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It may turn out ... that going back can be a way to go forward.1
Multiple Modernities
In the 1980s postmodernism's retro culture was widely diagnosed as the endgame of modernism. Some suggested that a bigger endgame was in play. Hal Foster glimpsed the end of a ruling civilisation: 'a moment when the West, its limit apparently broached by an all but global capital, has begun to recycle its own historical episodes'.2 By the end of the century the West's cultural hegemony did indeed seem over. From about 1990 global capital began delivering a completely deterritorialised contemporary art practice. Even Indigenous art, previously considered a primitive artifact of pre-modern times, was claimed (by a few) for contemporary art.3 This is one reason why Terry Smith believes that 'Modernism' and what he names 'Contemporary Art' are 'different in kind'.4 Yet one thing did not change. Deterritorialised or not, modern, anti-modern, postmodern or contemporary, it is all the culture of capitalism.
Postmodern deterritorialisation coincided with the deterritorialisation of capital spearheaded by economic deregulation i.e., the surrender of nation-state regulation of capital to financial globalisation.5 Just as Marx and Engels had predicted in the Communist Manifesto, having used the West to subjugate the rest for the expansion of capital, capitalism now turned on Western nations. Or as Slavoj Zizek described it, former colonial relations were globalised, so that today 'there are only colonies, no colonising countries-the colonising power is no longer a Nation-State but directly the global company'.6
These economic and cultural deterritorialisations were the culmination of postcolonial power arrangements that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. As capitalism globalised it changed its stripes from a site of antagonistic confrontation (with tradition, communism, the proletariat and the colonised) to the smooth invisible logic of the Real. Now, said Zizek, we face 'the massive presence of capitalism as universal world system', meaning that 'everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay.'1 It follows, argued Zizek, that 'the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism', the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the coloniser treats colonised people-as "natives" whose mores are to be carefully studied and "respected". That is to say, the...