What is a World Capital of Culture? The Case of Paris

Paris invented the notion of modern art and that of the avant-garde. She exercised undisputed hegemony over modern art and literature from the midnineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, when New York “stole” the concept. Pioneering works of the 1930s like Roger Caillois’ Le mythe et l’homme and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-werk indicated the existence of a secret generative link between the mythology of Paris as “capital of modernity” and the discourses of modern art and literature.1 The line of research was reopened in the 1990s and early 2000s in major studies by Patrice Higonnet, Christophe Charle, Pascale Casanova, Christopher Prendergast and Karlheinz Stierle.2 These writers are in intimate dialogue with some of the most important forms of cultural theory in the 20th century. Higonnet combines Roger Caillois’ theory of the mythology of the metropolis as frame for interpretation and action with Habermasian ideas of public space. Charle, a cultural historian and Casanova, a scholar of comparative literature, both draw primarily on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Prendergast uses deconstructive approaches, tracing the readability and blur of a 19th century Paris stretched out between “Paris the political and cultural capital”, dominating its territory and “Paris, the metropolis”, network of cultural exchange. One type of cultural theory is lacking, though. A world capital of culture is a capital of mediation. It mediates worldwide and is mediated worldwide. Yet none of the above see the problem as one of media studies and media theory. Walter Benjamin was a pioneer in linking art theory and urban studies to the theory of the modern media. Karlheinz Stierle puts this aspect of Benjamin’s work into parentheses in order to re-appropriate the Passagenwerk for German philology and hermeneutics (Romanistik). I will try and understand the notion of a “Paris world capital of culture” also from the perspective of media history and media theory. Only thus can one grasp what was most productive in the relation between the discourses of Paris and those of the avant-garde.