The Dictionary of Human Geography

Comp. by: VPugazhenthi Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 9781405132879_4_M Date:1/4/
09 Time:15:19:41 Filepath:H:/00_Blackwell/00_3B2/Gregory-9781405132879/appln/3B2/
revises/9781405132879_4_M.3d

(1) These episodes involved significant

changes in conceptions oftimeandspace

in thewest(Kern, 1983) which also had

dramatic repercussions far beyond the

shores ofeuropeand North America.

Huyssen (2007) insists that modernism

‘cut across’ imperial and post-imperial

cultures – it included Baudelaire’s Paris

and Joyce’s Dublin, but also Borges’

Buenos Aires and Kahlo’s Mexico City –

so that ‘metropolitan culture was trans-

lated, appropriated and creatively mim-

icked in colonized and post-colonial

countries in asia, africa and latin

america’.

(2) The ways in which these changes were

registered in the arts, literature and else-

where were profoundly gendered and

sexualized. ‘The territory of modernism,’

Pollock (1988, p. 54) argues, ‘so often is

a way of dealing with masculinesexual-

ityand its sign, the bodies of women’.

Representations of modern spaces were

made to revolve around masculine

subject-positions – like the mobile figure

of theflAˆneur– and to privilege en-

counters ‘between men who have the

freedom to take their pleasures in many

urban spaces and women from a class

subject to them who have to work in

those spaces often selling their bodies to

clients or to artists’. Indeed, Lefebvre’s

account of theproduction of space,

which was partly inspired by his encoun-

ters with surrealism and the Situationists,

repeatedly draws attention to the signifi-

cance of modernism for the triumph of

a ‘visual-phallic-geometric space’.

(3) Modernism was connected not only to

experimentation in the arts, but also to

new styles of philosophical reflection and

to the formation of the social sciences

(includingcritical theoryand Western

marxism, Lunn’s primary concern). But

most of these intellectual projects

retained the social markings, marginal-

izations and exclusions written into

metropolitan modernism.

Lunn’s characterizations work best when

applied to modernartandliteratureand

probably have less purchase on modern archi-

tecture, which has its own chronologies

(Frampton, 1992). These architectural motifs

assumed a wider significance in the 1950s and

1960s, when ahigh modernismemerged as a

dominant cultural thematic, distinguished by

what Bu ̈rger (1992) described as a ‘pathos of

purity’. ‘In the same way as architecture

divested itself of ornamental elements,’ he

argued, so ‘painting freed itself from the pri-

macy of the representational, and the nouveau

roman liberated itself from the categories

of traditional fiction (plot and character).’ In

much the same way, too, spatial science

divested human geography of an interest in

the particularities ofareal differentiation,

which became so much ‘surface noise’, in

order to reveal the purity of geometric form

andspatial structure(often, like architec-

ture, cast in terms of functionalism). It

would not be difficult to present other high

modernist movements in social thought in

much the same way, notablystructuralism.

From such a perspective,postmodernism

becomes a critique of high modernism rather

than of modernismtout court. It contains im-

portant echoes of the early-twentieth-century

avant-garde, and a number of writers have

urged the reclamation of that earlier modern-

ism as an indispensable moment in the formu-

lation of critical social theory. In fact, Berman

(1983) suggests that it had its roots even earl-

ier, in the nineteenth-century writings of

Baudelaire and Marx, both of whom (in dif-

ferent ways) sought to come to terms with a

world in which ‘all that is solid melts into air’.

Those human geographers most invested in

these reclamation projects have paid close

attention to the historical–geographical coord-

inates of modernism (above). Thus Harvey

(1989b) sought to expose some of the connec-

tions between the cultural formations of

modernism, the experience of time__space

compressionand the changing political econ-

omy of capitalism, which in turn provoked a

critique of the ways in which his own repre-

sentations erased the characteristic gendering

and sexualization of their maps of modernity

(Deutsche, 1996c). There have also been

specific studies: Harvey’s (2003a) excavation

of modernism and its material foundations in

nineteenth-century Paris, and Pinder’s (2005c)

exploration of forms of utopian modernism in

the twentieth century (seesituationism).

But the most deliberately modernist contri-

butions to contemporary human geography

are to be found in the work of Gunnar Olsson

and Allan Pred. Pred’s experimental studies of

European modernities (1995) and his extraor-

dinary re-creation of a ‘heart of darkness’ at

the very centre of ‘Swedish modern’ (2004)

were freely informed by the example of Walter

Benjamin; they beautifully exemplify all four

of Lunn’s diagnostics (above) and the radical,

critical impulse of early modernism that

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_M Final Proof page 470 1.4.2009 3:19pm

MODERNISM