Professor Julian Murphet: Modernism, Now and Then

?The academic thesis of 'postmodernism' is some thirty years old, but in the three decades since it was declared dead, Modernism has shown distinct signs of life, if not 'undeath'. On the one hand, a new academic industry has emerged, under the banner of the 'New Modernism Studies', resurrecting and reframing countless acts of cultural Modernism; on the other, the work of key contemporary artists such as J. M. Coetzee, Michael Haneke and Gerhard Richter can scarcely be accounted for outside of a broadly Modernist framework. Postmodernism, as a distinct style of cultural reaction, today seems deader than Modernism. In this lecture, I take stock of the current situation in terms of the uneven development of geographical cultural domains, and of media technologies, within an overarching economic drive toward 'convergence culture' and digitization. Rather than see Modernism as an exhausted phase of cultural development, I argue that it is more appropriate to understand it as an ongoing possibility within the coordinates of the present—a possibility beset by drawbacks as much as it is saturated with prestige value.