is this relation between gr n and

petit

modernity

that

has

contributed to the widespread search for fa

cilities of modernity

that

represent

what the

Indian

Marxisthistorian Dipesh Chakrabartywould call mo

dernity s

heterotemporal

history.2 Chakrabarty ar

gues that

the

various scenes of modernity observed

from

the point

of

view ofa heterotemporal composi

tion of history reveals the extent to which experienc

es ofmodernity are shot throughwith

the

particular

ities of each given locale therefore deregulating any

idea of one dominant universalism of historical ex

perience. Such experiences he argues are structured

within specific epistemological conditions that take

account of diverse modes of social identity and dis

course. ;Ihroughout the twentieth century all across

the

world diverse cultural contexts made adapting

or translating modernity into specific local variants

a pathway towards modernisation by acquiring

the

accoutrements

of

a

modern

society. Because

of

co

lonial experience this resulted in

what

could be re

ferred to as gr n modernity writ small in cultures

- Ch akr ab ar ty s case stu dy w as I nd ia - p er ceiv ed to

be in historical transition from colonialism to post

colonialism. In comparing different types of moder

nity and in our a ttempts to describe their different

characteristics we are constantly confrontedwith the

persistent tension betweengr n modernity and pet-

it modernity. How can this tension

be

resolved? And

how can the

fundamental historical experiences

and

the particularities of locale that attend

them

be rec

onciled or even compared? tstrikes

me

that all re

cent attempts to make sense of modernity

and

bend

i t toward

the

multiple situated petit modernities -

again Chakrabarty would have called these provinci

alities - are premised on finding a way to render

the

divergent experiences and uses of modernity namely


3/15

T H E

B A Z AA R O R

WORLD S FAIR

O F M O D ERNIS A TIO N

I

HAVE WITNESSED an d

mar

velled

at th e

breathtaking

speed

an d

scale of

th e

mod

ernisation occurring in

both

countries. Of course,

th e

economies

ofthese

two coun

t ries - along with

their

mod-

ernisation,

both

in depth

an d

in

breadth

- pale in compar

ison

to

Japan s, th e immediate East Asian reference

that lies equidistant

to

i ts two newly modernising

neighbours. Both China an d South Koreas financial

s trengths derive from a massive expor t economy.

China, ofcourse, is

known

as

th e

factory

ofthe

world,

a designation

made

possible by

th e

fact

that

its facto

ries are disproportionately

the production

centres of

cheap global

consumer

goods

that

have transformed

th e

Made in

China brand

into a ubiquitous logo of

global commerce. South Koreas industr ial power,

on

the other

hand is characterised

by

a focus on ad

vanced technology an d heavy industry. Each ofthese

two countries

has

buHt up its infrastructure

through

spaces,

museums

an d

ar t

fairs all are making the ir

way to Beijing an d

Shanghai.ln

China alone, th e rest

less imagination an d ambition shaping th e landscape

of

contemporary ar t

is breathtaking. Along with this

shift, especially

among

intellectuals an d artists, a re

verse phenomenon

of

migration is occurring, name

ly th e relocation

backto

an Asian

context

from which

many

of

t he m h ad

emigrated years before.

Yet

it

is

no t

only th e infrastructures o f t he s tat e a nd private

speculation that are being revived, bu t

th e

artistic

an d intellectual cultures of

many

cities are also being

remapped. New centres are

definitely emerging, bu t rath

er

than

cultural

an d

intellec

tua l capital being concen

trated

in a limited

number

of cities,

it

is being dispersed

in

many

cities as

th e

reverse

migration of ideas continues

to

explode

an d

expand the

cultural

pa ram et er s o f n ew

China an d South Korea.

O K W U I

E N W E Z O R [BELOW]

responding

to

NIC OL S

BOURRIAun s

[T ] definition

o f t he

new modern :

altermodern

The

session

was

chaired

London-based writer c u ra t or a n d a ri s t

J.J.

CH RLESWORTH

F O RM S O F T R AN S FO R MA T IO N :

M O D ERN ITY AS META-LANGUAGE

In fact, over

th e

course of

the las t

sixteen months,3 I

have

ha d

occasion

to

travel repeatedly

to

SouthKorea

an d

China. On

numerous

trips, as

part

of

my research

work as a curator, this situati on of urban transfor

mation

an d social renewal was visible everywhere.

Underscoring th e experiences ofthese trips is

an

ob

servation o f t he scale of growth of th e contempo

rary

ar t

world: artists, galleries, collectors, exhibition

th e

necessity

to

historicise an d

ground them

in tradi

tions

ofthought and

practice.

To

HISTORICISE MODERNITY

is

no t

only

to

ground

it

within th e conditions of socia , political

an d

econom

ic life, it is also

to

recognise i t as a meta-Ianguage

with which cultural systems

become

codified an d

gain

modern

legitimation.

The idea

of

modernity as a

meta-Ianguage

h as b ee n p ar

ticularly acute for

me

over

th e

past

year.

To

t ravel in China

an d

South Korea recently is

to e nc ou nter

this meta-Ian

guage in act ion an d in

many

guises. All around cities like

Seoul, Busan, Shanghai,

Beijing, Chengdu, Hangzhou,

Guangzhou, Hong Kong an d

Taipei, etc., th e clatler ofma

chinery erecting impressive

infrastructures

sounded like

th e

drill of

th e

Morse code

typ

ing

o ut the

meta-Ianguage of

modernisation. These struc

tures - from museums,

opera

houses

a nd the atre s to

stadi

ums, sport ing centres, high

speed

train

l ines, airports,

s tock exchanges , shopping

malls

an d

luxury

apartments

- bring alive t o ou r very eyes

brand

n ew u rb an conditions

an d cultural spheres

that

were no t remotely imagi

nable a generat ion ago. The cities of East Asia have

become

th e

playground of global architects enjoying

the patronage ofboth

public

an d

private developers.


4/15

IN

HIS

LECTURE AND SUBSEQUENT ESSAY,

E N W E Z O R drew

on w o r k s

s u c h

as

T H O M A S

H I R C H O R N S ataille Monument

2002

[TOP] an d

[BELOW]

GU Y

T I L L I M S ongo Series this workshowing supporters

of]ean-Pierre Bembaon their w ay t o a ral ly in Kinshasa,July 2006 .

T H E

ALTERMODERN

AND HABITATIONS

OF

CO N TEM P O RA RY

ART

I TH E

CURRENT SPATE of modernisation i n C hi na

effectively lays waste

to

heritage an d historical glo

ry an d

instead

emphasises contingency, might it

no t

be reasonable to argue for th e non-universal nature

pagoda. This hybridisation ma y

appear

absurd

to

us

now, until we

remember

that,

no t to o

long ago, post

modern

architecture

in

th e West was busily invent

ing these

trumped-up

styles

o f t he

classical

an d

th e

modernbased

on

a similarlyinvented

autochthonous

W es te rn p as t. Like l at te r- da y bi en na le s, Chi nes e

cities are theatres of t he

grand statement,

a lot of

which have no

other purpose than to

impress an d in

spire awe. This has been achieved by what

some

have

argued as indiscriminate

modernisation

an d

urban

isation schemes that have erased m uc h o f t he cul

tural heritage

of

o ld C hi na,

sweeping

ou t an d

destroying

many o ld n ei gh bo ur ho od s

and putting in their

place un

remarkable architecture.

4

Chinese bureaucrats, urban

planners an d developers, like

latter-day Baron Hausmanns,

are simply unsympathet

ic

to

any

idea

that

cities like

Beijing

need to

be histori-

cised,

that

is

to

say museu

mified. Modernity is a con

tinuous project. Its principal

features,

they ma y reason,

are

at best

contingent.

y

this

conjecture, I

want

to

seek

ou t

what

is currently

at

play i n

th e

relations

of

discourse in

which th e particularities

or

provincialities - I take this

to

m ea n t he

conditions

an d

sit

uations

that

generate

them

- of modernity are

situated

through the practice, produc

tion, dissemination an d re-

ception of contemporary art,

far from anyclaims

to

a

grand

heritage

o r a n

arriviste,

mimic

p t t

translation.

Yet ancient

cities like Beijing

an d

Hangzhou - in a

country that

possesses a very old civilisation an d so

ciety - i n

contrast

feel

nothing

like museums. Where

vestiges

of

th e

past

exist,

they t en d t o be

peripheral

rather than

central

t o m od ern

Chinese cities. These

cities,

if

anything, could be likened

to temporary

ex

hibitions of city-making, a succession of dizzying ob

solescence; a bazaar or world s fair of modernisation.

The ci tie s s kylines a re full o f g la ss bo xe s c ro wn ed

with the pitched green roofs of th e classical Chinese

The ongoing, large-scale process of modernisation in

China

an d South Korea underscores part o f t h e en

ergy, excitement

an d

sense

of newness coursing

through

th e

various

strata

of each

country, making

them

con

temporary

emblems

of

a

new

modernity. Travelling in

Europe,

on

t he o the r hand,

conveys

no

s uc h s en se o f e n

ergy, e xc it em en t or new

ness. Europe,

on the

con

trary,

fe

eIs o ld an d

dour

in

its majestic petrification. In

fact, many European cities

feelless like part o fo u r time.

With their miles o f im pe ri

ous ceremonial architecture

and

in

th e

quaintness

o f t he

narrow, tourist-friendly, cob

b le -s to ne d s tr ee ts , w al ki ng

through

these cities feels like

b ei ng i n a

museum of

moder

nity. The m us eu mi fi ca ti on

of Europe is in fact th e in

tention: th e display of herit

age, historical glory and dead

past. Preservationists of this

heritage

an d

glory play

th e

role ofmorticians ofmodernity.

th e combination of

grand

an d

p t t

modernity, bring

ing together successful models from both East

an d

West. That is, they are both undergoing modernisa

tion

based

o n t he acquisition of

instruments

an d in

stitutions

ofWestern

m od er ni ty - I mean t hi s i n a su

perficial sense - within a relatively short

span

of time,

yet

without the

wholesale discarding of local values

that

modify th e importations.


5/15

of

modernity as such? This certainly would

be t rue

when

applied

to contemporary

art. We are constant

ly entertained and

exercised

in

equal measure by th e

notion

that

there is

no

redline running from modern

ism

to contemporary

a rt . For t he p ed ag og ue s o f th e

existence

of

such lineage, the chiefemblem

ofthis

un

broken narrative can

be

found

in

the

attention

given

to

the procedures

and

ideas

ofthe

Western historical

avant-gardes by

contemporary

artists.

On the

other

hand

I t ak e the view of this claim,

pace

Chakrabarty,

as a provincial account

of

the complexity

of

contem

porary art. To understand its various

vectors, we need

then

to provincial-

ise modernism

There is

no

one line

age

of modernism

or, for

that

mat

ter, of

contemporary

art. Looking for

an equivalent o f an Andy Warhol in

Mao s China is to be seriously blind

to the

fact

that

China

ofthe

Pop

ar t

era had neither

a

consumer

soci

ety

nor

a c ap it al is t s tr ue tu re , two

things that were instrumentalised in

Warhol s critique

and

usage of its im-

ages. In that sense, Pop

ar t

would be

anathema to the

revolutionary pro

gram - and, one might even claim,

to the a va nt -g ar de i ma gi na ti on

of such aperiod i n C hi na

that

coin

eides with th e condition

and

situation that fostered

Warhol s analytical exeavation ofAmerican mass me

dia and consumer culture. But the absence

ofPop

ar t

in China in the 1960s is not the same as the absence

of progressive

contemporary

Chinese

ar t

during

that

period, even if such contemporary ar t mayhave been

subdued by the aggressive destruction of the Cultural

Revolution.

we a re

to

make sense of contemporary ar t during

t hi s p er io d i n C hi na

and

the United States, then we

have to wi eld the heterotemporal tools of history

writing;

in

so doing, we will see

how

differently situ

ated

American

and

Chinese artists were at this time.

Despite the importance ofglobalisation in mediating

the recent accounts of contemporary ar t - a world in

which artists like Huang Yong Ping,

Zhang

Huan,

Xu

Bing, Matthew Barney,Andreas GurskyandJeffKoons,

for i ns ta nc e, a re c on te mp or ar ie s - we can apply

the

same mode of argument against any uniform or uni

focal v iew o f a rt is ti c p ra et ic e today.

When

Huang

Yong

Ping, in the work

HistoryofChinese Painting

n

a Concise History ofModern Painting washed in

a Washing Machinefor

w

Minutes 987 Walker Art

Centre, Minneapolis: below centre), washed two ar t

historical texts - the first byWang Bomin and the lat

ter, o ne o f the first books ofWestern ar t history pub

lished

in

China, Herbert Read s

Concise Historyof

Modern Painting - in a washing machine,

the

result

is a mound ofpulped ideology, a history ofhybridisa

tion rather

than

universalism.

5

fwe apply the same

lens, say to the work of Yinka Shonibare, a Nigerian

a rt is t wo rk in g i n Lon do n, we will a ga in s ee

how he

ha s

made

the tension between his

tories, narratives,

and

the mytholo

gies of modernity, identity

and

sub

jectivity important i ng re di en ts i n

his continuous attempts

to

decon

s truc t the invention of an African

tradition by imperialism. The locus

of Shonibare s theatrical

and

some

times treacly installations is th e fic

tion

of thc

Afriean fabric he employs.

These fabries

and

their busypatterns

and vivid colours are often taken to

be

an

authentie symbol

ofan

African

past. But they are in fact,

products

of

colonial economic transactions

that

moved from Indonesia to the facto

ries of England

and

Netherlands,

to

the markets ofWest, East

and

Central Africa,

and

ul

timately to Brixton. These artists

inhabit what

could

be called the provincialities of modernity and have

incisively traced diverse paths ofmodernity through

them.

By

examining these clifferent locales

of

prac

tice, as well as

the

historical experiences that inform

t he m, we l ea rn a lot more about the contingent con

d it io ns o f m od er ni ty than about its universalism.

Here again, Chakrabarty offers a useful framework in

this regard by

dint

of

what he

refers

to

as habitations

of modernity:6

What

could these habitations

of

m od er ni ty b e? On

what maps

do

they

a pp ea r? An d i n

what

forms

and

shapes? The search for th e habitations of modernity

seems

to

me the crux of the altermodern , the sub

ject ofthe

2009 Tate Triennial exhibition

and the

ac

companying discursive projects organised by Nicolas

Bourriaud, its curator. In his outline to

the

altermod

ern project, Bourriaud lays

out

an intellectual

and

cultural itinerary, a jagged

map of

simultaneity

and

diseontinuity; overlapping narratives

and

contigu-

o


6/15

TRIS VONN MI HELL

uses the

tradition

of

storytelling to make

energetic performances

that

take

the

audience

on amental and physi

caljourney.His narratives,

both

fictional

and

non-fictionaL. explore

the

ways

history

is

passed

on.

Auto Tracking: From Cellar

t

Garret was

a new

performance

piece,

conducted

in s ix

aets

each

lasting

approx.

7

mins).

reworked previous narratives exploring

nations of

personal

and

historical spaces

and

monuments which arc embodied, fobricated

80ught for. hespoken-word monologue interwove past and current

verbal scripts. performed between interludes

of

audio field-recordings.

ous sites of production that form the basis of con

temporary ar t practice globally. The chiefclaim ofthe

altermodern project is simple: to discover the cur

rent habitations of contemporary practice. Thus the

altermodern proposes the rejection of rigid struc

tures

pu t

i n pl ac e by a stubborn

and

implacable mo

dernity and the modernist ideal of artistic autono

my In

the

same way,

it

manifests a rebellion against

the

systematisation of artistic

production based

on

a singular, universalised conception of artistic para

digms. Ifthere is anything that marks the

path

of the

altermodern,

it

would be

the

provincialities of contempo

rary

ar t

practice today - that

is, the degree to which these

practices, however globalised

they may appear, are also in

formed by specific epistemo

logical models and aesthet

ic conditions. Within this

scheme, Bourriaudsets

ou t

to

exmaine for us

the

unfolding

of

the

diverse fields of con

temporary ar t practice that

have been unsettled by global

links. But, more importantly,

these practices aremeasured

against the totalising princi

pIes

of

grand modernity.

At

the core

of the

altermodern s jagged

map

is its

description ofwhat its author refers to i n hi s i nt ro

ductory

paper

as

the

offshore loca tion

of

contem

porary ar t practice.

7

However, I will foreground the

location of

these contemporary

practices as indica

tive of a drive toward an off-centre principle, name

ly the multifocal, multilocal, heterotemporal and dis

persed structures around which contemporary ar t

is often organised and convened. This multiply

10-

cated off-centre - which might not be analogous to

Bourriaud s notion of offshore-based production

is not the s am e as

the

logic

of

decentred locations.

Rather, the off-centre is structured by the simultane

ous existence of multiple centres. In this way

rather

than being the decentring of the universal, or the re

location

of the

centre of

contemporary

art, as

the

no

tion ofthe offshore suggests, it becomes instead, the

emergence of multiplicity, the breakdown of cultur

al or locational hierarchies, the absence of a singular

locus or a limited number ofcentres.

TOWARD

THE

EXCENTRIC:

POSTCOLONIALITY

POSTMODERNITY

AND THE ALTERMODERN

Ta

A L AR GE E XTE NT ,

the discursive feature of the

altermodern project seems to me

areturn

to earlier

debates that shaped postcolonial and postmodern-

ist critiques

of

modernity and

the

aesthetic princi

pIe

ofthe

universal. At

the same

time, they

launched

an

attack on modernism s focus

on

a unifocal

rather

than dialogic modernity. Embracing these critiques,

Bourriaud s project sets out

to explore the excentric

8

and

dialogic nature

of

ar t today,

including its scattered trajec

tories

and

multiple temporal

ities, by questioning and pro

vincialising

the

idea of

the

centre, by decentring its im

aginary, as Chakrabarty pos

its

in

his provocative

book

Provincializing Europe

9

Yet

this excentric dimension of

modern and contemporary

ar t is not necessarily a rejec

t io n o f m od er ni ty and mod

ernism; rather it articulates

the shift to off-centre struc

t ur es of production and dis-

semination; the dispersal of

the universal, the refusal of the monolithic, a rebel

lion against monoculturalism. In this way what the

altermodern proposes is a rephrasing of prior argu

ments. The objective is to propose a new terminolo

gy

one

that could succinctly capture both the emer

gence of multiple cultural fields as they overspill into

diverse arenas of thinking and practice, and a recon

ceptualisation of the structures of legitimation that

follow i n t he ir wake. In his text, B our ri aud ma kes

concretewhat he sees as

the

field of

th e

altermodern,

describing his model as

an a ttempt to redefine modernity in the

era of

globalisation.Astate of

mind

more

than a movement , the altermodern goes

against culturalstandardisation

and

mas

sification on one hand, against national

isms and cultural relativism

on

the other,

by positioningitselfwithin the world cul

tural gaps, putting translation, wander-


7/15


8/15

While

none

of

the

four artists whose works were ex-

amined in the exhibition have appeared in standard,

so-called mainstream surveys

and

accounts of ex

perimental ar t

and

conceptualism of the late 1960s

to the

present, new off-centre historical research

such as Flores's consistently drives us

to the

har

bours of these archipelagos of modernity and con

temporary art. The work of Ray Albano from the

Philippines,Jim Supangkat from Indonesia, Piyadasa

and the

younger Thai artist,

curator and ar t

histori

an Apinan Poshyananda, have clear structural affini

ties with the work of their contemporaries practicing

in the West.

Yet

their work - made with an awareness

of

and

in response to, specific historical conditions

- shares similar objectives with the work of

other

postcolonial artists from different

parts

ofthe world,

including those living an d practicing in Europe.

These objectives would

be

familiar

toem

ergingschol

ars such as Sunanda Sanyal, whose research focuses

on

modernism

in Uganda;'4 Elizabeth Harney, who

has written extensively

about

negritude

and

modern

ism in Senegal;'5

or the

magisterial writing on mod

ern

and contemporary

Indian ar t by

the eminent

criticGeetaKapur.

Arthistorian Gao Minglu has en

gaged equally rigorously with contemporary Chinese

art,

and

with the same objective 7 In a sirnilar vein

of historical archaeology,

the

Princeton

ar t

historian

Chika Okeke-Agulu has studied

and written

persua

sively on t he generative character of young modern

Nigerian artists in the late 195 S during the period

of

decolonisation.

18

But by no

means am

I suggest

ing

that many

ofthe artists examined in these vari

ous research studies are obscure in their own artis

tic contexts. Their artistic trajectories belong exactly

in the heterotemporal frames of historical reflection

and

the chronicles oftheir

ar t

are part of

the

hetero

chronical criticism

and

curating

that

has been part

ofthe discourse oftwentieth-

and

twenty-first-centu

ry modernity. However, viewed with the lens of a uni

vocal

modernist

history,

one that

is predicated on

the

primacy of centres ofpractice -

what

Bourriaud re

fers

to

as the 'continental mainstream''' - can

these

practices be understood as forming more than an ar

chipelago,

and in

fact exceed

the

altermodernist im

pulse? Theycertainlydo expand

the

purely

modernist

notion of artistic competence. These issues are at the

core of recent writings

and

research b y the British

Ghanaian ar t historian and cultural critic Kobena

Mercer,

who

explores

the

diverse off-centre contexts

of late

modernism

and contemporary

art

in

aseries

of

anthologies focused on artistic practices and

art-

ists in Africa, Asia

and

Europe 9 Similar issues were

mapped in the seminal 1989 exhibition, h ther

Story a project curated by the Pakistan-born British

artist and

critic, Rasheed Araeen

at the

Hayward

Gallery, wherein he examined th e contributions of

hitherto unrecognised non-western modernist art

ists

to

European modernism.

These surveys

and

situations of off-centredness are

emblematic of the large historical gaps which today,

in the era ofglobalisation, need to be reconciled with

dominant paradigms of artistic discourse. In seeking

to historicise these contexts

ofproduction and

prac

tice, a dialogic system of evaluation is established.

resolutely veers away from the standard

and

received

notions of modernity, especially in the hierarchical

segmentations

that

have been the prevailing

point of

entryinto its review

of

off-centre practices.

MODERNITY POSTCOLONI LITY

ND

SOVEREIGN SUBJECTIVITY

WHATEVER

THE

ENTRY

POINT

for the altermodern

art ists , there remain some boundaries between the

locations of contemporary artistic practice and the

historical production

of modern

subjectivity. These

boundaries are tied up with th e unfinished nature

of the project of modernity. Consequently, I want

to examine in more detail some ideas of moderni

ty

that

could be related to

the

way hierarchies oper

a te in the recogni tion

and

historicisation of artists

and

their locations of practice. The course I will fol

low could be likened to navigating the different lev

els

and

segments

ofgrand and p t t

modernity, albeit

with

degrees of separation designating stages of de

velopment, movements, breaks in culturallogics, os

sification of epistemological models,

and

transitions

to

which we ascribe

the norms ofthe modern

world.

One logic ofmodernity to which

the altermodern

re

sponds is globalisation,

aseries

of processes synony

mous with the emergence of a worldwide system of

capitalism.

We

could

understand

this modernity,

in

its teleological unfolding, as

part ofthe

current man-

ifestation of globalisation as a force-field ofwinners,

near winners and losers. (The losers being, obvious

Iy those thoroughly subordinated and utterly disen

franchised bymodernity's centuries-Iongprogression


9/15

from the worlds of indenture, slavery, imperialism

and colonialism, to the aggressive, retributive wars

of

recent memory.)

This field ofretributive conduct has at its disposal th e

overwhelming capacity to erase and deracinate sub

jectivities that inhabit the cultural localities

of

petit

modernity. This makes the large claims ascribed to

grand modernityless an avatar of enlightened cultur

al and material transformation, and m or e a structure

wit h a dark core. It seems fairly impossible to think

of modernity without linking it

to

con cept s such as

sovereignty, equality and libertyas they have been de

veloped across domains of life and social practices.

Pace Michel Foucault s theory ofbiopower,21 a range

ofthinkers have focused on this dimension

ofmoder-

nity,

aspace

in which the master

and

slave dialectic is

writ large. This dialectic, developed by Hegel, dissoci

ates sovereignty from the practice of self-governance,

and instead embeds

it

in the interrogation ofthe rela

tions between power

and

subordination.

However, subordination is directly linked to how

power exposes the subordinated to structures ofvio

lence, to acts ofhistorical erasure. In this

area

ofanal

ysis, Giorgio Agamben s extension ofbiopower

and

bi-

opolitics was an

attempt

to sketch out the conditions

around which what he calls naked life is summoned:

astate

ofliving in which individual sovereignty is ex-

po se d to i ts

most

basic, barest dimension,

to

execu

tion.

In terms of ideas surrounding modernity

and

colonialism, this thinking has been singularly ilJu

minating,

and

h as b ee n

taken

up

by

other

thinkers.

The feminist literary scholar ]udith Butler, for exam

pIe, in

arecent

reflection onthe prosecution ofthewar

on terror and the hopelessness of prisoners caught

in

its principal non-place, uantanamo

Bay

ad

dressed

the

issue ofnaked life in

the

essay Precarious

Life:

Pushing further the f ro nt ier o f t hi s t hi nk in g is the

powerful writing of theorist Achille Mbembe, es

pecially in

an

essay in which

he

summarises the di

mensions ofbiopower, bare

and

precarious life as the

zon e o f necropolitics. In the essay Mbembe explored

the

fundamental relationship between modernity

and violence, particularly in the apparatuses of the

colonial regime, such that To exercise sovereignty is

to exercise control over mortality and to define life

as the deployment and manifestation

of

power:

24

For

Mbembe, necropolitics is

the

condition under which

conducts related

to

sovereignty - as he amply dem

onstrates by citing the policy of apartheid in South

Africa or the predicament of the Palestinians in the

occupied territories - are inextricably bound

up

with

exercises

of

control over existence,

of

individuallives

and

their narratives. Most examinations of the artis

tic work coming

out

of South Africa during the apart

heid era confirms how artists were overwhelmingly

preoccupied with

the

structures of violence and its

direct manifestation

as

part of

the

condition of co

lonial modernity and thereby establishes ar t as one

exploration of the question of sovereignty. Here, re

sistance to violence and th e rigorous assertion ofsov

ereign subjectivity becomes in itself the subject and

narrative of

art and

cultural production.

Facing away from culture, Mbembe in his critique, for

example, sees political theory as tending to associate

sovereignty with issues of autonomy,

be

it that of

the

state

or

ofthe

individual. He argues however,

that

The romance of sovereignty, in this case,

rests

on

the belief that the subject is

the

master

and

the controlling

author

of his

orher own meaning. Sovereignty is there

fore d ef in ed as a t wof old p ro cess o f seif-

institution and seif limitation fixing one s

own limits for oneself). The exercise of

sovereignty, in turn, consists in socie

ty s capacity for self-creation through re

course to institutions inspired by specific

social

and

imagina ry significations.

5

To distinguish this relation of seif institution

and

seif-

limitation th e central concern he notes targets in

s te ad t hos e figures of sovereignty wh os e c en tr al

project is

not

the struggle for autonomy but the gen-

eralised instrumentalisation

human

existence and

the material destruction human bodies and popu-

lations:

Two of Mbembe s historical examples are

South Africa

and

Palestine. In th e fate of these two

spaces,

he

identifies the fundamental rationality of

modernity, arguing, thatmodernity was at the origin

of

multiple concepts ofsovereignty - and therefore of

the

biopoliticaI:2

7

Artworks such as those

by

William

Kentridge, in films such as

Ubu

Teils the Truth 997

and

Paul Stopforth, in his

1980

drawing series Death

Steve Biko to

name

only two instances from South

Africa;

and

by Emily]acir in

her

exhibition Where

We

Con

arai

ene

res]

op

Documents

Okwui Enwensor Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence