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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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-
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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
-
8/9/2019 Okwui Enwensor Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence
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