Postmodernism: Roots and Politics
Gitlin, Todd
Something must be at stake in the edgy debates circulating around and about something called postmodernism. What, then? Commentators pro, con, serious, fey, academic, and accessible seem...
...Just whose place or placelessness is at issue is an entirely legitimate question I shall return to...
...Juxtaposition is the Strip, the shopping mall, the Galleria, Las Vegas...
...Likewise, controversies about postmodernism—the whole of what inevitably has to be called "the postmodernism discourse" — are in no small part discussions about how to live, feel, think in a specific world, our own: a world in nuclear jeopardy...
...They are bemused (though not necessarily by bemusement...
...We are, central myths and homogenizations and oligopolies notwithWINTER • 1989 • 105 Postmodern Culture standing, an immigrant culture, less melting pot than grab bag, perennially replenished by aliens and their singular points of view...
...A car with a dead battery can run off its generator only so long...
...it is remote-control-equipped viewers "zapping" around the television dial...
...Postmodernists ransack history for shards because there is no here here...
...Now one sets out to thaw the world, to show how the "natural" is situated, arbitrary, partial...
...What, in short, is the ethical basis for politics...
...I want to lurch, in properly postmodern style, to the domain of high theory...
...But as universalist structures were swept away, something essential was left wanting...
...In Stranger than Paradise and David Letterman as well as in the Republican party there is a love for the common people and their kitsch tastes that is indistinguishable from contempt...
...Things must be made to look crystalline for a moment before complications set in...
...One is drawn to a politics out of a complex of understandings and feelings—moral feelings...
...The protagonist is not so much wholeheartedly opposed as estranged...
...What After Postmodernism...
...Yet discourse theories cannot account for the impulse from which the politics proceeded in the first place...
...In this flickering half-light, postmodernism is significant because its amalgam of spirits has penetrated architecture, fiction, painting, poetry, planning, performance, music, television, and many other domains...
...Postmodernism couldn't have developed in Germany, because postwar Germans were too busy trying to reappropriate a suppressed modernism...
...This is not the place to try to develop a political point of view that would transcend Foucaultian relativism without taking refuge in an unworkable universalism...
...The first is the bleak Marxist account sketched with flair in a series of essays by Fredric Jameson...
...The other principal current is the opposite: assimilation into standard American styles and myths...
...It has been argued, with considerable force, that the lineaments of postmodernism are already present in one or another version of modernism, that postmodernism is simply the current incarnation, or phase, in a still unfolding modernism...
...All theoretical maps have empty spaces...
...She was partial to the notion that the world "is" —in quotation marks—everything that is agreed to be the case...
...As long ago as 1916, Randolph Bourne wrote that "there is no distinctively American culture...
...This self-exploding quality is the fundamental anomaly for poststructural theories...
...When the Partisan Review embraced modernism in the 1930s, for example, it took a position on more than style: it took a position on reason, the State, the (ir)rationality of history...
...Instead we have textuality, a cultivation of surfaces endlessly referring to, ricocheting from, reverberating onto other surfaces...
...The dominated collaborate with the dominators when they take for granted their discourse and their definition of the situation...
...But the poststructuralist move in theory has flushed the Archimedean point away with the sewage of discourse...
...Instead, postmodernism defines the present cultural space as a sequel—as what it is not...
...a mixture of levels, forms, styles...
...Hollywood and the radio and TV networks flattened the culture, but there is still life in Bourne's vision...
...there are things they cannot disclose, even acknowledge...
...a rejection of history...
...Dance can be built on Beach Boys songs (Twyla Tharp, "Deuce Coupe...
...Theirs is an experience of aftermath, privatization, weightlessness: They can remember political commitment but were not animated by it—more, they suspect it...
...Against Enlightenment ideas of universal rationality, serving to justify the suppression of those found wanting in rationality, Foucault constituted a considerable ad vance: an anticolonial respect for the principle of human diversity...
...That is perhaps its defining break from modernism, which was, whatever its subversive practices, a series of declarations of faith —Suprematism's future, Joyce's present, Eliot's unsurpassable past...
...The same Max is marched forward to promote Coca-Cola over Pepsi, as if Coke were both subversive and mandatory (the "wave" to be "caught")—to an audience encouraged to laugh at the distinction and still, as consumers, act on it...
...Simply, there must be limits to what human beings can be permitted to do with their powers...
...We can distinguish more or less five approaches to an answer...
...The patriotic words are mouthed while the performers signal, in the manner of Moonlighting (and Reagan at his self-deprecating best), that they don't really mean them (quite...
...As the ontological bedrock shakes, nostalgia will return for the old unmoved movers—the unbudgeable signified, the true, the essential, the godly...
...The implied subject is fragmented, unstable, even decomposed...
...Make the most of stagnation, it says, and give up gracefully...
...And indeed, the essential contribution of postmodernist art is that it obliterates the line— or the brow—separating the high from the low...
...Postmodernism dispenses with moorings, then, because old certitudes have actually crumbled...
...The postmodern is an aftermath, or a waiting game, because that is what we are living in: a prolonged cultural moment that is oddly weightless, shadowed by incomplete revolts, haunted by absences—a Counterreformation beating against an unfinished, indeed barely begun, Reformation...
...I call this regression for two reasons: first, because it screens out the dreadful history of "state socialism" —neglects, on the theoretical plane, the problem of state power...
...pleasure in the play of surfaces...
...I would add the obvious: that postmodernism is born in the U. S. A. because juxtaposition is one of the things we do best...
...market as long as it promises them an endless accumulation of crafted goods, as in the (half-joking...
...In either event, individuals matter...
...Their work was radiant with passion for a new world/work...
...There is laissez-faire in economics as long as you can find an apartment you can afford and as long as you have not thought too long about near-collisions between passenger planes...
...Surface is illusion but so is depth...
...Ideology, one comes to understand, freezes privilege and encases it in a spurious idea of the natural...
...it is photorealism, David Hockney, Rauschenberg's silkscreens, Warhol's multiple-image paintings and Brillo boxes, Larry Rivers's erasures and pseudopageantry, Sherrie Levine's photographs of "classic" photographs...
...In the British prototype, he throws in with a revolution against Network 23...
...What kind of authority, what kind of difference, is legitimate...
...Their mores lean toward the libertarian and, at least until the AIDS terror, the libertine...
...It was faith in a rule of progress under the sway of that trinity that had underlain our assumptions that the world displays linear order, historical sequence, and moral clarifies...
...High culture" doesn't so much quote from popular culture as blur into it...
...The culture has not found a language for articulating the new understandings we are trying, haltingly, to live with...
...high culture holds the line against the popular...
...The work is apocalyptic, often fused with a longing for some long-gone organic whole sometimes identified with a fascist present or future...
...But the last phase to reverberate throughout the AngloAmerican world, the phase that culminated in Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, outlined a world of power that not only instigated resistance but required it, channeled it, and turned its energy back upon it...
...We read in a "Design Notebook" column in the New York Times of March 12, 1987, that "Post-Modernism Appears to Retreat...
...Genres are spliced...
...There is no human experience—at least none that deserves special treatment...
...But cultural contradiction burst open the premises of the old cultural complex...
...by Vietnam, by drugs, by youth revolts, by women's and gay movements...
...Instead of passion, or alongside it, there is ambivalence toward the prevailing authorities...
...Finally, postmodern is pre-what...
...A knowing blankness results...
...Where it developed in France at all, it did so without antagonism to or rupture from modernism...
...It might even be argued that postmodernism plays in and with surfaces because that is what it must do to carry on with its evasions: because there are large cultural , terrors that broke into common consciousness in the sixties and there is no clear way to live out their implications in a conservative, contracting period...
...it is Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard...
...It thereby appealed to academics desirous of a radical stance beyond Marxism...
...Through the consecutive, the linear, it claims to represent reality...
...The quality of postmodern juxtaposition is distinct: There is a deliberate selfconsciousness, a skating of the edge dividing irony from dismay or endorsement, which makes up a distinct cultural mood...
...There is anxiety at work and at play here...
...it is the marketplace jamboree, the divinely grotesque disorder, amazing diversity striving for reconciliation, the ethereal and ungrounded radiance of signs, the shimmer of the evanescent, the good-times beat of the tall tale meant to be simultaneously disbelieved and appreciated...
...At times the critical world seems to divide between those who speak with assurance about what it is and those who are struggling to keep up...
...it leads to trouble...
...As the weeks pass, however, Max loses his computerized bite and becomes regressively cuter...
...The point is not only juxtaposition but its attitude...
...Characteristically, it is critics who have named the phenomenon that the practitioners practice as they wriggle away from it, insisting in virtual chorus on their individual artistry...
...everything has been done...
...a knowingness that dissolves commitment into irony...
...Where there was passion or ambivalence, there is now a collapse of feeling, a blankness...
...Why support some resistances and not others...
...The quality of deliberateness and the sense of exhaustion in the postmodern are what set it apart...
...The overarching concept we need is a politics WINTER • 1989 107 Postmodern Culture of limits...
...From this point of view, postmodernism is blank because it wants to have its commodification and eat it...
...Is Max a revolutionary guerrilla or a sales gimmick...
...But if it is true that deep social forces have been at work for a long time to produce the present cultural anesthesia, then postmodernism is not going to fade automatically...
...a sense of exhaustion...
...at the moment when photographs of Michael Graves's buildings were featured in the New York Times Magazine...
...Proceeding from that point, one tries to locate oneself in history...
...a relish for copies and repetition...
...2) The pluralist: the social group must be protected against domination by other social groups...
...Knowing indifference is their "structure of feeling" —thus a taste for cultural bricolage...
...Among the practitioners of postmodernism are peculiarly a generation schooled in poststructuralist theory: variously, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lacan, Derrida...
...And they are not necessarily ideal types of the work "itself "; rather, of the work as it is understood and judged by some consensus (albeit shifting) of artists, critics, and audiences...
...Actually, postmodernism as a stylistic avant-garde movement in architecture had probably already reached a plateau (but does this mean it ended...
...it is news commentary cluing us in to the imagemaking and "positioning" strategies of the candidates...
...One employs a language of unmasking...
...The premodernist work aspires to a unity of vision...
...Standing apart from reality, the work aspires to an order of beauty, which, in a sense, judges reality...
...As a feminist she was unwilling to make her commitments dissolve into ungrounded discourse...
...finally, it drove a revisionary wedge into left-wing politics in the large...
...Take, for instance, the "Joe Isuzu" commercials in which the spokesman, a transparently slick version of the archetypal TV huckster, grossly lies about what the car will do, how much it costs, and so on, while the subtitles tell us he's lying, and by how much...
...The orders of conventional reality—inside versus outside, subject versus object, self WINTER • 1989 • 101 Postmodern Culture versus other—are called into question...
...correspond to?— a crisis of thought that runs throughout poststructuralist theory, what we could call a crisis of bottomlessness...
...At the least, artists—and theorists—will have to do something else...
...Discourse, one discovers, is a means through which domination takes place...
...Beauty, deprived of its power of criticism in an age of packaging, has been reduced to the decoration of reality, and so is crossed off the postmodernist agenda...
...extenuate...
...In politics as in the arts distrust runs rampant while, beneath the surface, as David Byrne and Brian Eno have put it, "America is waiting for a message of some sort or another...
...it is Disneyland, Las Vegas, suburban strips, shopping malls, mirror glass facades, William Burroughs, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, Monty Python, Don DeLillo, Isuzu "He's lying" commercials, Star Wars, Spalding Gray, David Byrne, Twyla Tharp, the Flying Karamazov Brothers, George Coates, the Kronos Quartet, Frederick Barthelme, Laurie Anderson, David Letterman, John Ashbery, Paul Auster, the Centre Pompidou, the Hyatt Regency, The White Hotel, Less Than Zero, Kathy Acker, Philip Roth's The Counterlife (but not Portnoy's Complaint), the epilogue to Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz...
...Their television runs through Saturday Night Live and MTV...
...because historical continuity is shattered by the permanent revolution that is capitalism (which, by the way, I find it clumsy and inconsistent to call "late capitalism," a formulation haunted by a peculiar nostalgia for sequential time—as if we could know whether it is late early, middle, or early late...
...Surfaces meet surfaces in these postmodern forms because a new human nature—a human second nature—has formed to feel at home in a homeless world political economy...
...3) the student who walks into my office dressed in green jersey, orange skirt, and black tights...
...Postwar American versions of modernism, as artistic practice and critical exegesis, can also be understood as a way to inhabit a drastically changed political space...
...The idea of public life— whether party participation or military intervention— fills them with weariness...
...in general, by the erosion of that false and devastating universality embodied in the rule of the trinity of Father, Science, and State...
...How does a culture renew itself...
...If this is so, the interesting question is, Why...
...Who is entitled to say...
...All master styles aim to remake the history that precedes them, just as Eliot said individual talents reorder tradition...
...The music of the "Vietnam syndrome" is strangely akin to the music, if that is the word, of commodities trading...
...The cultural upwellings and wildness of the sixties kicked out the props of a teetering moral structure, but the new house has not been built...
...The modernist work still aspires to unity, but this unity, if that is what it is, has been (is still being...
...Postmodernism" usually refers to a certain constellation of styles and tones in cultural works: pastiche...
...so are cultural gradations...
...It may contain a critique of the established order, in the name of the obstructed ambitions of individuals...
...It shadows modernism...
...A second stab at explanation calls attention to our political rather than strictly economic moment...
...Lyrical forms, heightened speech, rhythm and rhyme, Renaissance perspective, and compositional "laws" go to work in the interest of beauty...
...I think it is reasonable, or at least interesting, to assume that the anxiety that surfaces in the course of the discussion—and I confess I share in it—is called for...
...The standard ideological configurations of "liberal" and "conservative" belief are decomposing, although the decomposition is masked by the fact that the old political language is still in force...
...it also wants to display its knowingness, thereby demonstrating how superior it is to the trash market...
...constructed, assembled from fragments, or shocks, or juxtapositions of difference...
...But in America, the artistic avant-garde, in order to break from cold war orthodoxy and corporatesponsored smugness, had to revolt against the officially enshrined modernism of the postwar period, had to smash the Modern Art idol...
...blankness...
...bumper sticker: "The One With the Most Toys Wins...
...The category of "lived experience" is, from this point of view, an atavistic concealment...
...In one sense, then, postmodernism remakes the relation between premodernism and modernism: In the light of postmodern disdain for representational conventions, the continuity between the preceding stages comes to seem more striking than the chasm dividing them...
...Commerce incorporates popular cynicism and political unease while flattering the audience that it has now, at last, seen through all the sham: Cynicism, Inc., Mark Miller has named it...
...A theoretical nihilism, then, is a fair charge to level against the discourse move...
...They like the idea of the free * Cecelia Tichi argues that the blank-toned fiction of Ann Beattie, Bret Easton Ellis, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Tama Janowitz, among others, is the anesthetized expression of a TV-saturated generation...
...Respect for uncertainties is of the essence...
...Apparently Progressive Architecture is no longer giving its awards to pastiches of columns, capitals, and cornices...
...3) The libertarian: the individual must be protected against domination by collectives...
...Yes, she said, it bothered, chagrined, embarrassed her...
...He could or would not say...
...The postmodernist arts, in toto, express a spirit that comports well with American culture in the eighties...
...As we pressed him to articulate the ground of his positions, he took refuge in exasperated modesty—there was no general principle at stake and no substantial lacuna for his system (which was not, after all, intended to be "a system...
...Here we find jubilant disrespect for the boundaries that are supposed to segregate culture castes, but disrespect of this sort does not imply a leveling down, profaning the holy precincts of high culture...
...20 Minutes into the Future" —so the pilot film shows us—the computer-generated Max fights the tyranny of the ratings-crazed Network 23, whose decidedly sinister (shot from below with wide-angle lens) board-room tycoons will stop at no crime in their pursuit of profits...
...it does not galvanize citizenship in a larger community—or imperial enthusiasms, for that matter...
...The company takes for granted a culture of lies, then aims to ingratiate itself by mocking the conventions of the hard sell...
...a world two decades from the hopes and desperate innocence of the sixties...
...The entire elusive phenomenon that has been categorized as postmodernism is best understood not just as a style but as a general orientation, as a way of apprehending and experiencing the world and our place, or placelessness, in it...
...A fourth approach starts from the fact that postmodernism is specifically, though not exclusively, American...
...How tempting it will be, for example, to regress to a labor theory of value, a notion of labor-power as human essence, with alienation reduced to the theft of the fruits of labor...
...the adventures that matter to them are adventures of private life...
...Modernism lurks in its sequel, haunts it...
...The volume and pitch of the commentary and controversy seem to imply that something about this postmodern something matters...
...Postmodernism is an art of erosion...
...To join the conversation I am going to use the term to refer to art located somewhere in this constellation...
...a circus can include cabaret jokes (Circus Oz...
...Not easily...
...We can only sympathize with the project...
...it is finally nothing more than a crosshatch of discourses...
...or it may uphold individuals as the embodiments of society at its best...
...It is one wing, at least, of the zeitgeist...
...She presented herself as a committed feminist working the deconstructionist beat...
...The territory of theory and the territory of art share an intimacy greater than ordinary...
...It might be objected that we are talking about nothing more than a fad...
...A third approach to explaining postmodernism is a refinement of the second: an argument not about history in general but about a specific generation and class...
...and second, because it fails to honor the contribution of the discourse-theory move, namely to have pointed out how discourse not only reflects but helps constitute the domain of production in which class relations are rooted...
...q 108 • DISSENT...
...Power was everywhere, "micropower," strategies constantly "deploying" (to use the military language Foucault was partial to) against other strategies—apparently without a basis for solidarity or a reason to support resistance against power...
...Cherchez la japanoise: the venal Zik-Zak corporation that brings on the ratings panic is conveniently Japanese...
...Shock, now routine, is greeted with the glazed stare of the absolute ironist...
...These are not at all necessarily incompatible...
...It is straining to make the most of seriality, endless recirculation and repetition in the collective image warehouse, because so much of reality is serial...
...Why has it come to pass...
...They crystallize into the Archimedean point, the unmoved and essential standing place, for one's intellectual project...
...Needless to say, this way of putting the matter leaves many questions unsettled: most grievously, what happens when there are conflicts and internal fissures among these objectives...
...it is the equivalent of the blank stare of the postmodern...
...Foucault's popularity today stems in good measure from the flair with which he engaged "the politics of the personal" in a succession of tour de force studies documenting the ways in which institutions (psychiatry, medicine, prisons, sexuality) are encrustations of power and assumptions...
...So are the hitherto self-enclosed orders of art: poetry vs...
...But they are not in any conventional sense "right-wing": They float beyond belief...
...What could be more American...
...Collage, montage: These are of the essence of modernism high and low...
...Postmodernism appears as an outlook for (though not necessarily by) Yuppies —urban, professional products of the late baby boom, born in the late fifties and early sixties...
...If the phenomenon were more clearly demarcated from its predecessor, it might have been able to stand, semantically, on its own feet...
...It shifts abruptly among a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, materials...
...Alongside blasé postmodernism, I am trying to maintain, there is another variant in which pluralist exuberance and critical intelligence reinforce each other...
...What constitutes lib — eration, and who says...
...As Donald Barthelme's fiction knows, we live in a forest of images mass-produced and endlessly, alluringly empty...
...This is the properly postmodern note on which I suspend the discussion for now...
...Continuity is disrupted, and with enthusiasm: it is as if the work is punctuated with exclamation marks...
...They are, though, disabused of authority...
...In any event, Max in his early American weeks reaches out of the fictional frame to yawn in the face of ABC's impending commercials...
...avant-garde music can include radio gospel (David Byrne and Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts...
...I want to broach some intersecting questions: What do we mean by postmodernism...
...Picasso, Boccioni, Tatlin, Pound, Joyce, Woolf in their various ways thundered and hungered...
...As Foucault said to a group of us in Berkeley in November 1983, "There is no universal criteri[on] which permits [us] to say, This category of power relations [is] bad and those are good"—although Foucault the person had no trouble taking political positions...
...I am going to take the position that the discussion of postmodernism is, among other things, a deflected and displaced discussion of the contours of political thought—in the largest sense—during the seventies and eighties...
...Then what is so special about (1) Philip Johnson's AT&T building, with its Chippendale pediment on high and quasi-classical columns below...
...Commentators pro, con, serious, fey, academic, and accessible seem agreed that something postmodern has happened, even if we are all (or virtually all) Mr...
...They grew up taking drugs, taking them for granted, but do not associate them with spirituality or the hunger for transcendence...
...The democratic, vital edge of the postmodern, the love of difference and flux and the exuberantly unfinished, deserves to infuse the spirit of politics...
...But then the ideal of a way of thinking that liberates has been thrown—thrown funda 106 • DISSENT Postmodern Culture mentally into question...
...The postmodernist, from this point of view, is hitching high art to the raucous, disrespectful quality that accompanies American popular culture from its beginnings...
...It honors sequence and causality in time or space...
...Anything can be juxtaposed to anything else...
...Everything takes place in the present, "here," that is, nowhere in particular...
...Roger Shattuck, for example, has recently made the point that Cubism, Futurism, and artistic spiritualists like Kandinsky "shared one compositional principle: the juxtaposition of states of mind, of different times and places, of different points of view...
...It is one of the defining currents of American culture, especially with Emancipation and the rise of immigration in the latter part of the nineteenth century...
...modernist collage made possible postmodernist genresplicing...
...they've seen it all...
...From this point of view, postmodernism rejects historical continuity and takes up residence somewhere beyond it because history was ruptured: by the Bombfueled vision of a possible material end of history...
...Individuality has become a parody of itself: another word for a fashion choice, a life-style compound, a talk-show self-advertisement logo...
...Altogether too easy...
...Andy Warhol would have grasped the point in a second, or fifteen...
...Jones who doesn't know what it is...
...These are ideal types, mind you, not adequate descriptions...
...It followed from the sixties' revelation that various systems of knowledge were fundamentally implicated in injustice and violence—whether racist or sexist exclusions from literary canons or the language and science of militarism and imperial justification...
...Yet as a theorist she was compelled to explode the very ground on which she stood as a political person—the very ground that had brought her to discourse theories in the first place...
...Choose one: the resulting ironic spiral either mocks the game by playing it or plays it by mocking it...
...There is a premium on copies...
...Aiming to bring into sharp relief the line between art and life, modernism appropriates selected shards of popular culture, quotes from them...
...Postmodernism in the arts corresponds to postmodernism in life, as sketched by the French theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard: "[o]ne listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo, and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong...
...The important thing is that their assemblage of "values" corresponds to their class biographies...
...Alas, Foucault's work was interrupted...
...The impulse toward this sort of unmasking is certainly political: it stemmed from a desire to undo the hold of one system of knowledge/ language/power over another...
...Or as Lily Tomlin puts it, that reality is a widely shared hunch...
...What is not clear is whether postmodernism, living off borrowed materials, has the resources for continuing self-renewal...
...Authentic use value has been overcome by the universality of exchange value...
...They cannot remember a time before television, suburbs, shopping malls.* They are accustomed, therefore, to rapid cuts, discontinuities, breaches of attention, culture to be indulged and disdained at the same time...
...Not for the first time, debates over cultural politics intersect with larger intellectual and political currents, prefiguring or tracing conflicts that have emerged, or ought to emerge, in the sphere of politics strictly understood...
...a world economically both alluring and nerveracking for the fitful middle classes...
...Or consider the early episodes of Max Headroom during the spring of 1987, which in nine weeks melted down from a blunt critique of television itself to a mishmash of adorability...
...A certain anxiety is entirely commensurate with what is at stake...
...The characteristic machine of this period is the computer, which enthrones (or fetishizes) the fragment, the "bit," and in the process places a premium on process and reproduction that is aped in postmodernist art...
...The very fact that a phenomenon is called "postmodernism" —that it differs from modernism by nothing more than a prefix— pays tribute to the power of modernism's cultural force field and suggests that postmodernism might be no more (or less) than an aftermath or a hiatus...
...But perhaps there is also something in his popularity that suggests a radicalism of gesture and not of action, suggests the paralysis of radical politics rather than the fruition of it...
...Postmodernism and Poststructuralist Theory: Unstable Bedrock...
...reality...
...it is bricolage fashion...
...I think of a graduate student I met in 1987...
...Finally, the work may borrow stories or tunes from popular materials but it holds itself (and is held by its audience) above its origins...
...The work composes beauty out of discord...
...Alongside ostensible belief, actual disengagement...
...In this light, the crucial location of the postmodern is after the 1960s...
...David Hockney...
...Uprooted juxtaposition is how people live: not only displaced peasants cast WINTER • 1989 • 103 Postmodern Culture into the megalopolis, where decontextualized images proliferate, but also TV viewers confronted with the interruptus of American television as well as financial honchos shifting bits of information and blips of capital around the world at will and high speed...
...In the postmodernist sensibility, the search for unity has apparently been abandoned altogether...
...Put it this way: Modernism tore up unity and postmodernism has been enjoying the shreds...
...They will have to cease being stenographers of the surfaces...
...Not only has the master voice dissolved, but any sense of loss is rendered deadpan...
...To the contrary: Several forces are converging to produce the postmodernist moment...
...Modernism's multiplication of perspective led to postmodernism's utter dispersion of voices...
...What is Postmodernism...
...Surely nothing is without precedent...
...A politics of limits respects horizontal social relations—multiplicity over hierarchy, juxtaposition over usurpation, difference over deference• finally, disorderly life in its flux against orderly death in its finality...
...Here, then, is one person's grid—hopelessly crude, in the manner of first approximations—for distinguishing among premodernism (realism), modernism, and postmodernism...
...Art expresses this abstract unity and vast, weightless indifference through its blank repetitions (think of Warhol or Philip Glass), its exhausted antiromance, its I've-seen-it-all, striving, at best, for a kind of all-embracing surface that radiates from the world temple of the postmodern, the glorious Centre Pompidou in Paris...
...So what's new...
...Andreas Huyssen makes an interesting argument that carries us partway but needs to be extended...
...The work calls attention to its arbitrariness, constructedness...
...it is vulgarized pluralism...
...Indeed, they hold, quite clearly, that such impulses should not be taken at face value...
...The essence of a politics must be rooted in three protections: (1) The ecological: the earth and human life must be protected against the Bomb and other manmade depredations...
...Where fey, blasé postmodernism skates along the edge, cheerfully or cheerlessly leaving doubt whether it is to be taken as critical or affirmative, the exuberant and parodic kind tries to undermine the apparently solid ground of belief...
...The aesthetics of postmodernism are situated, historical...
...Absorbing every scrap of leftover culture, it gets involved with nothing...
...They will have to decide not to coast down the currents of least resistance...
...sculpture, representation vs...
...Instead of a single center, there is pastiche, cultural recombination...
...What is the relation between postmodern aesthetics and a possible politics...
...2) the Australian Circus Oz, which combines jugglers who comment on their juggling and crack political jokes along with (their list) "Aboriginal influences, vaudeville, Chinese acrobatics, Japanese martial arts, fireman's balances, Indonesian instruments and rhythms, video, Middle Eastern tunes, B-grade detective movies, modern dance, Irish jigs, and the 102 • DISSENT Postmodern Culture ubiquitous present of corporate marketing...
...Something must be at stake in the edgy debates circulating around and about something called postmodernism...
...prose, painting vs...
...But I am also going to argue that what is at stake in the debate—and thus the root of the general anxiety —goes beyond art: it extends to the question of what sort of disposition toward the contemporary world is 100 • DISSENT Postmodern Culture going to prevail throughout Western culture...
...The work labors under no illusions: we are all deliberately playing, pretending here, get the point...
...surely modernism had to set asunder what postmodernism is mixing in and about...
...Why this Postmodernism...
...Most of the atrocities to which our species is prone can be understood as violations of limits...
...Poststructuralist critics generally agree that the concept of "literature," say, "assumes that something recognizable as human experience or human nature exists, aside from any form of words and from any form of society, and that this experience is put into words by an author" —thus Diane Macdonell, as if the idea that there is "human experience" were as dismissable as the idea that there is "human nature...
...The work observes, highlights, renders judgments, and exudes passions in their names...
...It is Michael What Are They Talking About...
...That is, it knows that the cultural industry will tailor virtually any cultural goods for the sake of sales...
...Graves's Portland Building and Philip Johnson's AT&T, and hundreds of more or less skillful derivatives...
...The postmodernist spirit, with its superseding of the problem of authenticity, belongs to, is coupled to, corresponds to, expresses—the relation is not altogether clear—the culture of multinational capitalism, in which capital, that infinitely transferable abstraction, has abolished particularity as such along with the coherent self in whom history, depth, and subjectivity unite...
...It is as if the very term had trouble establishing the originality of the concept...
...It would be cute but glib and shortsighted to dismiss the talk as so much time-serving space-filling, the shoring up of positions for the sake of amassing theoretical property, or propriety, or priority...
...Exhaustion is finally exhausting...
...In the pages of art journals, popular and obscure, abundant passion flows on about passionlessness...
...If there is one theorist whose work seems, at first, to be animated by the promise of the postmodern, it is Michel Foucault...
...I asked her if she wasn't troubled by the fact that her politics was rooted in a decision to pursue the cues supplied by her experience as a woman, yet from the poststructuralist point of view her emotions were to be forbidden any primacy...
...For the forms of representation displayed in postmodernist art rhyme or dovetail with—extend...
...Postmodernism is known by the company it succeeds...
...it interrupts itself...
...Today's postmodernists are blas...
...it is the cultural logic of laissez-faire but perhaps, the suspicion arises, even more—of an elbows-out, noisy, jostling, bottom-up version of something that can pass as democracy...
...It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cultures...
...It is discourse all the way down—analogous to postmodernism's endless play of surfaces...
...acute selfconsciousness about the formal, constructed nature of the work...
...But I do want to outline where I think we ought to be looking...
...What is interesting is not a single set of architectural tropes but postmodernism as what Raymond Williams called a "structure of feeling" — an interlocking cultural complex, or what he called "a pattern of impulses, restraints, tones" —that forecasts the common future as it colors the common experience of a society just at or beneath the threshold of awareness...
...what one "lives" is expressed as, constituted by, a layer of discourse that has no more—or less—standing than any other system of discourse...
...His insistence on the unavoidability and irreducibility of power relations—a revival of anarchist traditions long eclipsed by Marxism— was refreshing: it shattered any lingering idea that all oppression amounts, "ultimately," to that of capital over labor...
...in the American version, the self-proclaimed revolutionaries are 104 • DISSENT Postmodern Culture thuggish terrorists, as despicable as the Network bosses...
...Yet it is worth noticing that "postmodernist" —in the spirit of its recombinant enterprise—is a compound term...
...Their idea of government is shadowed by Vietnam and Watergate...
...But what is interesting about postmodernism goes beyond the fashion in architecture— for the recombinatory thrust, the blankness, the self-regarding irony, the play of surfaces, the self-referentiality and self-bemusement that characterize postmodernism are still very much with us...
...It is suspicious of crusades and commitments outside the self...
...a world unimpressed by the affirmative futurology of Marxism...
...How tempting to trumpet forth, yet once more, the incantation to class struggle—as if it were long since ordained what constituted a class, what impelled a class to make history, and what was defensible (and not) in its "struggle...
...It cherishes continuity, speaking with a single narrative voice or addressing a single visual center...
...The question is, What is postmodernism's relation to this historical moment, to its political possibilities and torments...
...What is troubling about it...
...the writer suggests that the popularization of the premium architectural style of the last ten years signals its uniformity, mediocrity, and impending end...
...The association of passion and politics rubs them the wrong way...
...how to decode it is a difficult matter...
Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
