Expanding Internationalism - A Conference on ... - Mary Jane Jacob

homogeneity achieved by "national" societies on the Western model, that
ensures the emergence of the "civilizing" values of modernity.
When I
talk of "modernity" I am referring primarily to that set of cultural ideas
and values associated with post-enlightenment Western thinking: the
ethics of individualism, the linear narratives of historicism, the
homogeneity of the social, the sovereignity of the "rational." These
values have a paradoxical existence in those cultural canons that we
identify with the movements of modernism;
reproducing them at the
ideological level while challenging them in the act of formal innovation.
But such paradoxes are permissible because modernity, whose matrix is the
nation-space, enables cultural value to be framed in what Walter Benjamin
called a "homogeneous empty time."
It is a fo:rm of cultural-time that allows the "simultaneous
translation" of traditions and peoples, so long as forms of alterity,
minority voices, marginal and transgressive styles of life and art, can be
ordered and represented in terms of a binary logic of inside/outside,
tradition/progress, custom/culture, ritual/writing. The homogeneous empty
time of modernity needs to move beyond its "ethnos and ethos," to cite,
quote, fetishise, appropriate the "Other" in order to authorise and
establish its cultural prerogative.
If this is not done explicitly in the
name of the nation -- for instance, The National Gallery -- it is done in
the name of the metropolis -- The M=tropolitan M.lseum of Modern Art. Can
the "universal" claims of globality or the metropolitan values of the
museum articulate or exhibit non-appropriative, non-marginalising
significations of cultural difference What are the possibilities of such
representations given the "homogeneous empty time-frame" that provides the
national and international conditions of "modernity"
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