The problem of Postmodernism -how its fundamental
characteristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first place,
whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the contrary, a mystification
-- this problem is at one and the same time an aesthetic and a political one.
The various positions that can logically be taken on it, whatever terms they
are couched in, can always be shown to articulate visions of history in which
the evaluation of the social moment in which we live today is the object of an
essentially political affirmation or repudiation. Indeed, the very enabling
premise of the debate turns on an initial, strategic presupposition about our social
system: to grant some historic originality to a postmodernist culture is also
implicitly to affirm some radical structural difference between what is
sometimes called consumer society and earlier moments of the capitalism from
which it emerged. The various logical possibilities, however, are necessarily
linked with the taking of a position on that other issue inscribed in the very
designation Postmodernism itself, namely, the evaluation of what must now be
called high or classical modernism. Indeed, when we make some initial inventory
of the varied cultural artifacts that might plausibly be characterized as
postmodern, the temptation is strong to seek the "family resemblance"
of such heterogeneous styles and products not in themselves but in some common
high modernist impulse and aesthetic against which they all, in one way or
another, stand in reaction.
The architectural debates, however, the inaugural
discussions of Postmodernism as a style, have the merit of making the political
resonance of these seemingly aesthetic issues inescapable and allowing it to be
detectable in the sometimes more coded or veiled discussions in the other arts.
On the whole, four general positions on Postmodernism may be disengaged from
the variety of recent pronouncements on the subject; yet even this relatively neat
scheme, or combinatoire, is further complicated by one's impression that each
of these possibilities is susceptible of either a politically progressive or a
politically reactionary expression (speaking now from a Marxist or more
generally left perspective). One can, for example, salute the arrival of Postmodernism
from an essentially antimodernist standpoint. A somewhat earlier generation of
theorists (most notably Ihab Hassan) seem already to have done something like
this when they dealt with the postmodernist aesthetic in terms of a more
properly poststructuralist thernatics (the Tel quel attack on the ideology of representation,
the Heideggerian or Derridean "end of Western metaphysics"), where
what is often not yet called Postmodernism (see the Utopian prophecy at the end
of Foucault's The Order of Things) is saluted as the coming of a whole new way
of thinking and being in the world. But since Hassan's celebration also
includes a number of the more extreme monuments of high modernism ( Joyce,
Mallarmé), this would be a relatively more ambiguous stance were it not for the
accompanying celebration of a new information high technology which marks the
affinity between such evocations and the political thesis of a properly postindustrial
society. All of which is largely disambiguated in Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to
Our House, an otherwise undistinguished book report on the recent architectural
debates by a writer whose own New Journalism itself constitutes one of the
varieties of Postmodernism. What is interesting and symptomatic about this
book, however, is the absence of any Utopian celebration of the postmodern and,
far more striking, the passionate hatred of the modern that breathes through
the otherwise obligatory camp sarcasm of the rhetoric; and this is not a new,
but a dated and archaic passion. It is as though the original horror of the
first middle-class spectators of the very emergence of the modern itself -- the
first Corbusiers, as white as the first freshly built cathedrals of the twelfth
century, the first scandalous Picasso heads with two eyes on one profile like a
flounder, the stunning "obscurity" of the first editions of Ulysses or
The Waste Land -- this disgust of the original philistines, Spiessbürger,
bourgeois, or Main Street Babbitry, had suddenly come back to life, infusing
the newer critiques of modernism with an ideologically very different spirit
whose effect is, on the whole, to reawaken in the reader an equally archaic sympathy
with the protopolitical, Utopian, anti-middle-class impulses of a now extinct
high modernism itself. Wolfe's diatribe thus offers a textbook example of the
way in which a reasoned and contemporary,
theoretical repudiation of the modern -- much of whose progressive force
springs from a new sense of the urban and a now considerable experience of the destruction
of older forms of communal and urban life in the name of a high modernist
orthodoxy -- can be handily reappropriated and pressed into the service of an
explicitly reactionary cultural politics. These positions -- antimodern,
propostmodern -- then find their opposite number and structural inversion in a
group of counterstatements whose aim is to discredit the shoddiness and irresponsibility
of the postmodern in general by way of a reaffirmation of the authentic impulse
of a high-modernist tradition still considered to be alive and vital.
Hilton Kramer's twin manifestos in the inaugural issue of
his journal, The New Criterion, articulate these views with force, contrasting
the moral responsibility of the "masterpieces" and monuments of
classical modernism with the fundamental irresponsibility and superficiality of
a Postmodernism associated with camp and the "facetiousness" of which
Wolfe's style is a ripe and obvious example. What is more paradoxical is that
politically Wolfe and Kramer have much in common; and there would seem to be a
certain inconsistency in the way in which Kramer must seek to eradicate from
the "high seriousness" of the classics of the modern their
fundamentally anti-middleclass stance and the protopolitical passion which informs
the repudiation, by the great modernists, of Victorian taboos and family life,
of commodification, and of the increasing asphyxiation of a desacralizing
capitalism, from Ibsen to Lawrence, from Van Gogh to Jackson Pollock. Kramer's ingenious
attempt to assimilate this ostensibly antibourgeois stance of the great
modernists to a "loyal opposition" secretly nourished, by way of
foundations and grants, by the bourgeoisie itself, while signally unconvincing,
is surely itself enabled by the contradictions of the cultural politics of
modernism proper, whose negations depend on the persistence of what they
repudiate and entertain -- when they do not (very rarely indeed, as in Brecht)
attain some genuine political self consciousness -- a symbiotic relationship with
capital. It is, however, easier to understand Kramer's move here when the
political project of The New Criterion is clarified; for the mission of the
journal is clearly to eradicate the sixties itself and what remains of its
legacy, to consign that whole period to the kind of oblivion which the fifties was
able to devise for the thirties, or the twenties for the rich political culture
of the pre-World War I era. The New Criterion therefore inscribes itself in the
effort, ongoing and at work everywhere today, to construct some new
conservative cultural counterrevolution, whose terms range from the aesthetic
to the ultimate defense of the family and religion. It is therefore paradoxical
that this essentially political project should explicitly deplore the
omnipresence of politics in contemporary culture -- an infection largely spread
during the sixties but which Kramer holds responsible for the moral imbecility
of the Postmodernism of our own period. The problem with the operation -- an
obviously indispensable one from the conservative viewpoint -- is that for
whatever reason, its paper money rhetoric does not seem to have been backed by
the solid gold of state power, as was the case with McCarthyism or during the
period of the Palmer raids.
The failure of the Vietnam War seems, at least for
the moment, to have made the naked exercise of repressive power impossible and
to have endowed the sixties with a persistence in collective memory and
experience that it was not given to the traditions of the thirties or the
pre-World War I period to know. Kramer's "cultural revolution"
therefore tends most often to lapse into a feeble and sentimental nostalgia for
the fifties and the Eisenhower era. In the light of what has been shown for an
earlier set of positions on modernism and Postmodernism, it will not be
surprising that in spite of the openly conservative ideology of this second
evaluation of the contemporary cultural scene, the latter can also be
appropriated for what is surely a far more progressive line on the subject. We are
indebted to Jürgen Habermas for this dramatic reversal and rearticulation of
what remains the affirmation of the supreme value of the modern and the
repudiation of the theory and practice of Postmodernism. For Habermas, however,
the vice of Postmodernism consists very centrally in its politically
reactionary function, as the attempt everywhere to discredit a modernist
impulse Habermas himself associates with the bourgeois Enlightenment and its
still universalizing and Utopian spirit. With Adorno himself, Habermas seeks to
rescue and recommemorate what both see as the essentially negative, critical, and
Utopian power of the great high modernisms. On the other hand, his attempt to
associate these last with the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment
marks a decisive break indeed with Adorno and Horkheimer's somber Dialectic of
Enlightenment, in which the scientific ethos of the philosophes is dramatized
as a misguided will to power and domination over nature, and their
desacralizing program as the first stage in the development of a sheerly
instrumentalizing worldview which will lead straight to Auschwitz. This very
striking divergence can be accounted for by Habermas's own vision of history,
which seeks to maintain the promise of "liberalism" and the
essentially Utopian content of the first, universalizing bourgeois ideology
(equality, civil rights, humanitarianism, free speech, and open media) over
against the failure of those ideals to be realized in the development of
capitalism itself. As for the aesthetic terms of the debate, however, it will
not be adequate to respond to Habermas's resuscitation of the modern by some
mere empirical certification of the latter's extinction.
We need to take into account the possibility that the
national situation in which Habermas thinks and writes is rather different from
our own: McCarthyism and repression are, for one thing, realities in the
Federal Republic of Germany today, and the intellectual intimidation of the
Left and the silencing of a left culture (largely associated, by the West German
Right, with "terrorism") has been on the whole a far more successful
operation than elsewhere in the West. The triumph of a new McCarthyism and of
the culture of the Spiessbürger and the philistine suggests the possibility
that in this particular national situation Habermas may well be right, and the
older forms of high modernism may still retain something of the subversive
power they have lost elsewhere. In that case, a Postmodernism which seeks to enfeeble
and undermine that power may well also merit his ideological diagnosis in a
local way, even though the assessment remains ungeneralizable. Both of the
previous positions -antimodern/propostmodern, and promodern/antipostmodern -- are
characterized by an acceptance of the new term, which is tantamount to an
agreement on the fundamental nature of some decisive break between the modern
and the postmodern moments, however these last are evaluated.
There remain, however, two final logical possibilities, both
of which depend on the repudiation of any conception of such a historical break
and which therefore, implicitly or explicitly, call into question the
usefulness of the very category of Postmodernism. As for the works associated
with the latter, they will then be assimilated back into classical modernism
proper, so that the "postmodern" becomes little more than the form taken
by the authentically modern in our own period, and a mere dialectical
intensification of the old modernist impulse toward innovation. (I must here
omit yet another series of debates, largely academic, in which the very
continuity of modernism as it is here reaffirmed is itself called into question
by some vaster sense of the profound continuity of romanticism, from the late eighteenth
century on, of which both the modern and the postmodern will be seen as mere organic
stages.) The two final positions on the subject thus logically prove to be a
positive and negative assessment, respectively, of a Postmodernism now
assimilated back into the high-modernist tradition. Jean-François Lyotard thus
proposes that his own vital commitment to the new and the emergent, to a contemporary
or postcontemporary cultural production now widely characterized as "postmodern,"
be grasped as part and parcel of a reaffirmation of the authentic older high modernisms
very much in Adorno's spirit. The ingenious twist, or swerve, in his own
proposal involves the proposition that something called Postmodernism does not follow
high modernism proper, as the latter's waste product, but rather very precisely
precedes and prepares it, so that the contemporary Postmodernisms all around us
may be seen as the promise of the return and the reinvention, the triumphant
reappearance, of some new high modernism endowed with all its older power and
with fresh life. This is a prophetic stance whose analyses turn on the antirepresentational
thrust of modernism and Postmodernism. Lyotard's aesthetic positions, however,
cannot be adequately evaluated in aesthetic terms, since what informs them is
an essentially social and political conception of a new social system beyond
classical capitalism (our old friend "postindustrial society"): the
vision of a regenerated modernism is, in that sense, inseparable from a certain
prophetic faith in the possibilities and promise of the new society itself in
full emergence. The negative inversion of this position will then clearly
involve an ideological repudiation of modernism of a type which might
conceivably range from Lukács's older analysis of modernist forms as the
replication of the reification of capitalist social life all the way to some of
the more articulated critiques of high modernism of the present day. What
distinguishes this final position from the antimodernisms already outlined
above is, however, that it does not speak from the security of an affirmation
of some new postmodernist culture but rather sees even the latter itself as a
mere degeneration of the already stigmatized impulses of high modernism proper.
This particular position, perhaps the bleakest of all and
the most implacably negative, can be vividly confronted in the works of the
Venetian architecture historian Manfredo Tafuri, whose extensive analyses constitute
a powerful indictment of what we have termed the "protopolitical"
impulses in high modernism (the "Utopian" substitution of cultural
politics for politics proper, the vocation to transform the world by
transforming its forms, space, or language). Tafuri is, however, no less harsh
in his anatomy of the negative, demystifying, "critical" vocation of
the various modernisms, whose function he reads as a kind of Hegelian
"ruse of History" whereby the instrumentalizing and desacralizing
tendencies of capital itself are ultimately realized through just such
demolition work by the thinkers and artists of the modern movement. Their
"anticapitalism" therefore ends up laying the basis for the
"total" bureaucratic organization and control of late capitalism, and
it is only logical that Tafuri should conclude by positing the impossibility of
any radical transformation of culture before a radical transformation of social
relations themselves. The political ambivalence demonstrated in the earlier two
positions seems to me to be maintained here, but within the positions of both
of these very complex thinkers. Unlike many of the previously mentioned
theorists, Tafuri and Lyotard are both explicitly political figures with an
overt commitment to the values of an older revolutionary tradition. It is
clear, for example, that Lyotard's embattled endorsement of the supreme value
of aesthetic innovation is to be understood as the figure for a certain kind of
revolutionary stance, while Tafuri's whole conceptual framework is largely
consistent with the classical Marxist tradition. Yet both are also, implicitly,
and more openly at certain strategic moments, rewritable in terms of a
post-Marxism which at length becomes indistinguishable from anti-Marxism
proper. Lyotard has, for example, very frequently sought to distinguish his
"revolutionary" aesthetic from the older ideals of political
revolution, which he sees as either Stalinist or archaic and incompatible with
the conditions of the new postindustrial social order; while Tafuri's
apocalyptic notion of the total social revolution implies a conception of the
"total system" of capitalism which, in a period of depolitization and
reaction, is only too fatally destined for the kind of discouragement which has
so often led Marxists to a renunciation of the political altogether (
Horkheimer and Merleau- Ponty come to mind, along with many of the
ex-Trotskyists of the thirties and forties and the ex- Maoists of the sixties
and seventies).
The combination scheme outlined above can now be
schematically represented as follows, the plus and minus signs designating the
politically progressive or reactionary functions of the positions in question: With
these remarks we come full circle and can now return to the more positive
potential political content of the first position in question, and in
particular to the question of a certain populist impulse in Postmodernism which
it has been the merit of Charles Jencks (but also of Venturi and others) to
have underscored -- a question that will also allow us to deal a little more adequately
with the absolute pessimism of Tafuri's Marxism itself. What must first be
observed, however, is that most of the political positions which we have found
to inform what is most often conducted as an aesthetic debate are in reality
moralizing ones that seek to develop final judgments on the phenomenon of
Postmodernism, whether the latter is stigmatized as corrupt or, on the other
hand, saluted as a culturally and aesthetically healthy and positive form of innovation.
But a genuinely historical and dialectical analysis of such phenomena --
particularly when it is a matter of a present of time and of history in which
we ourselves exist and struggle -- cannot afford the impoverished luxury of
such absolute moralizing judgments: the dialectic is "beyond good and
evil" in the sense of some easy taking of sides, whence the glacial and inhuman
spirit of its historical vision (something that already disturbed
contemporaries about Hegel's original system). The point is that we are within the
culture of Postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as
impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt.
Ideological judgment on Postmodernism today necessarily implies, one would
think, a judgment on ourselves as well as on the artifacts in question; nor can
an entire historical period, such as our own, be grasped in any adequate way by
means of global moral judgments or their somewhat degraded equivalent, pop
psychological diagnoses. On the classical Marxian view, the seeds of the future
already exist within the present and must be conceptually disengaged from it,
both through analysis and through political praxis (the workers of the Paris Commune,
Marx once remarked in a striking phrase, "have no ideals to realize";
they merely sought to disengage emergent forms of new social relations from the
older capitalist social relations in which the former had already begun to
stir). In place of the temptation either to denounce the complacencies of
Postmodernism as some final symptom of decadence or to salute the new forms as
the harbingers of a new technological and technocratic Utopia, it seems more appropriate
to assess the new cultural production within the working hypothesis of a
general modification of culture itself with the social restructuring of late
capitalism as a system. As for emergence, however, Jencks's assertion that
postmodern architecture distinguishes itself from that of high modernism through
its populist priorities may serve as the starting point for some more general
discussion.
What is meant, in the specifically architectural context, is
that where the now more classical high-modernist space of a Corbusier or a
Wright sought to differentiate itself radically from the fallen city fabric in
which it appeared -- its forms thus dependent on an act of radical disjunction
from its spatial context (the great pilotis dramatizing separation from the
ground and safeguarding the novum of the new space) -- postmodernist buildings,
on the contrary, celebrate their insertion into the heterogeneous fabric of the
commercial strip and the motel and fast-food landscape of the postsuperhighway American
city. Meanwhile, a play of allusion and formal echoes ("historicism")
secures the kinship of these new art buildings with the surrounding commercial
icons and spaces, thereby renouncing the high-modernist claim to radical
difference and innovation. Whether this undoubtedly significant feature of the
newer architecture is to be characterized as populist must remain an open
question. It would seem essential to distinguish the emergent forms of a new
commercial culture -- beginning with advertisements and spreading on to formal packaging
of all kinds, from products to buildings, and not excluding artistic
commodities such as television shows (the "logo") and best-sellers
and films -- from the older kinds of folk and genuinely "popular"
culture which flourished when the older social classes of a peasantry and an urban
artisanat still existed and which, from the midnineteenth century on, has
gradually been colonized and extinguished by commodification and the market
system. What can at least be admitted is the more universal presence of this
particular feature, which appears more unambiguously in the other arts as an
effacement of the older distinction between high and so-called mass culture, a
distinction on which modernism depended for its specificity, its Utopian
function consisting at least in part in the securing of a realm of authentic
experience over against the surrounding environment of middle- and low-brow
commercial culture. Indeed, it can be argued that the emergence of high
modernism is itself contemporaneous with the first great expansion of a
recognizably mass culture ( Zola may be taken as the marker for the last coexistence
of the art novel and the best-seller within a single text). It is this
constitutive differentiation which now seems on the point of disappearing: we
have already mentioned the way in which, in music, after Schönberg and even
after Cage, the two antithetical traditions of the "classical" and
the "popular" once again begin to merge.
In the visual arts the renewal of photography as a
significant medium in its own right and also as the "plane of
substance" in pop art or photorealism is a crucial symptom of the same
process. At any rate, it becomes minimally obvious that the newer artists no
longer "quote" the materials, the fragments and motifs, of a mass or
popular culture, as Flaubert began to do; they somehow incorporate them to the
point where many of our older critical and evaluative categories (founded
precisely on the radical differentiation of modernist and mass culture) no
longer seem functional. But if this is the case, then it seems at least
possible that what wears the mask and makes the gestures of
"populism" in the various postmodernist apologias and manifestos is
in reality a mere reflex and symptom of a (to be sure momentous) cultural
mutation, in which what used to be stigmatized as mass or commercial culture is
now received into the precincts of a new and enlarged cultural realm. In any
case, one would expect a term drawn from the typology of political ideologies
to undergo basic semantic readjustments when its initial referent (that Popular
Front class coalition of workers, peasants, and petit bourgeois generally
called "the people") has disappeared. Perhaps, however, this is not
so new a story after all: one remembers, indeed, Freud's delight at discovering
an obscure tribal culture, which alone among the multitudinous traditions of
dream analysis had managed to hit on the notion that all dreams had hidden
sexual meanings -- except for sexual dreams, which meant something else! So
also it would seem in the postmodernist debate, and the depoliticized
bureaucratic society to which it corresponds, where all seemingly cultural
positions turn out to be symbolic forms of political moralizing, except for the
single overtly political note, which suggests a slippage from politics back
into culture again. Here the usual objection -- that the class includes itself
and that the taxonomy fails to include any (sufficiently privileged) place from
which to observe itself or to provide for its own theorization -- has to be
reckoned into the theory as a kind of bad reflexivity that eats its own tail
without ever squaring the circle. Postmodernism theory seems indeed to be a
ceaseless process of internal rollover in which the position of the observer is
turned inside out and the tabulation recontinued on some larger scale. The
postmodern thus invites us to indulge a somber mockery of historicity in
general, wherein the effort at self-consciousness with which our own situation
somehow completes the act of historical understanding, repeats itself drearily
as in the worst kinds of dreams, and juxtaposes, to its own pertinent
philosophical repudiation of the very concept of selfconsciousness, a grotesque
carnival of the latter's various replays. The reminder of this interminability
is then staged in the form of the inescapability of the plus and minus signs
that emerge from their local slots to bedevil the external observer and to
insist ceaselessly on a moral judgment excluded in advance from the theory
itself. The provisional act of prestidigitation whereby even this moral
judgment is added to the list of pertinent features, by a theory momentarily
able to get outside itself and to include its own external boundaries, scarcely
lasts as long as it takes for the "theory" to re-form and serenely to
become an example of what the closure it proposes and foretells is supposed to
look like.
Postmodernism theory can thus finally rise to the level of
the system itself as well as its most intimate propagandas, which celebrate the
innate freedom of an increasingly absolute self reproduction. These
circumstances, which forestall in advance any foolproof theory of the
postmodern that can be recommended unreservedly as a weapon let alone a litmus
paper, demand some thoughts about an approximate proper use that does not lead
us back into the self-indulgence of this or that infinite regress. In this
particular new enchanted realm, however, the false problem may have become the
only place of truth, so that reflection on the impossible matter of the nature
of a political art in conditions that exclude it by definition may not be the
worst way of marking time. Indeed, I imagine (and the pages to come may or may
not confirm) that "postmodern political art" might turn out to be
just that -- not art in any older sense, but an interminable conjecture on how
it could be possible in the first place. As for the dualisms of the
modern/postmodern, which are considerably more intolerable than most
garden-variety dualisms, and thus are perhaps immunized in advance against the
misuses of which such dualism are infallibly the mark as well as the
instrument, it may be possible that the addition of a third term -- absent from
the present work, but mobilized elsewhere in a related one may serve to convert
this reversible scheme for registering difference into a more productive and
portable historical schema. That third term -- call it "realism" for
the moment and for want of something better -- acknowledges the emergence of
the secular referent from the Englightenment purging of the sacred codes, at
the same time that it accuses some first setting in place of the economic
system itself, before both language and the market go on to know declensions of
the second degree in the modern and imperialism. This new -65- third term,
then, earlier than the others, holds them together with whatever fourth terms
are hypothesized for the various precapitalisms and affords a more abstract
developmental paradigm that seems to recapitulate its chronology out of all
chronological order, as in film, or rock music, or black literature, for
example.
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