“ANDREAS HUYSSEN, whose name is widely recognized, though regularly mispronounced and misspelled, has been writing about modernism and postmodernism for more years than he’d like to admit. At Columbia University, he continues to teach a legendary course on Frankfurt School Critical Theory — a major body of work by 20th-century German intellectuals — that confounds, inspires, and enlightens undergraduate and graduate students alike. I was among those lucky enough to watch him unpack Georg Lukács’s masterpiece, History and Class Consciousness, and follow it up with a robust explanation for why the debates about aesthetics and politics between Lukács and Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht, are as urgent today as ever.”
“Modernist miniatures are short prose texts written for little magazines or newspaper feuilletons (arts supplements) by major German, French, and Austrian modernists. Always published in groups, they reflect on the fleeting experiences of modern city life, especially as it was shaped by the arrival of photography and early cinema. As such, they register the resulting historical transformation in perceptions of time and space in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries. These feuilleton texts, which we now read in book form — for example, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris or Benjamin’s One-Way Street — sought to capture the visceral feeling of acceleration and compression, social conflict, and cultural upheaval that defined urban existence.”
“In their focus on dream images, ghostly appearances, surreal memories, and urban phantasmagorias, they largely shunned the realistic description, typical of older urban sketches like those of Louis Sébastien Mercier in the 18th century. The miniature did not merely imitate visual media — it absorbed them, condensing objective and subjective perceptions into the very structure of language and text and asserting the aesthetic specificity of literary language and its own power to capture visual experience.”
“In their compressed form, miniatures also accommodate the short attention spans of urban readers, but in their conceptual ambition and complexity, they sit like foreign bodies in the feuilleton, a section of the newspaper mainly geared toward easy consumption.”
“the miniature and the metropolis are a match made in media heaven”
“Your book ends with a coda devoted to Adorno’s Minima Moralia, suggesting that this work marks the end of the miniature. Why? Isn’t Minima Moralia more of a collection of aphorisms?”
“You are right. Peter Suhrkamp, Adorno’s publisher, suggested that Minima Moralia could be compared to Benjamin’s short prose texts such as One-Way Street or Berlin Childhood Around 1900. Adorno, probably mindful of the fact that Nietzsche’s aphorisms were really closer to the genealogy of his text, rejected this comparison, but as one asks about the place of the city in Adorno’s miniatures from exile, it becomes clear that they can be read as a late expression of this new form, which, as Bloch once said, is no longer really a form.”
“Minima Moralia was written when Adorno was living in exile in Los Angeles and yet the city is nowhere to be found. Or is it?”
“Right again. The city of Los Angeles is largely absent in this text. But so too are Prague, Berlin, and Vienna from the miniatures of Kafka, Jünger, and Musil. This absence of realistic description characterizes the miniature and marks its distance from the urban sketch, that other major mode of writing the city that goes back to Mercier’s Le Tableau de Paris from the 1780s and that was also widespread in the feuilletons of the period.”
“Just think of the marvelous urban sketches of Robert Walser or Joseph Roth, or even of Benjamin’s descriptions of Moscow or Naples, which are fundamentally different from the miniatures of One-Way Street.”
“For me, Adorno’s experience of LA marks the end of the metropolitan miniature. He recognized that this city, contrary to the European cities of the early 20th century, was no longer an island of modernization in a largely provincial and agricultural national environment. LA was the model of a city oozing out beyond its borders as urban modernity had begun to invade and to capture all territories of the nation state via communications, traffic patterns, and suburbanization, a development that caught on in Western Europe only in the 1950s and 1960s. LA of course also provided the ground for Adorno’s theory of an all-engulfing culture industry that left no corner of modern life untouched.”