The Off-Modern

Svetlana Boym

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501328954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Svetlana Boym writes a new genealogy of modernity, moving beyond older debates between modernism and postmodernism to focus on the intersection of art, architecture, technology, and philosophy in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson, Aby Warburg, and Jacques Derrida, Boym presents the off-modern as an eccentric, self-questioning, anti-authoritarian perspective with roots in the Russian avant-garde, now developed in surprising ways by contemporary artists, architects, and curators around the world. She illustrates the off-modern in discussions of (and with) figures as diverse as architect Rem Koolhaas, Albanian artist-turned-mayor Edi Rama, an art collective in Delhi, and the creator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Both a manifesto and a memoir, The Off-Modern often returns to themes of travel and immigration, exploring issues of diasporic intimacy and productive estrangement amid nostalgic landscapes of urban ruins.

Part One

Perspectives

Figure 1.1    Svetlana Boym, “Chessboard Collage” combining Victor Shklovsky’s knight’s move and the anamorphic fragment of a photograph of NKVD employees leaving Lubianka Prison, Another Freedom, 2012.

1

History Out-of-Sync

In the twenty-first century, modernity is our antiquity. We live with its ruins, which we incorporate into our present. Unlike the thinkers of the last fin de siècle, we neither mourn nor celebrate the end of history or the end of art. We have to chart a new road between unending development and nostalgia, find an alternative logic for the contradictions of contemporary culture. Instead of fast-changing prepositions—“post,” “anti,” “neo,” “trans,” and “sub”—that suggest an implacable movement forward, against, or beyond, I propose to go off: “off” as in “off the path,” or way off, off-Broadway, off-brand, off the wall, and occasionally off-color. “Off-modern” is a detour into the unexplored potentials of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history, at the margins of error of major philosophical, economic, and technological narratives of modernization and progress. It opens into the modernity of “what if,” and not only postindustrial modernization as it was.

The preposition “off” is a product of linguistic error, popular etymology and fuzzy logic. It developed from the preposition “of,” signifying belonging as in “being a part of,” with the addition of an extra “f,” an emphatic marker of distancing. The “off” in “off-modern” designates both the belonging to the critical project of modernity and its edgy excess. “Off” suggests a dimension of time and human action that is unusual or potentially off-putting. Through humorous onomatopoeic exaggeration it describes something too spontaneous (off-the-cuff, off-handed, off the record) or too edgy (off the wall), verging on the obscene (off-color) or not in sync with the pace (off-beat). Sometimes “off” is about the embarrassment of life caught unawares. It is provisional, extemporaneous, and humane. Most importantly, “off” is not a marker of margins but a delimitation of a broad space for a new choreography of future possibilities. Off-modern isn’t antimodern; sometimes it is closer to the critical and experimental spirit of modernity than it is to contemporary neotraditionalism or postmodern simulations.

The off-modern isn’t a lost “ism” from the ruined archive of the avant-garde, but a contemporary worldview and a form of historic sensibility that allows us to recapture eccentric aspects of earlier modernities, to “brush history against the grain,” to use Walter Benjamin’s expression. The off-modern project is still off-brand; it is a performance-in-progress, at once con-temporary and off-beat vis-à-vis the present moment.

After the Russian revolutions of 1917, theorist and writer Viktor Shklovsky proposed to explore the lateral move in cultural history that can rescue a broader range of politics and arts. Modern artistic practice in this case isn’t conceived as an autonomous activity (contrary to a common misunderstanding); it is a practice of estrangement and engagement; estrangement for the world and not from the world. The full implications of this radical world wonder haven’t yet been fully explored, because this estrangement for the world doesn’t follow systematic logic, and it doesn’t fit into a familiar narrative of critical theory that was in part shaped by a mistranslation of Russian and East European formalists and structuralists. Shklovsky’s favorite figure for such aesthetic and political practice was the knight in the game of chess. The knight moves forward sideways and traces “the tortured road of the brave,” not the master–slave dialectics of “dutiful pawns and kings.”¹ Oblique, diagonal, and zigzag moves reveal the play of human freedom vis-à-vis political teleologies and ideologies that follow the march of revolutionary progress, development, or the invisible hand of the market.

Like his contemporaries, Victor Shklovsky was fascinated by modernist science, from Einstein’s theory of relativity, to the quantum and wave theories of light and Nikolai Lobachevsky’s conception of a non-Euclidian geometry that doesn’t accept the central axiom that parallel lines cannot meet. In the words of Vladimir Nabokov: “if the parallel lines do not meet, it is not because meet they cannot, but because they have other things to do” (Lectures on Russian Literature, 58). In my off-modern interpretation, Shklovsky’s zigzag is a path between two parallel lines, at once jagged and regular. It isn’t a simple one-dimensional figure but an opening of an alternative intellectual tradition that brings together physics and poetics—from the ancient swerve of the Epicurean philosophers to the squiggle of the eccentric Enlightenment, from baroque anamorphoses to the Möbius strip, and from there to Deleuze’s folds and veins in marble. The knight’s move allows for a coexistence of different models of the universe side by side, not as a mere digital database or a salad bar of philosophical dressings, but as a complex counterpointed composition that invites rigorous perspectivism and creative action.

The off-modern doesn’t suggest a continuous history from antiquity to modernity to postmodernity. Instead it confronts the breaks in tradition, the loss of common yardsticks, and disorientations that occur in almost every generation. The off-modern acknowledges the syncope and the off-beat movements of history that were written out from the dominant versions edited by the victors, who cared little about the dignity of the defeated. Off-modern reflection does not merely try to color the blank spots of history green or red, thus curing longing with belonging. Rather it veers off the beaten track of dominant constructions of history, proceeding laterally, not literally, to discover missed opportunities and roads not taken.

An off-modern line of thinking takes us away from postmodernism and its discontents towards a broader reconsideration of modernities in the plural and over a long duration of time, from the early modern of the seventeenth century to the present. It is part of the twenty-first-century cultural reflection on the “unfinished” project of modernity, “uneven” modernizations and “divergent” modernisms.² The off-modern is neither a new spatial turn to the margins or semi-peripheries of the West, nor a return to hip retro media. It tries to rethink the porous nature of historical time, making modernities out-of-sync less eccentric and more symptomatic for twenty-first-century experience.

Most importantly, the off-modern approach breaks away from the opposition between an artist and a master-theorist who maps and typologizes the modern and all its prefixes and suffixes. This is a contemporary exercise in aesthetic knowledge that crisscrosses (but never abolishes) the boundaries between artistic and critical practice; it follows the zigzag movements of an alternative cultural development explored by artists and writers themselves, and often overlooked by the theorists because it exceeds a specific plot of the history of the modern. The off-modern approach zooms in on the transitional periods of modern and contemporary history, moves off-center and foregrounds the heretics and misfits within well-known artistic and cultural movements. It unearths an alternative genealogy of the critical apparatus of modernity, harking back to Shklovsky’s and Hannah Arendt’s “estrangement for the world” that I understand as an aesthetic, existential, and political practice of passionate thinking and freedom, which strives neither for utopia nor for artistic autonomy, but for the transformation of this world.

The off-modern approach defies the “distant reading” and remote-controlled historiographic mappings of the modern and contemporary period; instead it engages in the embarrassment of theory and in a double movement between perspectivist estrangement and almost tactile nearness to artistic making. In short, the off-modern artist and theorist share an unconventional bond of diasporic intimacy familiar to contemporary immigrants.

Unlike the “altermodern,” the term proposed by the writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud in 2009, the off-modern doesn’t define itself merely as a new modernity “reconfigured to an age of globalization,” a “new universalism” based on translations, subtitles, and generalized naming.³ The off-moderns aren’t “early adapters” to the existing gadgets of posthistorical globalization or internet technology; they search for experimental platforms that would connect the world’s public squares with the digital humanities of the future, for which no gadgets have yet been invented. Instead of relying on the subtitled and translated languages of a new universalism, off-moderns focus on accents and affects, on material singularities and alternative solidarities between cultures that often circumscribe the center, creating a broad margin for peripheral scenographies. Examples can be found in the longstanding connections between Latin American, East European, and South Asian modernities that didn’t always go via Paris, London, or Berlin where metadiscourse to end all metadiscourses is perpetually enunciated, as if anew.

We will follow here some key aspects of the off-modern project, not “power points” but rather tangents with many possible bifurcations:

1.An alternative genealogy and understanding of the modern project, including art, theory, and history.

2.Eccentric geographies, alternative solidarities, and reemergence of cross-cultural public space.

3.Politics and arts of dissent based on pluralities within cultures and identities, and not only external pluralism or multiculturalism. This brings forth elective affinities between unlikely international bedfellows, not only anxieties of influence and memories of domination.

4.Prospective nostalgia and critical urbanism that engages architectural and social concerns. A new scenography of “modernization through preservation” where ruins cohabit with construction sites.

5.Alternative new media shaped by estranging artistic techniques and not only by new gadgets. Organization of humanistic platforms for knowledge and experience. Neither “hyper-” nor “cyber-” but another prefix that hasn’t been invented yet.

6.Engagement with “human error” and human creativity, with artful and not just artificial intelligence. Reconsideration of affects, and productive embarrassment of theory and technology.

7.Not the end of criticism but passionate thinking, however belated and outmoded.

Figure 2.1    Svetlana Boym, “Letatlin with Butterfly,” Hybrid Utopias, 2002–2007, photographic print, 17 × 22 inches.

2

Cultural Exaptation

The off-modern perspective invites us to rethink the opposition between development and preservation, and proposes a non-linear conception of cultural evolution through trial and error.⁴ The off-modern artist finds an interesting comrade-in-arms in contemporary science, in particular in Stephen J. Gould’s subversive theory of exaptation that unsettles evolutionary biologists and proponents of intelligent design, technovisionaries and postmodernists. Exaptation places imagination closer to innovation than the brutal struggle for the survival of the fittest, which extends from Darwin’s theory of evolution to contemporary market capitalism. Exaptation can be seen as a rescue of the eccentric and unforeseen in natural history, a theory that could only have been developed by an imaginative scientist who sometimes thinks like an artist.

Exaptation is described in biology as a...