Two years ago, Terry Smith and a few of his colleagues set about recruiting a dream team of world-class intellectuals to convene at Pitt and hash out the most vital artistic, cultural, political, and philosophical issues of the post-9/11 world.

To the delight and amazement of Smith, Pitt’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, nearly everyone the University invited agreed to come. The resulting symposium, titled “Modernity and Contemporaneity: Antimonies of Art and Culture After the 20th Century,” will be held Nov. 4-6 here and at the Carnegie Museum of Art. (For the symposium schedule, visit www.mc.pitt.edu.)

Conference conveners, in addition to Smith, include Nancy Condee, director of Pitt’s Graduate Program for Cultural Studies and an associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures, and Okwui Enwezor, artistic director of Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany, and visiting professor in Pitt’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture.

“Modernity and Contemporaneity” will be held in conjunction with the 54th biannual Carnegie International contemporary art exhibition. “It was Laura Hoptman, the exhibition’s curator, who came to us with the idea for this symposium,” Smith says. “The Carnegie International is meant to bring together the best contemporary art from around the world. The challenge was, could we pull together an equivalent, parallel gathering at Pitt of the best contemporary thinkers from around the world?”

Smith and his coconveners drew up a wish list of intellectual heavyweights. What if Pitt could get Frederic Jameson, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University and an internationally revered theorist of postmodernism, to attend? What about Bruno Latour, director of the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation in the Ecole des Mines, Paris, and a philosopher in the history and philosophy of science? And Boris Groys, philosopher and aesthetician at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, known as a theorist of art in post-Cold War Europe…Antonio Negri, professor at the University of Padua, Italy, a well-known contemporary moral and political philospher…Rosalind Krauss, Meyer Shapiro Professor of Modern Art History at Columbia University, a renowned theorist of modern and contemporary art in the United States….

In the end, everyone on Pitt’s wish list of invitees for the “Modernity and Contemporaneity” symposium was set to come with only two exceptions: the great German philosopher and critical theorist Jergen Habermas (who sent his regrets) and Jacques Derrida, the legendary, Algerian-born French philosopher of postmodernism, who had agreed to come but died last month. Pitt’s symposium is dedicated to Derrida, who was a friend of Smith’s.

“When all of these great thinkers agreed to participate,” Smith recalls, “my Pitt colleagues and I thought, ‘Great!’ But then it occurred to us, ‘No, that’s not enough. We’ve also got to invite the next generation of great thinkers—younger artists, critics, historians, and curators from around the world.’ So, we invited as many of those folks as we could, and the result is that the symposium will bring together 24 participants from two generations, representing 11 countries and six continents.”

An unprecedented gathering—but will anything tangible come out of the symposium discussions?

“Pure thought usually precedes the events of the world,” Smith replies. “I would argue that pure thought actually has huge impacts on real-life things in the world.”

Last week, Smith took a break from symposium planning for the following Pitt Chronicle interview.

BRUCE STEELE: Soon after the Cold War ended, the first President Bush proclaimed a New World Order and a then-obscure U.S. State Department official named Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy constituted the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”—and, therefore, the 20th-century triumph of liberal democracy over fascism and repressive socialism probably marked “the end of history.”

A mere decade later came 9/11, and suddenly America was plunged into a new kind of war against stateless, religious fanatics whose orientation isn’t just premodern…it’s premillennial, as in pre-1,000 C.E.

We’ve been in one era and out the other during just the last 15 years. Where are we now?

TERRY SMITH: I think we’re living in a condition today rather than a historical era or epoch. The condition of contemporaneity is what I call it. If it is an age, it is the Age of Aftermath, one littered with pasts that keep on returning, with empires that are falling as they arise. The thought that we probably never will live in a historical epoch, in the traditionally understood sense, is shocking––but it can also be liberating.

This is all very different from the way we lived during the Cold War, which was a big, enveloping term that evoked a simplistic picture of two great world forces that basically sought equilibrium. The West, led by the United States, and the Soviet bloc had a policy of mutual deterrence; all of the other forces in the world were obliged to line up behind one or the other superpower, to some degree. Clearly, the world isn’t like that anymore––if it ever was.

The question that I’m asking, and which we’re going to explore in this conference, is: How can we understand the world if we can’t appeal to big world pictures anymore—if all we have is a clamor of big pictures that fall short and a multiplicity of quite specific, small pictures of the world, as well as a whole variety of different ways of being in time?

This is not to suggest that history has somehow ended. History is going backwards for some people, it’s going forward for other people, and history is irrelevant to still other groups of people. The situation is much more complex than Fukuyama’s original picture, and indeed he’s admitted in his recent books that his “end of history” argument was a gross oversimplification.

Essentially, the big-picture idea is that there are no more big pictures. And the big question is: How do we live in a world without big pictures?

But hasn’t there always been a multiplicity of different worlds? What did “big picture” concepts such as postmodernism ever mean to, say, Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia or the Chinese people during their country’s Cultural Revolution?

Well, Wahhabis do have big pictures of their own, including one about Western modernity. The Cultural Revolution was driven by a vision of China promulgated by Mao and the party leadership. Since then, however, Chinese artists and intellectuals have embraced postmodernism and many modernizing ideals in a mix that, to many of them, is peculiarly Chinese. China does look like the most contemporary country on the planet at the moment. At the symposium, three China scholars will tackle just this issue. My coconveners, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee, are great scholars of these kinds of shifts––respectively, in postcolonial situations and in what used to be called the Second World. They will lead discussion of these themes at the symposium.

Yet your larger point about the eternality of the contemporary is also true. Contemporaneity—that is, living in one’s own sense of the present—has always been our first condition of existence. What might postmodernism mean to people who were never modern in the first place? I’m thinking particularly here of the Aboriginal people in my home country [Australia] who define “the modern world” as the one dominated by the White people who now control most of their country. Aboriginal people are basically working out how to survive through the period of these White people whose time, they believe, will pass at some point, perhaps centuries from now. Which is a very brave way of viewing the world for a people who constitute just over 1 percent of the country’s population. But that’s the Aborigines’ perception. When you’re brought to see the world like that, you develop a totally different sense of time.

I would argue that the big difference between past forms of selective contemporaneity and the current state of the world is: Today, contemporaneity is all that any of us has got.

It may be that while history itself isn’t dead, history in the sense of a huge narrative that encompasses everybody in the world is no longer possible. History writing and history construction of that kind really don’t seem to work anymore. Try and imagine a history, or a sense of what historical development is like, that could be shared by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. Their publicly stated personal values and their ideas about human progress could not be more different.

On the other hand, Bush and bin Laden absolutely share a common understanding of how the international media work and how they’ve got to play the media. The main war they’re waging is a war of competitive imagery, a war of icons. That’s the war that really counts. The military war and the economic war feed into that. They are very adept at putting out big pictures. Yet, to me, they sell images of aftermath, bound to fail their own tests of universality.

What’s the difference between “modern,” “contemporary,” and “contemporaneity”?

Well, the irony is that “modern” used to mean “contemporary” in the sense of “what’s happening now, today.” But gradually it came to refer to a specific, historical time period, and we began to talk about modern with a capital “M.” Modern Art, Modern Architecture, and so forth. In Europe, people tend to speak about the Modern Era as beginning with the Italian Renaissance and continuing until about 1950. Others say the Modern Era began with the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century.

In either case, the terms “postmodern” and “postmodernity” eventually evolved as markers to express that something was happening, something was changing—that the modern was continuing but somehow, at the same time, also reaching its own end point.

Clearly, we’re now beyond the postmodern. We’re in some other state of being, which I and some of my colleagues prefer to call the condition of contemporaneity. Now, what’s tricky is that you can’t actually define contemporaneity. If you try to define it, you’re turning it back into something time-specific like “modern.” In fact, you’re turning it into what I call “the contemporary.” You can define contemporary art when you label a museum, for example, with that title, and select conformist, conventional “Contemporary Art” to put in it, but you can’t define contemporaneity as such, because it has three or four different, internal qualities.

In the banal sense, contemporaneity means “things occurring at the same time.” It also means “being contemporary with something or someone else.” In a stronger sense, you can be a contemporary of a certain time or period, you can belong to it. Finally, there’s a sense of being up to date and living exactly in the present, not depending on the past, exemplified by art and fashion.

Four different senses, and they’re all going on simultaneously, flying off in mutually contradictory directions—past, present, and future, in time and out of time. You can see this multiplicity in the variety of works in the current Carnegie International Exhibition, to which our symposium is a complement.

Obviously, the past will keep on accumulating and the present will keep on occurring. But maybe the present won’t continue to turn into the past in the same ways that it has before. So, in which ways will it turn into the past? How will presentness assert its dominance? We don’t quite know that yet. That’s the kind of conundrum we’re going to try and crack during the symposium.

It all sounds esoteric and a little intimidating. What might someone who’s not a cultural critic or a philosopher gain from attending your symposium?

When you bring the best minds in the world together into the same room, there’s the potential to see something happening that doesn’t normally occur. You can actually see the world thinking.

It’s not just that these people are smart or ingenious—of course, they are—it’s more that when you try to think about the most important questions that affect everybody’s lives and you try to come up with an understanding of those questions, however complex that picture is, you’re providing a human service. You’re coming up with a description, for your fellow human beings, of what it’s like to live in the world today.

It would be esoteric and elitist if we were holding this symposium just for ourselves in some wonderful little palace along the Mediterranean. But instead, the program will be structured so that anyone who comes should be able to follow the argument. Not every little detail, not every little nuance or reference, but the overall flow of the conversation will, I think, be clear. If people stay with it, they should witness an amazing pattern of thought unfolding.

Assuming it’s even possible, what would it take for the world to move beyond contemporaneity?

It would require the emergence of some concentration of power, influence, and economic growth and inventiveness comparable to what we saw in Europe during the Modern Period.

It might take the form of religious fundamentalism becoming a progressive, growing movement, which, in a way, it has. There’s fundamentalism in the White House and in caves in Afghanistan. Fundamentalism—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist—is, collectively, the growth ideology in the world. If you bracket the deadly competition between the different sects, you could say there is a massive rise in fundamentalism all over the world. If these fundamentalists ever somehow cohered, it could create a force of mind and habit and belief that could become so dominant that it would define an era. I believe that’s unlikely, but it could happen.

You’ve written, “If it is to be truly contemporary, rather than an update of comfortable modernism, the art of today must respond deeply to the complex conditions of contemporaneity.” But you’ve also suggested that contemporaneity threatens what you call “the implied contract between artists and their societies—the invitation to provide beauty, insight, and provocation in exchange for tolerance and occasional support in pursuing one’s obsessions.”

To my knowledge, only one human society—a small tribal group in the Philippines—has been found to lack any kind of specialized person or group of people whose job it is to produce visual imagery or craftwork that gives physical form to that society’s self-imagining. Normally, there is a social contract between any group of people and the artists who live within that group. The contract is: We, the larger society, will allow you, the artists, to think and act and live much more freely than the rest of us. In exchange, you will give us back pictures of our society and of us as individuals. We may not like those pictures, but that’s the risk we’ll take, because many times you will give us imagery that we consider to be beautiful and moving.

The question is, if big world pictures are no longer available to us, but only small, partisan, competitive multiplicities and differences, does that mean that artists will have to make contracts with smaller groups and lose the sense of what it is to practice their art within a society?

It’s a challenge that artists are feeling today, very consciously. Some artists are retreating—they’re just producing beautiful images or tricky, funny little objects that are not intended to reflect any larger realities. A lot of contemporary artists have gone back to a sort of adolescent dreamland of what the world might have become had it not been for all the disruptions of the 1960s, the political challenges of the ’70s, the system collapses of the ’80s, and the terror of the ’90s and the present. That’s an avoidance mechanism.

On the other hand, every country has major artists who are making art in and about this condition of contemporaneity. Those are the artists whose work we will be discussing during the symposium.