xxii INTRODUCTION As for postmodernism itself, I have not tried to systematize a usage to impose any conveniently coherent thumbnail meaning, for the con. cept is not merely contested, it is also internally conflicted and contra, dictory. I will argue that, for good or ill, we cannot not use it. But my argument should also be taken to imply that every time it is used, we are under the obligation to rehearse those inner contradictions and to stage those representational inconsistencies and dilemmas; we have to \v<,\ all that through every time around. Postmodernism is not something wE can settle once and for all and then use with a clear conscience. The concept, if there is one, has to come at the end, and not at the begi;-ning, of our discussions of it. Those are the conditions—the only ones, I think, that prevent the mischief of premature clarification—undei which this term can productively continue to be used. The materials assembled in the present volume constitute the third and last section of the penultimate subdivision of a larger project entitled The Poetics of Social Forms. * Durham, April 1990 The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 1 he last few years have been marked by £in inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (lln* end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. Tho' case lor its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or (.'impure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the '.;arly I'JUUs. As II le word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the uanin&or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement [or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school o| poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace-! Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of 3 high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. The j '■numeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, J •mlt'r(i»eneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism,] 3«yond it, the "new expressionism"; the moment, in music, of John aS«. luiL also the synthesis of classical and "popular" styles found in nock')(lh^rS ^e ^ass anc* Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave hioh/"16 BeatIes and the stones now standing as the high-modernist n"t of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, post-Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a new type of commercial film (about which more below); Bur-no",'" yncnon' or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French ;(,u roman and its succession, on the other, along with alarming 2 POSTMODERNISM " Culture 3 new kinds of literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of textualitj or ecriture . . . The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imp],," any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and hs^.-ion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of sty. listic innovation? | It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aes. | thetic production are mosFdramatically visible, and that their theoretj. I cal problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was 1 indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of post. I modernism—as it will be outlined in the following pages—initially! began to emerge. More decisively I ban in.....the other arts..or media, I postmodernist positions in architecture.have bjeejLinjsgjjHabJe from an | implacable critique of architectural high modernism and of Frank Lloyd I Wright or the so-called international style (Le Corbusier, Mies, etc),~wEeFe | formal criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of | the building into a virtual sculpture, or monumental "duck," as Robert | Venturi puts it)1 are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urban-1 ism and of the aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited | with the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and its older 1 neighborhood culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Uto-j pian high-modernist building from its surrounding context), while the | prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement ate remorselessly identified in the imperious gesture of the charismatic { Master. Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itseli J as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi's influential I manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ulti- j mately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric,2 it has at least the merit ol drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodern- j isms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the olu& j (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-call^ j mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of tex« infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very cultui1 ; industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the rood' ern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorn' and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have, in fact, been ' cinated precisely by this whole "degraded" landscape of schlock an \ kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture, of advertising and motel8', of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paralite'lj ture, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romaflc|j I u rbiography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or the lJ0|3|i(n.ei. materials they no longer simply "quote," as a Joyce or a lantJSJ ^ ^ have done, but incorporate into their very substance. t j-' should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural ■ ■ indeed, theories of the postmodern—whether celebratory or 3 -lied in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation—bear a c ' t F-iiuilv resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological gen-.ralizntions which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the rrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized '"postindustrial society" (Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society or hi"htěch, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological; mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with the signal exception of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Loře Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomize the historic originality oi lliis new society (which he sees as a third stage or moment in tlie evolution of capital) but also to demonstrate that it is, if anything, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. I will return to this argument later; suffice it for the moment to anticipate a poinl that will be argued in chapter 2, namely, that every position on J'íiiÍP'^rrňsm in culture—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also a!.°.nn imcl the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today. A last preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement among others. I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis, and at at n moment in which the very conception of historical periodization jgS L0Ine to seem most problematical indeed. I have argued elsewhere ■ at since the critical capacity of his work is thereby Zt'd, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those 6 POSTMODERNISM Culture 7 bf social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivia in the face of the model itself. I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception Q> a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine different could be measured and assessed. I am very far from feeling that a| cultural production today is "postmodern" in the broad sense I will conferring on this term. The postmodern is, however, the force field i( which very different kinds of cultural impulses—what Raymond Wil aMams has usefully termed "residual" and "emergent" forms of cultural [production—must make their way. If we do not achieve some genera; sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of presen: history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of; host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. At any rate, this has been the political spirit in which the following analysis was devised to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and it; reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today! The exposition will take up in turn the fallowing constitutive feature of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongatioc both in contemporary "theory" and in a whole new culture of the imag; or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in on: relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose "schizophrenic" structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more tempora arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what I will call "inten sities"—which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sub lime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new tech nology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system' and, after a brief account of postmodernist mutations in the lived expf rience of built space itself, some reflections on the mission of politics art in the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capita' We will begin with one of the canonical works of high modernism>' visual art, Van Gogh's well-known painting of the peasant shoes, aI example which, as you can imagine, has not been innocently or ra"1 domly chosen. I want to propose two ways of reading this paintiiV both of which in some fashion reconstruct the reception of the work1,1 a two-stage or double-level process. vint Id suggest that if this copiously reproduced image is not to *tirH [ifl |cv„| of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some Sl"-'l situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that '■"^ation --uliicl) has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally Sl -torrid ill" painting will remain an inert object, a reified end product ■ npossibln to grasp as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. This last term suggests that one way of reconstructing the initial situation (n whi(.:h the work is somehow a response is by stressing the raw materials. Mic; initial content, which it confronts and reworks, transforms, and appropriates. In Van Gogh that content, those initial raw materials, arc. I will suggest, to be grasped simply as the whole object world ofagriLulLural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state. Fruit Irons in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; I lie people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How is it, then, that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into u hallucinatory surface of color, while his village stereotypes are suddenly ai id garishly overlaid with hues of red and green? I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent translonnalion of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture, an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new l-'lnpiaiirealm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense—sight, Hie visual, the eye—which it now reconstitutes for us as a semiautono-nioiis space in its own right, a part of some new division of labor in the 'ody ot capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium pilich replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at . " same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Ul«|iian compensation for them. k J hiTu is, to be sure, a.second reading of Van Gogh which can hardly ^ 'Snored when we gaze at this particular painting, and that is Heideg-izfd Lentra* anaiysis in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, which is organ-''ii'rth rí'UnC' ^B '^ea ^e work °^ art emer8es within the gap between mat 1 '9ri^ VVorld' or wnat 1 would prefer to translate as the meaningless lorv-Bria^ty °^tne ^ociy ana" nature and the meaning endowment of his-un- ai?d °f the social- We wil1 return to that particular gap or rift later tice it here to recall some of the famous phrases that model the 84 8 POSTMODERNISM process whereby these henceforth illustrious peasant shoes slo^ re-create about themselves the whole missing object world which y. once their lived context. "In them," says Heidegger, "there vibrates tl silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn and its enigmat self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field." "This equj ment," he goes on, "belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the wor of the peasant woman. . . . Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of wh the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. . . . This enti emerges into the unconcealment of its being,"3 by way of the mediatk of the work of art, which draws the whole absent world and earth in revelation around itself, along with the heavy tread of the peasai woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing, tl worn and broken instruments of labor in the furrows and at the heart' Heidegger's account needs to be completed by insistence on the renewe materiality of the work, on the transformation of one form of materialii —the earth itself and its paths and physical objects—into that othi materiality of oil paint affirmed and foregrounded in its own right and ft its own visual pleasures, but nonetheless it has a satisfying plausibilit; At any rate, both readings may be described as hermeneutical, in tl1 sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue ur symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate Iruit Now we need to look at some shoes of a different kind, and it is pie. to be able to draw for such an image on the recent work of the cento figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol's Diamond Dust Shot evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Va Gogh's footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really spea to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place ft the viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a museum corridor ( gallery with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object. 0 the level of the content, we have to do with what are now far clearly fetishes, in both the Freudian and the Marxian senses (Dern11 remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian Paar Bauernschuhe, th' the Van Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair, which allows neither ft ._, perversion nor for fetishization). Here, however, we have a random 0 L-" lection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so ma" turnips, as shorn of their earlier life world as the pile of shoes left of from Auschwitz or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehefl? ble and tragic fire in a packed dance hall. There is therefore in War|j| no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture and restore to these o ments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball* 5865 5896 Culture 9 Diego Rivera, "Man at the Crossroads" of jclfit,t 'ashion 01 glamour magazines. Yet this is even more par-W°r - 1 in 'i8nt 01 biographic information: Warhol began his artis-nd"xic|^ ^ ^ (.ommercial illustrator for shoe fashions and a designer of "■^la"' windows in which various pumps and slippers figured promi-^'ll^Intlood. one is tempted to raise here—far too prematurely—one "tTht" t-cn ml issues about postmodernism itself and its possible politi- ] dimensions: Andy Warhol's work in fact turns centrally around iniiujclifi'1'1''"11' ancltne great billboard images of the Coca-Cola bottle r tlio Campbell's soup can, which explicitly foreground the commod-'tv fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and cjriticiil political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more soriouslv about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern prriod of late capital. Uul tlirsrc; are some other significant differences between the high-modernist and the postmodernist moment, between the shoes of Van Gogh and the shoes of Andy Warhol, on which we must now very briefly; dwell. The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of other contexts. Then we must surely come to terms with the role of photography and lliu photographic negative in contemporary art of this kind; and it is this, indeed, which confers its deathly quality to the Warhol image, whose glaced-X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way dial would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content. It is indeed as 'hough we had here to do with the inversion of Van Gogh's Utopian gesture: in the earlier work a stricken world is by some Nietzschean fiat |lr. will call the waning of affect in postmodern culture. Of course, it v be inaccurate to suggest that all affect, all feeling or emotion, all sx=h|.-r tivity, has vanished from the newer image. Indeed, there is a ki return of the repressed in Diamond Dust Shoes, a strange, comp tory, decorative exhilaration, explicitly designated by the title which is, of course, the glitter of gold dust, the spangling of gilt that seals the surface of the painting and yet continues to glint Think, however, of Rimbaud's magical flowers "that look back at or of the august premonitory eye flashes of Rilke's archaic Grei-k which warn the bourgeois subject to change his life; nothing of tha here in the gratuitous frivolity of this final decorative overlay. In.. interesting review of the Italian version of this essay,4 Remo Ces expands this foot fetishism into a fourfold image which adds tn gaping "modernist" expressivity of the Van Gogh-Heidegger shoi "realist" pathos of Walker Evans and James Agee (strange that p should thus require a team!); while whatJooked like a random n ment of yesteryear's fashions in Warhol takes on, in Magritte, the i reality of the human member itself, now more phantasmic than i leather it is printed on. Magritte, unique among the surrealists vived the sea change from the modern to its sequel, becoming i process something of a postmodern emblem: the uncanny, Lacaniar: foreclusion, without expression. The ideal schizophrenic, indeed, ii easy enough to please provided only an eternal present is thrust befon the eyes, which gaze with equal fascination on an old shoe or the tenaciously growing organic mystery of the human toenail. Ceserani thereto deserves a semiotic cube of his own: Van Gogh MAGIC REALISM the prehensile toe WORK ^ TRANSFORMATION" SUFFERING ■ PLAY IDLENESS -> INDIFFERENCE PHOTOGRAPHY Warhol creases on the face THE REALISM OF OLD AGE Culture 11 Andy Warhol, "Diamond Dust Shoes" Walker Evans, "Floyd Burroughs' Work Shoes" The waning of affect is, however, perhaps best initially approached by way oi thu human figure, and it is obvious that what we have said about tho cornmodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol's human subjects: stars—like Marilyn Monroe—who are themselves commqdificul and ..transformed into their own images. And here too a( r certain brutal return to the older period of high modernism offers a dramatic shorthand parable of the transformation in question. Edward; Mynchs painting The Scream is, of course, a canonical expression of c ^real niodornist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social, used enta^l)n' anc^ isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what irnenl"0 ^° lll" Cuurt (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) Owi v /ol'urn5 ^err*^—a surface which seems to be unsupported by any quite '' °r U'1(Jse Putative volume (rectangular? trapezoidal?) is ocularly iwcHijriC ^'.'k^'^' This great sheet of windows, with its gravity-defying ; we atanQe,nSln?la^t^' mornentaruy transforms the solid ground on which themsel lnt° ^ contents °fa stereopticon, pasteboard shapes profiling all sides' f10re an<^tnere around us. The visual effect is the same from c°niron| !*S ^ as the great monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 which 11 s viewers like an enigmatic destiny, a call to evolutionary 1378 6692 14 POSTMODERNISM Culture 15 mutation. If this new multinational downtown effectively abolished older ruined city fabric which is violently replaced, cannot sometV t similar be said about the way in which this strange new surface own peremptory way renders our older systems of perception of theC| somehow archaic and aimless, without offering another in their pi^f Returning now for one last moment to Munch's painting, it Seep: evident that The Scream subtly but elaborately disconnects its own ail thetic of expression, all the while remaining imprisoned within it I gestural content already underscores its own failure, since the realm! the sonorous, the cry, the raw vibrations of the human throat, are incoll patible with its medium (something underscored within the work! the homunculus's lack of ears). Yet the absent scream returns, as it virgin a dialectic of loops and spirals, circling ever more closely toward4' even more absent experience of atrocious solitude and anxiety whic^ the scream was itself to "express." Such loops inscribe themselveso the painted surface in the form of those great concentric circles in whif" sonorous vibration becomes ultimately! visible, as on the surface oi sheet of water, in an infinite regress wKich fans out from the sufferers become the very geography of a universe in which pain itself now spei and vibrates through the material sunset and landscape. The visif world now becomes the wall of the monad on which this "screamim ning through nature" (Munch's words)5 is recorded and transcribed:us-thinks of that character of Lautreamont who, growing up inside a seal! and silent membrane, ruptures it with his own scream on catchingsi^ of the monstrousness of the deity and thereby rejoins the world of soul and suffering. All of which suggests some more general historical hypothesis: na# ( that concepts such as anxiety and alienation (and the experiences' which they correspond, as in The Scream) are no longer appropriate J the world of the postmodern. The great Warhol figures—Marilvn h( self or Edie Sedgewick—the notorious cases of burnout ands&j destruction of the ending 1960s, and the great dominant experiences', drugs and schizophrenia, would seem to have little enough in company more either with the hysterics and neurotics of Freud's own da5 with those canonical experiences of radical isolation and solitude,8f-mie, private revolt, Van Gogh-type madness, which dominated of high modernism. This shift in the dynamics of cultural Pat fj can be characterized as one in which the alienation of the subjejj displaced by the latter's fragmentation. f Such terms inevitably recall one of the more fashionable the10 J I ry that of the "death" of the subject itself—the end í contemporary"^!. bourgeois monad or ego or individual—and the 0f the au 0 wnether as some new moral ideal or as empirical accoinp^ - ^ ^ decentering of that formerly centered subject or psy- descripl1011, ,,nccihle formulations of this notion—the historicist , ff~)f the nvo i^um)*^ nee-existing centered subject, in the period of classical cap-one, that a oi ^ niicjear family, has today in the world of organizational italism^n^ dissolved; and the more radical poststructuralist position, diich such a subject never existed in the first place but constituted ^mething Ji -nn°S w^ ^ tne enQl of the psychopathologies oFthat ego—what ? morpL.6!?11 La^ing tne waning of affect. But it means the end of much1 Personal (!I1,*''for examPIe> of style, in the sense of the unique and the ized bv 11 (lnt* °^ tne distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbol-exPressio,ll! 0rnergent Primacy of mechanical reproduction). As for society f,U aiU* *eennSs or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary n^mer"ě]v1JI ^ °^er anorrue °f the centered subject may also mean ^ind of feyja deration from anxiety but a liberation from every other feeling/p1,.1"*5 as we^' since there is no longer a self present to do the ls i-Vnot to say that the cultural products of the postmodern A4$C 16 POSTMODERNISM Culture 17 f era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings—w may be better and more accurate, following J.-F. Lyotard, to call" sities"—are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dom by a peculiar kind of euphoria, a matter to which we will want Iu later on. The waning of affect, however, might also have been chareu I in the narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of Hi, high modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac my; of duree and memory (something to be understood fully as mm "category of the literary criticism associated with high modern with the works themselves]. We have often been told, however, 1 now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and 11 is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic i ence, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories c rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period i modernism.6 The disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal cot sequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engeni: the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pj^lli This concept, which we owe to Thomas Mann (in Doktor Fauslu.s).'■' owed it in turn to Adorno's great work on the two paths of advance musical experimentation (Schoenberg's innovative planificationandSfc vinsky's irrational eclecticism), is to be sharply distinguished from!" more readily received idea of parody. To be sure, parody found a fertile area in the idiosyncracies moderns and their "inimitable" styles: the Faulknerian long senten-for example, with its breathless gerundives; Lawrentian nature imag6' punctuated by testy colloquialism; Wallace Stevens's inveterate hyp0 sis of nonsubstantive parts of speech ("the intricate evasions of as )■ fateful (but finally predictable) swoops in Mahler from high orches' pathos into village accordion sentiment; Heidegger's meditative-so practice of the false etymology as a mode of "proof" ... All theses -one as somehow characteristic, insofar as they ostentatiously oe , from a norm which then reasserts itself, in a not necessarily unfne way, by a systematic mimicry of their willful eccentricities. Yet in the dialectical leap from quantity to quality, the explos1 I'tcntui'fi into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms modern ^qWI,^ dV a linguistic fragmentation of social life itself to the haS heen^ (he ]lorrn itself is eclipsed: reduced to a neutral and reified poin.1 W jpt-li enough from the Utopian aspirations of the inventors modi" spL of L-jagic English), which itself then becomes but one more °^ lcct anions many. Modernist styles thereby become postmodernist 1 .s And that the stupendous proliferation of social codes today into C° Passional utid disciplinary jargons (but also into the badges of 'tfirniation "1 iMhnic, gender, race, religious, and class-factional adhesion) is ajSC) a political phenomenon, the problem of micropolitics sufficiently demonstrates. If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist c onnfries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive het-ero°cncity without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the eco-'nomic strategics which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose thci r speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself. ■ in this situation parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that slninge new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place. Pas-tichejs, like pamdy^the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic "Style, fneu-naiiiiR of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily ^oimu-ed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus othor im!°l,y' H Statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that a kind"/^^111" historically original modern thing, the practice of of ihr n° i "k il0ny' is to what Wayne Booth calls the "stable ironies" 01 ™° eighteen h century. has heen're-lh^^016 be8in t0 Seem that Adomo's prophetic diagnosis of wh6st. ai'l 'Z(jd' albelt ln 3 ne§ative way; not Schonberg (the sterility; true Precursr!"Td SyStem he already 8limpsed) but Stravinsky is the 0f thu high-n'I P°Stmodem cuItural production. For with the collapse' lakahlB"as ernist ideology of style—what is as unique and unmis-1 ftile ve'ryJS0'1"'lr-PJ/vn fingerprints, as incomparable as your own body innovatlou)_'":J' for an early Roland Barthes, of stylistic invention and \..ie producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the 18 POSTMODERNISM past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the mask voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culfuj^i This situation evidently determines what the architecture histoid call "historicism," namely, the random cannibalization of all the stjf of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general U'-Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the "neo." omnipresence of pastiche is not incompatible with a certain hum however, nor is it innocent of all passion: it is at the least compatji with addiction—with a whole historically original consumers' ap»j-tite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseuf events and "spectacles" (the term of the situationists). It is tor S|| objects that we may reserve Plato's conception of the "simulacriM the identical copy for which no original has ever existed. Appro! ately enough, the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a socil where exchange value has been generalized to the point at which I very memory of use value is effaced, a society of which Guy Debl has observed, in an extraordinary phsase, that in it "the image h become the final form of commodity"reification" (The Society off Spectacle). | The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to hq a momentous effect on what used to be historical time. The paste thereby itself modified: what was once, in the historical novel a* Luk| defines it, the organic genealogy of the bourgeois collective prof —-what is still, for the redemptive historiography of an E. P. Thompa or of American "oral history," for the resurrection of the dead of anoi mous and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension in dispel able to any vital reorientation of our collective future—has meanwbj itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photograpi simulacrum. Guy Debord's powerful slogan is now even more apt| the "prehistory" of a society bereft of all historicity, one whose o putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles. In ialU5 conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as "relet6 finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leavi^ with nothing but texts. j Yet it should not be thought that this process is accompany j indifference: on the contrary, the remarkable current intensifies0 J an addiction to the photographic image is itself a tangible symp^ an omnipresent, omnivorous, and well-nigh libidinal historicisn1, t have already observed, the architects use this (exceedingly polyseI^j word for the complacent eclecticism of postmodern architecture v Culture 19' thout principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the archi- i«i"om^"aTltl o/lhi1 past ana-commnes tnem in overstimulating ensem-tectural styles o ^ ^ strike one as an altogether satisfactory word for bles- Nosta g ^ (unI-Ucularly when one thinks of the pain of a properly such *aS.clU,ogf,1]ojji with a past beyond all but aesthetic retrieval), yet it modernist n"^°mi tD wnat js a culturally far more generalized mani-difects our u,hS.jn commercial art and taste, namely the so-called fW-tidffio film (or what the French call la mode retro). n°S' stalgia films- restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it ntb°a collective anil social level, where the desperate attempt to appro-0 missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the etieigent ideology of the generation. The inaugural film of this new aesthetic d iscourse, George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), sefout to recapture, as so many films have attempted since, the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era; and one tends to feel, that tor Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object of desire7 —not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana but also the; first naive innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs (Coppola's Rumble Fish will then be the contemporary dirge that laments their passing, itself, however, still contradictorily filmed in genuine nostalgia film style). With this initial breakthiough, other generational periods open up for aesthetic colonization: as witness the stylistic recuperation of the American and the Italian 1930s, in Polanski's Chinatown and Bertolucci's II Conform-istp, respuclivuly. More interesting, and more problematical, are the ultimate attempts, through this new discourse, to lay siege either to our own present mid immediate past or to a more distant history that escapes 'Mwidualexistinilial memory. aced with these ultimate objects—our social, historical, and existen- emist*"6111' a"(1 lh'"PaSt aS "referent"—the incompatibility of a postmod-roati , i.110^"'1'1" ;,rt language with genuine historicity becomes dra-complejf ai3,,-lr(,nl' T'ie contraa,iction propels this mode, however, into thatlheT T'' il.l1wr,,'stin8 new formal inventiveness; it being understood ♦fition" oft ■'! ' " '"L was never a matter of some old-fashioned "represen-stylislic' llStc)riu)1 content, but instead approached the "past" through imaBe, and1"1"1"1""1' conveying "pastness" by the glossy qualities of the th'a* falu, ■ ■!,30s-ness" or "1950s-ness" by the attributes of fashion (in 'inscription of the Barthes of Mythologies, who saw !>fample, as some Disney-EPCOT "concept" of Chine Sinit6-" for 1 'Jurveying of imaginary and stereotypical idealities 5890 111587 20 POSTMODERNISM Culture 21 The insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgia mod6 be observed in Lawrence Kasdan'selegant film Body Heat, a ( "affluent society" remake of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity,. contemporary Florida small town a few hours' drive from Miami word remake is, however, anachronistic to the degree to which our: ness of the preexistence of other versions (previous films of the no-,,, well as the novel itself) is now a constitutive and essential part film's structure: we are now, in other words, in "intertextualil deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the open new connotation of "pastness" and pseudohistorical depth, in the history of aesthetic styles displaces "real" history. Yet from the outset a whole battery of aesthetic signs begin to distant the officially contemporary image from us in time: the art deco ing of the credits, for example, serves at once to program the spectator^ the appropriate "nostalgia" mode of reception (art deco quotatii much the same function in contemporary architecture, as in 1 remarkable Eaton Centre).8 Meanwhile5 a somewhat differenl connotations is activated by complex {but purely formal) allusions k the institution of the star system itself. The protagonist, William Hint' is one of a new generation of film "stars" whose status is n ■ distinct from that of the preceding generation of male superstar: as Steve McQueen or Jack Nicholson (or even, more distantly, Brando],* alone of earlier moments in the evolution of the institution of tin1 s ' The immediately preceding generation projected their varioi through and by way of their well-known off-screen personalities, whit* often connoted rebellion and nonconformism. The latest genen starring actors continues to assure the conventional functions ' dom (most notably sexuality) but in the utter absence of "personally" in the older sense, and with something of the anonymity of < li'1'1", acting (which in actors like Hurt reaches virtuoso proportions,} very different kind than the virtuosity of the older Brando or Olivie|~ This "death of the subject" in the institution of the star now, hi opens up the possibility of a play of historical allusions to mui roles—in this case to those associated with Clark Gable—so that -very style of the acting can now also serve as a "connotator" of 1I'1' I1' Finally, the setting has been strategically framed, with great mg ity, to eschew most of the signals that normally convey the conterw " neity of the United States in its multinational era: the small-tov ting allows the camera to elude the high-rise landscape of the 19'1 1980s (even though a key episode in the narrative involves 1 f older buildings by land speculators), while the object destruction . —artifacts and appliances, whose styling would world oi ' * dale the image—is elaborately edited out. Everything in 0ODEO se^^rcj-fjr0 conspires to blur its official contemporaneity and ihe filrni b ^ ^ ^ viewer to receive the narrative as though it were make it PoSS">terni| | thirties, beyond real historical time. This approach set m nni Iiv wav of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the . _ tl*ip Tirc^^' ' ,he of tlic stciiiotypical past, endows present reality and the open-of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage. ^Mhis mesmerising new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an elabo-ated svinptom ol t In' waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way. It cannot therefore be said to produce this strange occultation of the present by its own formal power, but ralhei mereU to demonstrate, through these inner contradictions, the enormity ul a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning icpresentations of our own current experience. As for "real history" itself—the traditional object, however it may be denned, ot what used to be the historical novel—it will be more revealing now to* turn hack to that older form and medium and to read its postmodern Idle in Ihe work of one of the few serious and innovative leftist novelists a work in the United States today, whose books are nourished with li istory in the more traditional sense and seem, so far, to stake out successive generational moments in the "epic" of American history, between which they alternate. E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime gives itself officially as a panorama of the first two decades of the century (hke World's Fair); his most recent novel, Billy Bathgate, like Loon Lake hoi jeSHRS 1,1"' 'RS the Great DePression'while The Book of Daniel tte 01r]P k^""' ''''' 'n Painrul juxtaposition, the two great moments of the rad'^r' C"1C' New Left' of tnirties and forties communism and W this 1960s (even his early western maY be said to fit seif-consr=C And to designate in a less articulated and formally TIip n C?UH U ''■ the end of tne frontier of the late nineteenth century). n *°»k ol ,j»lnieI n°vcls to 3 i lcl is not lne ordy one °f these five major historical t,]e writer' 'IS"' an explicit narrative link between the reader's and foe work' MPiU>MMlt and the older historical reality that is the subject of p|n„. . ' 10 'ihlonishing last page of Loon Lake, which I will not dis- se. clo ■^tto an alSo d , 011u1b msT PaSe 01 ^oon Lake, wnich 1 will not dis '^te^h!'^ '.'"S in a Very difrerent wav; itis a matter of some inter in 0%Vti Pro '! ■' filSt version of Bagtime9 positions us explicitly i WhlLh at Q^"' ln the novelist's house in New Rochelle, New York, 0 "Torries the scene of its own (imaginary) past in the 8^5390 22 POSTMODERNISM Culture 23 1900s. This detail has been suppressed from the published text, Sy^' bolically cutting its moorings and freeing the novel to float in some r» world of past historical time whose relationship to us is problematic indeed. The authenticity of the gesture, however, may be measured^ the evident existential fact of life that there no longer does seem |0 l any organic relationship between the American history we learn schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current multinational, higj. rise, stagnated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life. A crisis in historicity, however, inscribes itself symptomatically in «-eral other curious formal features within this text. Its official subject is the transition from a pre-World War I radical and working-class politics (the great strikes) to the technological invention and new commodity production of the 1920s (the rise of Hollywood and of the image a commodity): the interpolated version of Kleist's Michael Kohihaas, tlf strange, tragic episode of the black protagonist's revolt, may be thoughi of as a moment related to this process. That Ragtime has political to tent and even something like a political'"meaning" seems in -,m\ c\ obvious and has been expertly articulated by Linda Hutcheon in t of its three paralleled families: the Anglo-American establishment i and the marginal immigrant European and American black ones. The novel's action disperses the center of the first and moves th: margins into the multiple "centers" of the narrative, in a lormal allegory of the social demographics of urban America. In addition, there is an extended critique of American democratic ideals through the presentation of class conflict rooted in capitalist property and moneyed power. The black Coalhouse, the white Houdini, the imini- -grant Tateh are all working class, and because of this—not in spite of it—all can therefore work to create new aesthetic forms (ragtime' vaudeville, movies).10 But this does everything but the essential, lending the novel an adm1 ble thematic coherence few readers can have experienced in parsing lines of a verbal object held too close to the eyes to fall into these spectives. Hutcheon is, of course, absolutely right, and this is what ■ novel would have meant had it not been a postmodern artifact. F< thing, the objects of representation, ostensibly narrative chara< l',J^, incommensurable and, as it were, of incomparable substances, I1 ^ and water—Houdini being a historical figure, Tateh a fictional ni"1^ Coalhouse an intertextual one—something very difficult for an & •, ■ comparison of this kind to register. Meanwhile, the theme attrib-^"ri to l1QVe^ a^s0 demands a somewhat different kind of scrutiny, U.B ■[ can be rephrased into a classic version of the Left's "experience S1"j0fpat" in the twentieth century, namely, the proposition that the jo 0]itizalioii of the workers' movement is attributable to the media or .ulture generally (what she here calls "new aesthetic forms"). This is, 'ndecd. in '"P opinion, something like the elegiac backdrop, if not the meaning. °i" nagtime> and perhaps of Doctorow's work in general; but then wij need another way of describing the novel as something like an unconscious expression and associative exploration of this left doxa, this historical'Opinion or quasi-vision in the mind's eye of "objective spirit.'' What such a description would want to register is the paradox that a seemingly realistic novel like Ragtime is in reality a nonrepresen-tatiohal work that combines fantasy signifiers from a variety of ideo-logemcjs in a kind of hologram. My point, however, is not some hypothesis as to the thematic coherence of this docentered narrative but rather just the opposite, namely, the way in which the kind of reading this novel imposes makes it virtually impossible ior us to reach and thematize those official "subjects" which float above the text but cannot be integrated into our reading of the sentences. In that sense, the novel not only resists interpretation, it is organized systematically and formally to short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpretation which it perpetually holds out and withdraws. When we remember that the theoretical critique and repu-latinn ni interpretation as such is a fundamental component of poststructura ist theory, it is difficult not to conclude that Doctorow has inS^L „ dRlil,erately built this very tension, this very contradiction, The, mr',lhiS Sentences' valt to }°0k 'S 'rowded witil real historical figures—from Teddy Roose-Pierponf1"™ Goldman' from Ha"y K. Thaw and Stanford White to J. '"'Grponl M ------- """i iiuiij ix. maw emu oidiliUiU Wime LO J. of Houdin-01'8'111 Henry Ford' not to mention the more central role Father, Moil ",Ull(> interact with a fictive fam% simply designated as ^8 with th M' °lder Br°ther, and so forth. All historical novels, begin-anStherinvo^^6 °f Sir Walter Scott himself, no doubt in one way or ally acquired H ' " m°bilization of previous historical knowledge gener-ever leoi«^.. . Imil§h the Schoolbook history manuals devised for what- esitimizing --GndLMnn'illVe dialectic between what we already "know" about Pa8esorthono'v^jU' and what he is then seen to be concretely in the . e • But Doctorow's procedure seems much more extreme .btu«nE n „ |mrP°se by this or that national tradition—thereafter retGndL.j 24 POSTMODERNISM Culture 25 than this; and I would argue that the designation of both types, characters—historical names and capitalized family roles—opetat,, powerfully and systematically to reify all these characters and to mai, it impossible for us to receive their representation without the ptjP interception of already acquired knowledge or doxa—something whir; lends the text an extraordinary sense of deja vu and a peculiar familja, ity one is tempted to associate with Freud's "return of the repressed":. "The Uncanny" rather than with any solid historiographic formationt, the reader's part. Meanwhile, the sentences in which all this is happening have the; own specificity, allowing us more concretely to distinguish the mo] erns' elaboration of a personal style from this new kind of linguist? innovation, which is no longer personal at all but has its family kinshi; rather with what Barthes long ago called "white writing." In this pa; ticular novel, Doctorow has imposed upon himself a rigorous princip!, of selection in which only simple declarative sentences (predominantt mobilized by the verb "to be") are received. The effect is, however, m really one of the condescending simplification and symbolic careful ness of children's literature, but rather something more disturbing, tfc sense of some profound subterranean violence done to American English which cannot, however, be detected empirically in any of the perfecti; grammatical sentences with which this work is formed. Yet other mot visible technical "innovations" may supply a clue to what is happenii; in the language of Ragtime: it is, for example, well known that the souifi of many of the characteristic effects of Camus's novel The Stranger cat be traced back to that author's willful decision to substitute, through out, the French tense of the passe compose for the other past tense more normally employed in narration in that language.111 suggesl • it is as if something of that sort were at work here: as though Doctor had set out systematically to produce the effect or the equivalent, in W language, of a verbal past tense we do not possess in English, namel.( the French preterite (or passe simple), whose "perfective" movement.5' Emile Benveniste taught us, serves to separate events from the preset of enunciation and to transform the stream of time and action into s-many finished, complete, and isolated punctual event objects wl* find themselves sundered from any present situation (even that of act of story telling or enunciation). E. L. Doctorow is the epic poet of the disappearance of the America radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of "1' American radical tradition: no one with left sympathies can read ihe: t;iiKuni llienitf " ]id novels without a poignant distress that is an authentic way of sI)lon ' . nll (U1,. own current political dilemmas in the present. What is (.0iilron r]i|(M.estingi however, is that he has had to convey this great normally (since the waning of the content is very precisely his ■nc'i) and. more than that, has had to elaborate his work by way of HU Tver 1 i-ulliiral logic of the postmodern which is itself the mark and tlhlf n! Imm dilemma. Loon Lake much more obviously deploys the ' lr„jes of i lii i pastiche (most notably in its reinvention of Dos Passos); hul Ha"limc remains the most peculiar and stunning monument to the ■ ..slliPlii' situation engendered by the disappearance of the historical •fiicrent. This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past: it can only "represent" our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes "pop history"). Cultural pro-(hiclion is thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the old monadic subject but rather that of some degraded collective "'objective! spirit": it can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once itself a prosciit; rather, as in Plato's cave, it must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls. If there is any realism left here, it is a "realism" that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of re ich. IH _[he crisis in historicity now dictates a return, in a new way, to the question ol temporal organization in general in the postmodern force field, a"d indeed, to the problem of the form that time, temporality, and the, s>nUi;irruiij( u [jj De aD]e ^0 jn a cuJture increasingly dominated by, Kpacc and spatial logic. If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity1 xpi '"ience or psychic life. With the breakdown of the sig-b!°°.rilo chain. Iherefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience "[ ure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure andunre-latcd presents in lime. We will want to ask questions about theaesthetic oVcuItural results of such a situation in a moment; let us first see what it feels like: 1 remember ven well the day it happened. We were staying in the country and f had gone for a walk alone as I did now and then. Suddenly, as 1 was passing the school, I heard a German song; the children were having a singing lesson. I stopped to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling came over me, a feeling hard to analyze but akin lo something I was to know too well later—a disturbing" sense of unreality. It seemed to me that I no longer recognized the school, it Irid become as large as a barracks; the singing children were prisoners, compelled to sing. It was as though the school and the children's song were set apart from the rest of the world. At the same time niv - /. 7 ............................ ^^^^^^F^ Duane Hanson, "Museum Guard' IV Now we need to complete this exploratory account of postmed-' space and time with a final analysis of that euphoria or those inti'11'" which seem so often to characterize the newer cultural experience, us reemphasize the enormity of a transition which leaves behi desolation of Hopper's buildings or the stark Midwest syntax of Sh^ forms, replacing them with the extraordinary surfaces of the phol cityscape, where even the automobile wrecks gleam with some ne* ■ jjijl D«*» Hanson, "Tbunst II- '"cinatory Su| T°re P^doxicii i^h! ^hilaration of these new surfaces is all the ^oratud ur t|,-' ^ essential content-the city itself-has :h,i early years , ? et8raled t0 a de&™ s^ely still inconceivable in early " ~ -- *~ - uogicc suieiy sun inconceivable in How urba^arS °' ^ twent'etn century, let alone in the previous era. cQnvrnarjjfj Sl?u,,'"r can De a delight to the eyes when expressed in ation of dai^"'1' 3n unPara^e^e<^ quantum leap in the alien- strange uev/j'n';t^e can now De experienced in the form of a f'ons that r lt,",l(4natory exhilaration—these are some of the ques-1 rout us in this moment of our inquiry. Nor should the 34 POSTMODERNISM Culture 35 human figure be exempted from investigation, although it seems cj„, that for the newer aesthetic the representation of space itself ha: to be felt as incompatible with the representation of the body: a kind ] aesthetic division of labor far more pronounced than in any of the J lier generic conceptions of landscape, and a most ominous sympt0 indeed. The privileged space of the newer art is radically antianthronn morphic, as in the empty bathrooms of Doug Bond's work. The ultima*, contemporary fetishization of the human body, however, takes ; different direction in the statues of Duane Hanson: what I have alre^ called the simulacrum, whose peculiar function lies in what : would have called the derealization of the whole surrounding worldcj everyday reality. Your moment of doubt and hesitation as to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures, in other words, tends to retuit upon the real human beings moving about you in the museum andt transform them also for the briefest instant into so many dead and colored simulacra in their own right. The world thereby momentarili loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereo illusion, a rush of filmic images without density. But is this now i fying or an exhilarating experience? It has proved fruitful to think of such experiences in terms of wh? Susan Sontag, in an influential statement, isolated as "camp." I propos a somewhat different cross-light on it, drawing on the equally fashiw able current theme of the "sublime," as it has been rediscovered works of Edmund Burke and Kant; or perhaps one might want to yo» the two notions together in the form of something like a camp or 'W terical" sublime. The sublime was for Burke an experience borders! on terror, the fitful glimpse, in astonishment, stupor, and awe, of win was so enormous as to crush human life altogether: a description tM refined by Kant to include the question of representation itself, so IW the object of the sublime becomes not only a matter of sheer power a1 of the physical incommensurability of the human organism with \ 1 but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity of the hufl' mind to give representation to such enormous forces. Such forces Bu ► in his historical moment at the dawn of the modern bourgeois state, * only able to conceptualize in terms of the divine, while even Heid^ continues to entertain a phantasmatic relationship with some org precapitalist peasant landscape and village society, which is the form of the image of Nature in our own time. rf Today, however, it may be possible to think all this in a different at the moment of a radical eclipse of Nature itself: Heidegger's 7" "TT , [t(-.r all. irredeemably and irrevocably destroyed by late capi-Path lS'^r OI-,.(.|i revolution, by neocolonialism and the megalopolis, tSl'-lh rum/il-" superhighways over the older fields and vacant lots and v,'*llt' \, :ri„,.L <>i "s "house of being" into condominiums, if not the most ■ ,■ ble unlic-'ted, rat-infested tenement buildings. The other of our ""^it-ty is>in l'ial sense n0 l°nSer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist societies l,Lil .something else which we must now identify. lam anxious that this other thing not overhastily be grasped as tech-Olo«'v per se, since I will want to show that technology is here itself a Touro'lor something else. Yet technology may well serve as adequate horthiinrl to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labor stored up in our machinery—an alienated power, what Sartre calls the counterfinality of the practico-inert, which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms and seems to ■constitute the massive dystopian horizon of our collective as well as our individual praxis. Technological development is however on the Marxist view the result of the development of capital rather than some ultimately determining instance in its own right. It will therefore be appropriate to distinguish several gene rat ions of machine power, several stages of technological revolution within capital itself. I here follow Ernest Mandel, who outlines three such fundamental breaks or quantum leaps in the evolution of machinery under capital: Ihe fundamental revolutions in power technology—the technol-. °gy ol the production of motive machines by machines—thus appears as the determinant moment in revolutions of technology as il wnnlo. Machine production of steam-driven motors since 1848; niadiije production °f electric and combustion motors since the s of the 19th century; machine production of electronic and ^L'E'ar-pmvered apparatuses since the 40s of the 20th century by tjCSG ar& tne three general revolutions in technology engendered ll! capitalist mode of production since the "original" industrial """"hi." CapÖi^t!1'1Udization underscores the general thesis of Mandel's book Late capita]- -Sln; namely'tnat tnere have been three fundamental moments in stage. Ti""' eaCtl °ne markinB a dialectical expansion over the previous imPoria|U!Se market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of ^Bttei bp'Srn'°Ur 0Wn' wrongly called postindustrial, but what might 0 termed multinational, capital. I have already pointed out that; solution of the later 18th century.17 36 POSTMODERNISM Mandel's intervention in the postindustrial debate involves the pr sition that late or multinational or consumer capitalism, far from bey inconsistent with Marx's great nineteenth-century analysis, constitute"; ion the contrary, the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a pr0(jj' gious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas. This pUre capitalism of our own time thus eliminates the enclaves of precapitalg organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary ■„., j One is tempted to speak in this connection of a new and historical!; original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious that is, the destruction of precapitalist Third World agriculture by the Green Revolution, and the rise of the media and the advertising indus-try. At any rate, it will also have been clear that my own cultural periodization of the stages of realism, modernism, and postmodernism is both inspired and confirmed by Mandel's tripartite scheme. We may therefore speak of our own period as tin; Third Machine Asej and it is at this point that we must reintroduce the problem of aesthetic: representation already explicitly developedln Kant's earlier an.ilv.-ivl the sublime, since it would seem only logical that the relationship to and the representation of the machine could be expected to shift dialer tically with each of these qualitatively different stages of technological, development. It is appropriate to recall the excitement of machinery in the momeni: of capital preceding our own, the exhilaration of futurism, most nota-j bly, and of Marinetti's celebration of the machine gun and the motorcai. These are still visible emblems, sculptural nodes of energy which gitf tangibility and figuration to the motive energies of that earlier momem of modernization. The prestige of these great streamlined shapes cantf, measured by their metaphorical presence in Le Corbusier's building vast Utopian structures which ride like so many gigantic steamship11 ers upon the urban scenery of an older fallen earth.18 Machim-n. 1 another kind of fascination in the works of artists like Picabia a j Duchamp, whom we have no time to consider here; but let me menti° , for completeness' sake, the ways in which revolutionary or comrnu ■ artists of the 1930s also sought to reappropriate this excitemen _ machine energy for a Promethean reconstruction of human society whole, as in Fernand Leger and Diego Rivera. : It is immediately obvious that the technology of our own mornen longer possesses this same capacity for representation: not the tur , nor even Sheeler's grain elevators or smokestacks, not the baroque | oration of pipes and conveyor belts, nor even the streamlined pro 1 Culture 37 Iroad train—all vehicles of speed still concentrated at rest—but lI1B "*■' the (omputer, whose outer shell has no emblematic or visual or civcrx the casings of the various media themselves, as with that PolV^a plinnce called television which articulates nothing but rather ^Tdf'S. currying its flattened image surface within itself. , 1 gucn machines are indeed machines of reproduction rather than of eduction- and they make very different demands on our capacity for , P0-thetic representation than did the relatively mimetic idolatry of the older machinery of the futurist moment, of some older speed-and-energy scululuie. Here we have less to do with kinetic energy than with all kinds oi now reproductive processes; and in the weaker productions of postmodernism the aesthetic embodiment of such processes often tends to slip hack more comfortably into a mere thematic representation of content—into narratives which are about the processes of reproduction and include movie cameras, video, tape recorders, the whole technology of the production and reproduction of the simulacrum. (The shift from Anluuioni's modernist Blow-Up to DePalma's postmodernist Blowout is here paradigmatic.) When Japanese architects, for example, model a building on the decorative imitation of stacks of cassettes, then the solution is at best thematic and allusive, although often humorous. Yet something else does tend to emerge in the most energetic postmodernist texts, and this is the sense that beyond all thematics or content the work seems somehow to tap the networks of the reproductive p) ocess and 1111 ■ reby to afford us some glimpse into a postmodern or tech-nological sublime, whose power or authenticity is documented by the success ol sut,n works in evoking a whole new postmodern space in emer-fa«eJ arnUntl ^Architecture therefore remains in this sense the privi-of8OTif.at.:SUli;liC language; and the distorting and fragmenting reflections of tiC ,WU)"1U)US glass surface to the other can be taken as paradigmatic As /h"11''' r°le °f process and reproduction in postmodernist culture. °gy"is ' Said' nowever'1 want to avoid the implication that technol-Pr5sETrt4|a"y the '""""'''''''.V determining instance" either of our rwnv,..... — society K-1||',!'tely 3t uitntlllf''-Duilt in the new Los Angeles downtown by the archi-"rid devolcippr fohn Portman, whose other works include the vari-Hvatt Regencies, the Peachtree Center in Atlanta, and the Renais-ance Center in Detroit. I have mentioned the populist aspect of the hetorical defense of postmodernism against the elite (and Utopian) austerities ol the great.trchitectural modernisms: it is generally affirmed, ' in other words, that these newer buildings are popular works, on the one hand, and that they respect the vernacular of the American city fabric, on the otier; that is to say, they no longer attempt, as did the masterworks and monuments of high modernism, to insert a different, a distinct, an elevated, a new Utopian language into the tawdry and commercial sign system of the surrounding city, but rather they seek to speak . that very language, using its lexicon and syntax as that has been emblematically "learned irnm Las Vegas." . On the iiist oi t hese counts Portman's Bonaventure fully confirms the - claim: it is a popular building, visited with enthusiasm by locals and ■ tourists alike (allhough Portman's other buildings are even more suc-' cessful in this respect). The populist insertion into the city fabric is, owever, another matter, and it is with this that we will begin. There are two r.entra"t;CK lhe Bonaventure' one from Figueroa and the other built X tVai' °f rl(n',,ted gardens on the other side of the hotel, which is isanythi° 1*1° r(,m,lining sl°Pe of the former Bunker Hill. None of these with wh" h i °ld h°tel marquee' 01 the monumental porte cochere y6urpassC« f Suniptuous buildings of yesteryear were wont to stage venture are * ■ ' ^ StXeet t0 the interior- The entryways of the Bona-' '"toeback'nf'i" '•' UOre' lateral and rather backdoor affairs: the gardens ^"st WaiL ? mU -vuu to the sixth floor of the towers, and even there you U» Uip i i, °Wn ■'"ofligh C"*^.....*£. - Stol*»hopplnr,. '°llt3roa' admits you, baggage and all, onto the second tile main rem ? 'lcony' fr™ which you must take an escalator down to 0Usly unm^ lt^on desk- What I first want to suggest about these curi-i,:>niB nevv cu[|j Ways in is that they seem to have been imposed by iry of closure governing the inner space of the hotel °Wn one flight to find the elevator by which you gain access entry, „„ ,iruvhile' what one is still tempted to think of as the 40 POSTMODERNISM Culture 41 The Westin Bonaventure (Portman) itself (and this over and above the material constraints under « Portman had to work). I believe that, with a certain number ot < characteristic postmodern buildings, such as the Beaubourg in l''1'1" the Eaton Centre in Toronto, the Bonaventure aspires to being space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this new total si meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode m '' individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of '> and historically original kind of hypercrowd. In this sense, thi ally the minicity of Portman's Bonaventure ought not to have t at all, since the entry way is always the seam that links the bu1 ^ to the rest of the city that surrounds it: for it does not wish to to of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement or substiti Lb L'cnb usicr. "Unite d'Habitation" Js obviously not possible, whence the downplaying of the entrance to karc ITil'iimum.19 But this disjunction from the surrounding city is which11' (rUm t^iat °f the monuments of tne International Style, in "symti i^10 !'r,t °^ disjunction was violent, visible, and had a very real tur !^ s'"vimcance—as hi Le Corbusier's great pilotis, whose ges-de<*rad 1C,n<'ln8s hy the very power of its new spatial language). The to he iQll*U"'' however, is content to "let the fallen city fabric continue lts being" (to parody Heidegger); no further effects, no larger 42 POSTMODERNISM protopolitical Utopian transformation, is either expected or desitej This diagnosis is confirmed by the great reflective glass skin rjf Bonaventure, whose function I will now interpret rather differei I did a moment ago when I saw the phenomenon of reflection g( as developing a thematics of reproductive technology (the two ] are, however, not incompatible). Now one would want rather I the way in which the glass skin repels the city outside, a repulsn,i.i, which we have analogies in those reflector sunglasses which impossible for your interlocutor to see your own eyes and thereby a certain aggressivity toward and power over the Other. In a simi the glass skin achieves a peculiar and placeless dissociation of 1 aventure from its neighborhood: it is not even an exterior, inasnuitr. when you seek to look at the hotel's outer walls you cannot see 1 he nr. itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it. **' Now consider the escalators and elevators. Given their very ri sures in Portman, particularly the latter,, which the artist ha: "gigantic kinetic sculptures" and which eertainly account fo] the spectacle and excitement of the hotel interior—particular Hyatts, where like great Japanese lanterns or gondolas they ce. rise and fall—given such a deliberate marking and foregrou their own right, I believe one has to see such "people movers" 11'< own term, adapted from Disney) as somewhat more significant 11 functions and engineering components. We know in any case th.it rr/- . architectural theory has begun to borrow from narrative analysi1 fields and to attempt to see our physical trajectories through su< ings as virtual narratives or stories, as dynamic paths and narration adigms which we as visitors are asked to fulfill and to complete tfj* our own bodies and movements. In the Bonaventure, however, v\ dialectical heightening of this process: it seems to me that the esi and elevators here henceforth replace movement but also, and aho\-c esignate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of move proper (something which will become evident when we coUie}°^ question of what remains of older forms of movement in this bi most notably walking itself). Here the narrative stroll has bet-scored, symbolized, reified, and replaced by a transportation which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade Culture 43 of spai,! y°u unaerg° when you step off such allegorical experience^ ^ atrium, with its great central column surrounded tleviceS x° tuffi ].,£,.. thevvhole positioned between the four symmetrical byaBlin j tmv(.rs with their elevators, and surrounded by rising balco-residen ia ^ ^ greenhouse roof at the sixth level. I am tempted r that such space makes it impossible for us to use the language of f° S3^' or volume-, .my longer, since these are impossible to seize. Hang-V°^eamers indeed suffuse this empty space in such a way as to dis-ract systematical ly and deliberately from whatever form it might be sup-pd-to have, while a constant busyness gives the feeling that emptiness s here absoluteh packed, that it is an element within which you yourself are immersed, w ithout any of that distance that formerly enabled the 1 perception of perspective or volume. You are in this hyperspace up to voureyes and your body; and if it seemed before that that suppression of depth I spoke ol in postmodern painting or literature would necessarily be difficult to a( hieve in architecture itself, perhaps this bewildering immersion may now serve as the formal equivalent in the new medium. .Yet-escalator and elevator are also in this context dialectical oppo-sites; and we may suggest that the glorious movement of the elevator gondola is also a dialectical compensation for this filled space of the atrium—it gives us the chance at a radically different, but complementary, spatial experience: that of rapidly shooting up through the ceiling arid outside, alunj,' one of the four symmetrical towers, with the referent, Los Angeles itself, spread out breathtakingly and even alarmingly ore us. Rut even this vertical movement is contained: the elevator ^ 8 you 10 Hnt! nf those revolving cocktail lounges, in which, seated, you oflhfi3"1 J).assivc!|y rotated about and offered a contemplative spectacle dft,.,e*?ly ilS(!"'tl0w transformed into its own images by the glass win- wemr8hui,ichyouviewit lobby 2fC,:0I!C;llldea11 this by returning to the central space of the niarn- 'he passin§ observation that the hotel rooms are visi-CeilingedanVrrl: COrrid°rS in the residential sections are low-tha* the toon ^' depressin81y functional, while one understands Plummeting ? ^the W°rSt °f taste^' The descent is dramatic enough, ^aWl , d°Wn trough the roof to splash down in the lake, char-- s u'lien vm. ™t ^—.■-----___i__ i • i , , no longer allowed to conduct on our own: and this is a dialectic!''n^ sification of the autoreferentiality of all modern culture, which ft turn upon itself and designate its own cultural production as its Cf I am more at a loss when it comes to conveying the thing itsf ^draclerizec] "Sn y°U get there is somethmg else, which can only be ?pace takes o/n1111111118 coniusion> something like the vengeance this .te symmetry (T r Wh° StiU seek t0 walk through it. Given the abso-' In8s in this Jol( the four towers, it is quite impossible to get your bear-H - recently, color coding and directional signals have 589010619737 44 POSTMODERNISM been added in a pitiful and revealing, rather desperate, attempt to re. the coordinates of an older space. I will take as the most draraa1ic I. tical result of this spatial mutation the notorious dilemma of th keepers on the various balconies: it has been obvious since the n opium to keep us even apparently quiet, we'd still be miming around inside our skins like something was after us, ha h.i l a \ 11la 1 oca. In the months after I got back the hundreds ofhislini|i|,., | 11 flown in began to draw together until they'd formed »c olli'i IK,. ,„..| chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing j'^iifc; s.iv,'i - ,i,,, /er, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nim-fluiMii. i.iMny and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated ' '"|V,,f!."' ■ sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock mil in on. ..ar and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality n-a death, death itself, hardly an intruder.20 I,f ''"Hiii u '"'I' WhlCh d°eS n0t' liketneoldermodernistmachinery 1 c°motive or the airplane, represent motion, but which can only be r i ''"""■liiisl '.' ' '" r"()tion' something of the mystery of the new post- represonted sPace is concentrated. Th «» hi. "'pt'stmodernism outlined here is a historical rather 11,11 '"wi Iji-t-v,,' Uc one" 1 cannot stress too greatly the radical dis-- ■; - Ken Vlew for wilicb. the postmodern is one (optional) 46 POSTMODERNISM style among many others available and one which seeks to | the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism: the two a in fact generate two very different ways of conceptualizing nomenon as a whole: on the one hand, moral judgments (about is indifferent whether they are positive or negative), and, on the otfi 5* genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in llIst'' ,1 Of some positive moral evaluation of postmodernism little need 1 be said: the complacent (yet delirious) camp-following celebration this aesthetic new world (including its social and economic dimetisiif greeted with equal enthusiasm under the slogan of "postindus,lrialS0!j,-f ety") is surely unacceptable, although it may be somewhat less ob that current fantasies about the salvational nature of high technoloTt' from chips to robots—fantasies entertained not only by both leftapf right governments in distress but also by many intellectuals—are#| essentially of a piece with more vulgar apologias for postmodernist But in that case it is only consequent Jo reject moralizing cunaW? tions of the postmodern and of its essential triviality when juxtap®$ against the Utopian "high seriousness''' of the great modernisms: juH ments one finds both on the Left and on the radical Right. And no_d»5| the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older rea]i|i into television images, does more than merely replicate the logicofJR capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it. Meanwhile, for politicalgtori which seek actively to intervene in history and to modify its othenHij passive momentum (whether with a view toward channeling it socialist transformation of society or diverting it into the regies**' reestablishment of some simpler fantasy past), there cannot but be that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image at^ tion which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypy texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future an(|c j^. collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future cna"^ fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from vl|!|j9 of "terrorism" on the social level to those of cancer on the person ;* Culture 47 f 1 am proposing here knows one canonical form in ^he'distm .ftjon 0f the thinking of individual morality or moral-Hegělfe d" ^_ fn)Va that whole very different realm of collective social izing-f^0™ 1 r,lt tirfíš [Sittlichkeit].2'1 But it finds its definitive form in values Bnni^'straiioii"of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those ;, 0f fh.j Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of some more das'sicp ;° ' jeLtlclu way to think historical development and change, genuine ^ ^ ^ j0ShOn jSj 0f course, the historical development of capi-Thetop'c ^ ^ deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In a H-knowii passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, \nely to think lb is: development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve" in otlfer words, a type of thinking that would be capable of prasplng the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and will out attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We ai&vsbmehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that c apitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse fromjthis austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance oftiietakmg of nióral': positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to thinfcthe cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastro-..gfeigéJBrqgross all together. Such an etfort suggests two immediate questions, with which we will conclude these retleetions. Can we in fact identify some "moment of UuthV within the culture? A mnre evident "moments of falsehood" of postmodern paralyzint ? We can do so' is there not something ultimately above"; doesT 'iidlectical view of historical development proposed 3110 helD]eS U Lui'd;to demobilize us and to surrender us to passivity y essilpss b\ SVStfimatiralhr nKlif0r,tm„ „„™U;l4^---1__4-:__ "^r^eimpenet/abr ^ y °bliteratinS Possibilities of action 0disc«sSthePs^ ^;ift°8,?f hlSt0riCal stability? It is appropriate r attl,mPiW- T&Bife^vont lated)lSSUesinterms of current possibilities for if postrnodermsm is a hzstorxcal phenomenon, then the at n I ^ of» It mporary cultural politics and for the construction ceptuahze it in terms of moral or moralizing judgments rmi-> _ 10 fnpii_ ^"uic nl culture, identified as a category mistake. All of which becomes more, when we interrogate the position of the cultural critic and mora latter, along with all the rest of us, is now so deeply immerse! modernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new 1 it ' 1 categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological cn, indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailfj To f ^ernorg118 ^ '"""'''em in this way is, of course, immediately to raise fell of culteT1Uinn 'HSUe °f the fate °^ culture generally, and of the func-Ptodepi eta r S'lltjl^ca1^' as one social level or instance, in the post-WehSveheoi jVl!n,t'ling in tne Previous discussion suggests that what ^e^ithau°I^ft"111" Postmodernism is inseparable from, and unthink-_ . ; , - 11 p hypothesis of, some fundamental mutation of the sphere 5461699999 48 POSTMODERNISM Culture 49 of culture in the world of late capitalism, which includes a monie]1, modification of its social function. Older discussions of the spacer'1; tion, or sphere of culture (mostly notably Herbert Marcuse's classic J! "The Affirmative Character of Culture") have insisted on what u ^' ent language would call the "semiautonomy" of the cultural rc(i|nii ghostly, yet Utopian, existence, for good or ill, above the practice tto,_ of the existent, whose mirror image it throws back in forms which from the legitimations of flattering resemblance to the contestaton in(],. ments of critical satire or Utopian pain. What we must now ask ourselves is whether it is not precisely f semiautonomy of the cultural sphere which has been destroyed by j-logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is today no ]a]^ endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one levul dnic\ others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in precapitalist sa: ties) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Qj, the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autc-;' mous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explqsir a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to^ point at which everything in our social life—from economic value ai! state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyi hi —can be said to have become "cultural" in some original a untheorized sense. This proposition is, however, substantively quite u\ In I', it has alrea(iy been observed how the prodigious new lijti"11" ""J-f j,,,||[national capital ends up penetrating and colonizing fMh>,,',lU" * JI|M .iiiitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which l*V pClr ili'11111 'rial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity. ""''"'I ,'rin iiul language of co-optation is for this reason omnipresent S "irli In'1 ""^d now seem t° offer a most inadequate theoretical U ' mlerstanding a situation in which we all, in one way or un lusis' fill H tlici iliwli hsel that not only punctual and local counterculturah '"j is of < tilli'f-1' resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly oliliial iiili'i'.i'iil'ions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly ] sjriiH'iJ "''absorbed by a system of which they themselves might ' II |IL,, Diisidi'icd a part, since they can achieve no distance from it. Whiil wr iiiiisI now affirm is that it is precisely this whole extraordi-ii.iii'v diMiioiali/ing and depressing original new global space which is die 'iimniiMil ol Iruth" of postmodernism. What has been called the nostmnuc'iiiihl" sublime" is only the moment in which this content has iii iniu' ninsl implicit, has moved the closest to the surface of consciousness as .i t.nlii-i flit new type of space in its own right—even though a 'oennin ligiii.il i nncealment or disguise is still at work here, most nota-alv in tin1 high li-ch thematics in which the new spatial content is still |r.iiii,iliy.Pfi .mil articulated. Yet the earlier features of the postmodern vvhii h witc cmiuierated above can all now be seen as themselves partial ><'l (Hiistiliitiwi aspects of the same general spatial object. I hi- .iigiiiniMii lor a certain authenticity in these otherwise patently ■m"" ,""',llctioils depends on the prior proposition that what we ■ i'lu'irT" ' ,l"IM"i P°stm°dern (or multinational) space is not merely a noin l-' "'''."'"'^ or fantasy but has genuine historical (and socioeco-'hi'Rl'jl "r IS Ugreat original expansion of capitalism around "npi-ri.il' '!'" earlier exPansions of the national market and the older i fiB|i''i,ii,.,|S SYsl"lu' which each had their own cultural specificity and ,or|«,tl.ii'ii|l|l,,,A 'XPeS °f Space aPProPriate to their dynamics). The dis-'•mai',,""'!!''''*ive tempts of newer cultural production to explore s-idi-i iii ,,s"k' 11 new sPace must then also, in their own fashion, be con-Usp iiii'in.'!''"iy approacnes to the representation of (a new) reality (to !,ltj" pi.iv n," "'"'^d language). As paradoxical as the terms may seem, ',r fuiMp l,,llo^ring 3 classic interpretive option, be read as pecu-tJUi sai"«- Iiiin'ti reallSm ^0r at least of ^ mimesis of reality), while at lstract and '. yy can equally well be analyzed as so many attempts to resolVe t^'0n US from ^t reality or to disguise its contradictions B»i in the guise of various formal mystifications. I I ! 1 50 POSTMODERNISM As for that reality itself, however—the as yet untheorize space of some new "world system" of multinational or late caj nt,i|.[' space whose negative or baleful aspects are only too obvious lectic requires us to hold equally to a positive or "progressive" ^ T tion of its emergence, as Marx did for the world market as the , national economies, or as Lenin did for the older imperialist ulo^,, work. For neither Marx nor Lenin was socialism a matter of u smaller (and thereby less repressive and comprehensive) syster. organization; rather, the dimensions attained by capital in times were grasped as the promise, the framework, and the tion for the achievement of some new and more comprehens ism. Is this not the case with the yet more global and total izii the new world system, which demands the intervention an tion of an internationalism of a radically new type? The realignment of socialist revolution with the older nationalism in Southeast Asia), whose results have necessarily aroused : ous recent left reflection, can be adduced^ in support of this position.^ But if all this is so, then at least one possible form of a ne1 cultural politics becomes evident, with a final aesthetic proviso must quickly be noted. Left cultural producers and theorists larly those formed by bourgeois cultural traditions issuing from mnv r ticism and valorizing spontaneous, instinctive, or unconsc iuu: "genius," but also for very obvious historical reasons such as Zhdanovs * and the sorry consequences of political and party intervene arts—have often by reaction allowed themselves to be undul dated by the repudiation, in bourgeois aesthetics and most n high modernism, of one of the age-old functions of art—the l""-'1'-cal and the didactic. The teaching function of art was, however, w-w stressed in classical times (even though it there mainly took the to |g moral lessons), while the prodigious and still imperfectly undeIS Culture 51 mm work of Brecht reaffirms, in a new and formally innovative and oi way, for the moment of modernism proper, a complex new cone of the relationship between culture and pedagogy. The cultura will propose similarly foregrounds the cognitive and pedagogical"^ sions of political art and culture, dimensions stressed in very *rj ways by both Lukacs and Brecht (for the distinct moments oi i $£j and modernism, respectively). We cannot, however, return to aesthetic practices elaborate ^ basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no 1°°^ ^ Meanwhile, the conception of space that has been developed Iff] model of political culture appropriate to our own situation ges'ts that ^a , jiive f0 raise spatial issues as its fundamental organiz-^jllnece < therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of this ^concern- i thetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive new (and »>h ""^"fas&ic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that fjenated c it\ is above all a space in which people are unable to map ^meirminds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which the find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built erspeclives) obLain, are the most obvious examples. Disalienation in the traditional cily, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories. Lynch's own work is limited by the deliberate restriction of his topic to the.problems ol city form as such; yet it becomes extraordinarily suggestive when pjojected outward onto some of the larger national and global spaces i\ i1 have touched on here. Nor should it be too hastily assumed that his model—while it clearly raises very central issues of representation as such—is in any way easily vitiated by the conven-postslruUiiral critiques of the "ideology of representation" or mimesis. The cognitive map is not exactly mimetic in that older sense; indeed, the theoietical issues it poses allow us to renew the analysis of representation on a higher and much more complex level, em ^ |S' *°r "ne tnin§' a most interesting convergence between the BttS AH PmbIt!ms studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the resentat'^',ln ^ Lac:a,lian) redeliiiition of ideology as "the rep-Co^ditTon~ °"' lllosub'ec,'s 'mrifiinary relationship to his or her Raul is oalled"S °J rxiste-nce"22 Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map «1 city: to^"f" d° ln the narrower framework of daily life in the physi-"al.subject^, i1'1'3 SitUati°nal rePresentation on the part of the individ-tile Ensemhl° i Vaster and Pr0Perly unrepresentable totality which is .Yet Lyr,c[. ',ociety's structures as a whole. " Sinograph lV,°r^also suggests a further line of development insofar is"" makitl8 Lyiu? ■% 6t'm fact'really corresPond to what will become map-°P?ratloiisu.n' " subJects are rather clearly involved in precartographic "s<> results traditionally are described as itineraries rather ^wSy1^,,11."811 constitutes its key mediatory instance. A return to mnH"' ' esj10l!'S.SCience twhich is also an art) shows us that Lynch's 9288^393 9200^^1190 52 POSTMODERNISM than as maps: diagrams organized around the still subject-cen(e „ existential journey of the traveler, along which various signifli dll^,4 features are marked—oases, mountain ranges, rivers, monumem. the like. The most highly developed form of such diagrams is th(. cal itinerary, the sea chart, or portulans, where coastal features arunw for the use of Mediterranean navigators who rarely venture out jm, ' open sea. Yet the compass at once introduces a new dimension into sea i,hn> dimension that will utterly transform the problematic of the í t ixic-and allow us to pose the problem of a genuine cognitive mapping..'! far more complex way. For the new instruments—compass, sextant theodolite—correspond not merely to new geographic and navili,^,, problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude, particularlvn the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler inuttr-j latitude, which European navigators can still empirically determiner ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce a whole'i i coordinate: the relationship to the totality, particularly as it is nnuKiv by the stars and by new operations like that of Triangulatinn. point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require then dination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) v.1. unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality. Finally, with the first globe (1490) and the invention of the Mitc!* projection at about the šime time, yet a third dimension of cartogriip" emerges, which at once involves what we would today call the uaturcs representational codes, the intrinsic structures of the various m?i^t the intervention, into more naive mimetic conceptions of mapping the whole new fundamental question of the languages of representaWfe itself, in particular the unresolvable (well-nigh Heisenbergian) dilfii"' of the transfer of curved space to flat charts. At this point it bud" clear that there can be no true maps (at the same time it also bt'i;0, clear that there can be scientific progress, or better still, a di.il"1,1'' advance, in the various historical moments of mapmaking). Transcoding all this now into the very different problemalu 0 Althusserian definition of ideology, one would want to make two p0' Culture 53 *vay The first is that the Althusserian concept now allows us to re 0 of s°R finitf starkly up against those very difficulties in mapping ViJ. m heightened and original ways by that very global IS| MU)dernist or multinational moment which has been j,|i,it« 1 "^„„1 here. These are not merely theoretical issues; they under disc"- "^.j^,^ political consequences, as is evident from the con- |i.r.i"11 "'''j |t,t.|oi First World subjects that existentially (or "empiri- ventiona ' ■ i inhabit a "postindustrial society" from which tra-Htf") thfiY r''1" j oduction has disappeared and in which social classes of the (hi!!)"-1 P i(,naer exist—a conviction which has immediate effects classical tyPe 111,11 " „n political pmxis. "I'lii- sim ui'il p"!"1 is ti131 a return t0 the Lacanian underpinnings of - Althusser's theory can afford some useful and suggestive methodologi-* I j,,,,,, imii'iits. Althusser's formulation remobilizes an older and hew i'tmlli1 a' Marxian distinction between science and ideology Ihdl i1* '■Mill'1"1 value for us even today. The existential—the positioning ul null i idual subject, the experience of daily life, the monadic "PDiiii ol v ii-v. ii'i the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted—is in Althusser's formula implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which, as Lacan reminds us, is mvci positiiiiieil in or actualized by any concrete subject but rather by that structural void called Ie sujet suppose savoir (the subject supposed to know), a subject-place of knowledge. What is affirmed is not lliiil vii- i.uiiiui know the world and its totality in some abstract or "scientific" way. Marxian "science" provides just such a way of know-inn and i dm cpiuiilizing the world abstractly, in the sense in which, for •aainplr. Mandel's great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge of |h-it ii«.i| v.nild system, of which it has never been said here that it iiiikiiiiv>liul(> but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a nat^.C''^Ulenl m;i,ll!r" '^rie Althusserian formula, in other words, desig-edo 3 U r'^1' ^(jtween existential experience and scientific knowl-^tlcul^''1^0"^' 'liIS *^e function °^ somehow inventing a way of toricisHt^.11" l'll)si! lwo distinct dimensions with each other. What a his-ti0n tjjVU5W °' ,n'H definition would want to add is that such coordina-d'fferen6 U,''im OI hinctioning and living ideologies, is distinct in cal si'i, . Istor'1:i,l situations, and, above all, that there may be histori- these specialized geographical and cartographic issues in terms < space—in terms, for example, of social class and national or h1*6 ,|" tional context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily J cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, na^°d and international class realities. Yet to reformulate the problem 1,1 , be our sitU,ns Which {t is not P°ssible at a11-BlIt ^ "allon in the current crisis. -and this would seem to Al«, U::.siM Pi, D^'acan's "'1Position of ideology and science correspond only two 'Partite functions: the Imaginary and the Real, respectively. Lilian system is threefold, and not dualistic. To the Marxian- 54 POSTMODERNISM Our digression on cartography, however, with its final revelation i properly representational dialectic of the codes and capacities q[\*§ vidual languages or media, reminds us that what has until now |, 1 omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic itself. An aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical political ( j', . which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new hej^' ened sense of its place in the global system—will necessarily ]lav j respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic J invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not tin'! clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some ol^ and more transparent national space, or some more traditional andieg* suring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art [if possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, thatir to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinatiojj capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to soiil as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which id may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collects subjects and regain a capacity to. act and struggle which is at press! neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The politic form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation! invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social? well as a spatial scale. Theories of the Postmodern I he 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 in\ stification—this problem is at one and the same time anaesthetic and a political one. The various positions that can logically 'beiaken on it, vvhatever 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 graiil some historic originality to a postmodernist culture is also implicitly I o affirm some radical structural difference between what is sometimes i ailed consumer society and earlier moments of the capitalism from which it emerged. ^ e various It igical possibilities, however, are necessarily linked with naV^111" °' ' 'l0s^0n on tnat other issue inscribed in the very desig-be |,^ostm(1<'errnsm itself, namely, the evaluation of what must now initial ^' '^"^ W c^ass^ca^ modernism. Indeed, when we make some cjlarajJ"Vent01'y of the varied cultural artifacts that might plausibly be ilyresénlb""' ^ Postmoc'ern'tne temptation is strong to seek the "fam-Se'ves"bu ai1(' °^ SUC"1 heterogeneous styles and products not in them-a8äiiis"t\vh Some oommon high modernist impulse and aesthetic Thenrvi l'le^ *n one way or another, stand in reaction m°^°rnii, ' °1' Ura* °-eDates' however, the inaugural discussions of post-tllese seen, a Style'have tne merit of making the political resonance of "i thpU"ly aestnetic issues inescapable and allowing it to be detect-3rts' °n tl ,MlItletirnes more coded or veiled discussions in the other L u hole, four general positions on postmodernism may be