Culture Clubs

Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture. Susan Hegeman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 264. $55.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

What was modernism's relation to the concept of culture? To those of us who have spent some time with modernism, at least two kinds of answer might suggest themselves right away. One would fix on modernism's ambivalent entanglement with "high culture" at its demandingly highest, and find its icons in writers like T. W. Adorno (railing against the culture industry on behalf of a bleak and difficult art) or better still T. S. Eliot (author not only of a poem whose forbidding learnedness helped to secure its eminence but also, thirty years later, of Notes reporting that evidence of cultural decline "is visible in every department of human activity"). ¹ The other sort of answer would play upon a rather different sense of "culture": here, figures like the Picasso of Les demoiselles d'Avignon or the Conrad of Heart of Darkness would evoke modern Western art's fascination with non- Western people, objects, and texts, and more generally the essential "modernism" of cross-cultural contact on an unprecedented scale. The high-culture response and the other-culture response both attest to the intimacy of modernism and "culture," of course; but contemplated together they also appear as poles of a contradiction that can seem--to anyone worn out by the "culture wars" of the 1990s, and quite apart from questions about modernism per se--more bothersome than generative. The prescriptive sense of the oh-so-tired term bids it be esteemed right into impossibility ("culture," since Matthew Arnold, as the perfection of knowledge and manners that no one can quite achieve); the descriptive one looks ample to the point of meaninglessness ("culture" as a totality hard to differentiate from society itself). Why mess with it anymore?

In her savvy and important new book, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture, Susan Hegeman faces squarely the irritation that "culture" currently produces, arguing both that the slipperiness of the term is a reason to prize rather than dismiss it, and that attempts to negotiate between the aforementioned (and still other) meanings proved crucial to the shaping of a modernism whose consequences continue to be felt. According to her, "the lineaments of many of the most visible contemporary debates about 'culture' are residua of the early Cold War era," and the origins of Cold War formulations themselves to be discerned in confrontations transpiring in the preceding decades (194). It was during the heyday of modernism that those most concerned with America's ills and possibilities came routinely to invoke "culture" in their diagnoses; it was in the 1930s most acutely, as Warren Susman has argued, that Americans came "to do two new things: to understand themselves as participating in a distinctive 'American' culture, and to see this culture as a set of patterns, values, and beliefs roughly comparable to those of other cultures" (4). For her, in other words, the roots of our own multicultural panics and pleasures lie in the young century's effort to fulfill at a stroke culture's descriptive and prescriptive mandates--to conceive of an American culture whose virtues would be those of both an American culture (an achieved, coherent culture where none had existed before) and an American culture (not better than any other, but right for Americans where any other would be wrong).

To represent Hegeman's book this way is to make it sound rather more like Our America (1995)--Walter Benn Michaels's strenuously provocative effort to intervene in the culture wars through a reading of modernism--than it does in its own voice. Still, it's worth noting up front that in spite of important disagreements (to be considered further on), she shares his belief that the crucial link between modernism and the concept of culture lies in a set of interlocked anxieties about identity and relativism. For her, then, the new understanding...