Shane Lore

Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism (Manchester University Press, 1999).

Notes on postmodernism as a philosophy and phenomenon according to this book, formatted as bullet points (page number references in parentheses; postmodernism sometimes abbreviated as “PM”).

• It’s been suspected as reactionary (Paul de Man’s writings) (18). Marxists might say “I told you so!”
• Derrida: smash illusion of priority around privileged terms in dialectics (18).
• Jacques Lacan: replace Enlightenment reason with desire as motor for historical change (18).
• Foucault: genealogy the model of history, not Platonic “eureka moment” breaks (18).
• Lyotard: says PM started in late ’50s (19).
• Lyotard: it’s incredulity towards metanarratives.
• Micronarratives are small-scale, particular issues: save the whales, oppose a bypass. Rather than Save the Planet or Enthrone the Proletariat (19).
• PM science: “undecidables,” gray areas, limits, paradoxes (19).
• Enlightenment notion of progress has been smashed (19).
• Knowledge is “partial, fragmented, and incomplete,” no universality; this acknowledges our limitedness.
• Strategy: “ad hoc, tactical manoeuvers” for “eccentric lines of argument” (21).
• Realpolitik at bottom: power is behind everything (21).
• Opposing foundations allows activation of “one’s own politics.”
• Conspiracy between “wealth, efficiency, and truth.” “Privilege of legitimation” monopolized by wealthy (21).
• Aesthetically, PM is a set of strategies that puts forward “the unpresentable in presentation itself” (or attempts to), not a time period or age (22).
• Modernism in its nascent state? (22)
• A formalist attack on Marxist history (22).
• The Differend explores how different worldviews are incommensurable and explores judgment (23).
• PM gives allusions to the unpresentable (23).
• Is Lyotard just creating a new metanarrative of “fragmentation and heterogeneity”?
• Yes, but as Derrida points out, you have to use meta-narrative itself to critique metanarrative. This is how logic and discourse are set up.
• Jean Beaudrillard: considered nihilistic (25).
• Draws from “Marxism, cybernetics, social theory, psychoanalysis, comm[unicative?] theory, and semiotics” (25).
• Says now we’re dominated by the sign: Marx had political economy of commodities, we have that of the sign (25). So we need theory of semiology.
• “World of simulacra, of models, codes, and digitalized reality” (25).
• Simulation: image or model becomes more real than the real, and experience of the real disappears (26). Happens in three stages: from Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution: counterfeit, or distorted reality. From the industrial age: production, where signs hid the lack of reality. Simulation is now, when signs bear no relationship to reality (26).
• Hyperreal: more real than real: real is produced by the model (26).
• Change and associations of NYC vs. reality (26).
• Disney World: simulation of Old West town now the reality for everyone; or how sitcom family starts to determine what real family life looks like (26).
• World of “simulacra without referents” (26).
• Alienation: lack of power and agency: simulation distracts from this, leads to “end of history” (27).
• Beaudrillard: hyperbolic, but it’s a tactic of PM, flouting the rules (28).
• Question: can audiences decode TV and simulacra? I argue no (29).
• Question: Was language the first technology that allowed representation and consequently distortion of reality? (29) Derrida might say so. And Walter Benjamin.
• Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: blend psychoanalysis, “poststructuralist attack on representation and the subject,” and critique of Marxism (30).
• Discourses and institutions legitimate “existing structures and states of affairs” (30).
• Says Freudian unconscious is a result of capitalist impression on the psyche (30).
• Become “nomads of desire” by surmounting repressive, totalizing ideas (30).
• Schizoanalysis: multiple and decentered identities is the natural way. Society built to channel desire and corral it (30).
• Anti-Oedipus explores how this has occurred in history (31).
• Humans are “desiring-machines” and need to become “bodies without organs,” deterritorializing themselves from colonizing ideologies and forces which seek to dam up or divert leisure and libido, including family structure and gender roles (31).
• Goal to capture pre-linguistic experience, express it though the illogical and varied (31).
• Want to re-eroticize body: free for sex, pursuit (31).
• Rhizome of history of ideas instead of tree (31). Spread out in “random, unregulated relationships” instead of hierarchy of descent (31).
• Destroy ego, let flourish instead dynamic unconscious (32).
• Destroys “modernist notion of the unified, rational, and expressive subject” for decentered, multiple, dispersed identities (32).
• Serious adversaries are on the left; say it’s actually reactionary and a schill for capitalism (33). Say it’s “anti-realist” (Christopher Norriss)
• Habermas: believes in ultimate emancipation and a unity of knowledge, through a society “modelled on communicational processes” that are general conditions of communication between two people. Says modernism is not finished (34).
• Basically he agrees with critique of positivism but says pragmatic universalism can lead to “socially … agreed status of social values” (34).
• Disagrees with discourse being “interplay of signifiers with no touchstone for making truth claims (34).
• Frederic Jameson: justificatory discourse for late stage capitalism (35). PM is air we breathe, affects all things.
• Features: superficiality, loss of feeling, loss of history (replaced by pastiche and ornament), differentiation over unification, the sublime without the “sense of the revolution of truth.”
• Need cognitive mapping to create definable, unique places instead of the duplication inherent in capitalism (37).
• Says PMists don’t have style because they are a pastiche of past styles (37).
• Says they can’t do parody because they can’t adopt a satiric position seriously (38).
• For feminists, heteroglossia concept opens up feminist, pluralist opportunities.
• PM feminism: confusion of gender boundaries stops erosion of fractious self in the face of “rigid demarcations of the masculine Cartesian universe” (38).
• Donna Haraway: cyborg is a metaphor for PM body floating “free of time, place and gender restrictions” (38).
• Susan Hekman: PM feminism extends and reveals its gendered character (39).
• PMers say modernist feminism is phallogocentric cause it tries to create a totalizing, unified feminist perspective (40).
• Hélène Cixous: masculine logic “writing” casts gender as a binary (40). They must present the unthinkable or unthought in words (40).
• Somer Brodribb: PM undermines feminism because feminism relies on the grand narrative of male domination. Takes away potential for radical universal politics of feminism (40).
• Irigaray: mimicking a position of patriarchy can also reinforce it rather than subvert it [WAP?] (41) (it fulfills it).
• PM inspires African American studies, decentering of Eurocentric narrative (41).
• Edward said (in Orientalism): western intellectual tradition “bound up with the particular politics and interests of the West.” Need counter-narratives (42).
• Later he softened, said people in 3rd World want Enlightenment values and they’re not just the property of Europeans (42).
• Gayarti Spivak: subaltern: history from non-elite or subordinated social groups (42).
• Forms from “network of differentiated, potentially contradictory identities” (42) and “discursive displacements,” or “fractional changes in sign systems.”
• Spivak: However, no pure subaltern voice: that’s modernist (43).
• Spivak: history is a process of “epistemic violence,” an “interested construction of a particular representation of an object” (Robert Young) (43).
• Spivak: ask not who am I, but who is the other woman (44).
• Identity constructed through process of “alterity or otherness” (44).
• Hybridity and liminality over purity and centrality (44).
• All things are a shifting, sliding sand [cf. Nominalism to Darwinism to PMism?].
• No original purity, no pure thing, period. Just hybridity, liminality, third spaces. Identity then is impossible and unpredictable (Homi Bhabha) (44).
• Bhabha: take dominant narratives and “lever them open for reutterance from a postcolonial perspective” (45).
• Bhabha: suspicious that PM could be used in a colonial way (45).
• Do modern people just get bored and then invent PM? (45)
• PM and the Literary Arts (Chapter 3) following…
• Elizabeth Ermarth: goes beyond obsession with identity and similitude that characterized writing from the Enlightenment on, that time of historical and rational thinking (49).
• Challenges psychological realism of modernist fiction (50).
• “Random techniques, mixed and merged styles, and increasingly provisional methods” (50).
• From James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake to Don DeLillo’s fiction today (50).
• “Ongoing process of problematisation or subversion of realist (mainstream) aesthetic ideology” (50).
• “Periodisation can be modernist” (50).
• Some call PM fiction “anti-realist” (50) or (Susan Strehle) “fiction in a quantum universe.”
• Kurt Vonnegut: “leave realism behind” (51).
• William Burroughs: “world cannot be expressed” only “indicated by mosaics of juxtaposition” (51) “defined by negatives and absences” [see Derrida].
• Seeks to “subvert its own structural and formal bases.” Meaning dependent on “writing and reading practices” (51).
• Exhaustion: modernism “used up” conventions of fictional realism” (Barth): cannot now write an original work (52).
• Because “obsessively concerned with its own status as fiction,” art then becomes “the object of imitation.” “A self-conscious reflexivity emerged” (52).
• Silence becomes the goal: “disruption of all links between languages and reality” (52).
• Robert Scholes: fabulation: “fiction that owns its unreality” (53).
• “Disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, and self-reflexiveness” (53).
• Celebrates “impatterned, resistant reactions to history, systems, and codes” (Joseph Keller’s Catch-22 (1961)) (53).
• “To what extent have self-reflexive interrogations freed the novel from obsolete conventions?” (53)
• PM fiction critiques “the myth of history as a set of ‘innocent’ facts and deeds”: it demythologizes history (54).
• E.C. Doctorew (1978 int): found out “history” is highly interpreted history. In U.S., so diverse that our story of the past became an act of community; therefore very political (54).
• Hayden White and Roland Barthes attack history as objective representation of reality (55).
• Jameson: PM makes past nostalgia based on consumerism (55).
• PM always wary of history that’s not self-aware (55).
• Critics: PM will turn history into a reactionary formalist exercise “unrelated to its social conditions of production” (55).
• Linda Hutcheson: PM fiction is Janus-faced to the dominant culture (55).
• PM “self-consciously problematizes the making of fiction and history” (55).
• Status as fiction and also as somehow grounded in objective reality (55).
• PM is paradoxically upholding conventions of realism and mimetic representation. As Derrida said, my discourse by definition reinforces logos. However, as he also says [“silence is violence”], Hutcheson says the issue is who are those representations for, and how do they work? (55).
• Metafiction (Gass): we don’t describe world in writing; we make it. Fiction not “memetic, but constructive” (55).
• Federman: Surfiction: fiction that explores limits of fiction and its orthodoxies. “Exposes the fictionality of reality” (55).
• PM: “elaborate forms of complicity between author, text, and reader” (55).
• Metafiction: “text’s power to signify is arbitrary.”
• Stories turn in on themselves, repeat in convoluted and inverted ways. Can existence of a self be separated from writing? (Barth)
• Patricia Waugh: expose illusion of self-sufficiency and the revealing of that illusion (57) through “exaggerated structural patterning, infinite textual regression, literary parodies, temporal and spatial dislocations, and blurred boundaries of discourse” (57).
• Does the self write or is the self written? (Barth) (57).
• Andreas Huyssen: PM is challenge to high art. Like the “historical avant-garde,” it explores “contradictions and contingencies of high and pop cultures” (57).
• John Mepham: PM fiction “foreground[s] and highlight[s] the textuality of the work (‘metafictional strategies’), to draw attention to the fictional framing devices and the plurality of worlds” (58).
• Brian McHale: PM shifts focus from problem of knowing knowledge (like in the Enlightenment) to one of how to be: question like which self am I, what world am I in?… foreground questions (58).
• Ahab Hassan: PM is indeterminacy and “immanence”: indetermanence. Comes from how language slides and indicates more than it is (Derrida) (59).
• Also has table comparing and contrasting Modernism and PM (60). Could just be strawman modernism, though.
• Does the contrast depend upon a certain violent squishing of modernism into a certain mold? (61)
• Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, and Constance deJong: stories “destabilize plot and character,” “employ non-sequential structures to celebrate a fluidity that resists narrative totalization” (61).
• Some “PM” fiction works in “realist mold” but describes postmodern life: Ellis, McInerney, Janowitz (62).
• Cyberpunk: quintessentially postmodern, best example is William Gibbon’s Neuromancer “with its melange of genres, its compelling account of late commodity capitalism, and its decentering of the human consciousness in its innovative exploration of cyberspace” (62).
• Andre Brink in South Africa: writes about how stories displace other stories but “without denying or even entirely effacing them” (Contrary, p. 134). (64).
• Compels reader to reassess his or her practices of interpretation and evaluation (64).
• PM is why non-Eurocentric cultures even get considered now (65).
• PM fiction: decenters subject, is fragmented and reflexive, is open-ended and playful with “formal devices and narrative artifice”: narrative “alludes to its own artifice self-consciously” (65). It explores how “narrative mediates and constructs history” (66).
• DeLillo’s White Noise: explores how hard to pick out “the important message from the ‘white noise’ in a society ‘suffused with simulacra’” (66).
• Shows the real as measured by the simulation and found wanting (66).
• The “ficto-critical” replaces “binary opposition of the ‘fictional’ and the ‘critical’” (67).
• Shows sense of subjectivity and individuality shifting and decentering with the societal fragmentation (68).
• Unclear if all this is good or bad to DeLillo, so “indecision of representation” is the “very form of the novel” (68).
• Charles Olson: PM poetry: “field composition”: improvisation and spontaneity over “worn-out,” old forms.
• Attention to speech patterns and “suspicion of language as a source of self-expression” (68).
• Beat poets in 50s “developed theories of spontaneous composition, verbal improvisation, and a direct, ecstatic, and incantatory writing” (69).
• They thought eastern thought would “cure” America, so still quite a lot of modernist baggage (69).
• On East Coast at the same time, New York Schol emphasized “immediacy and directness” saying “poetry had to be born out of one’s sense of interior address to and dialogue with another, without being distracted by that relationship” (70).
• 1970s, “Language” poetry tries to distance themselves from implicit “claims of presence and participation” of the other schools (71).
• Pointed out how “media pervade the most private recesses of our psychic lives” (71).
• They denied artist as central “expressive genius” and deconstructed poetics of presence and the privileging of the oral over the written word [cf. Derrida] (71).
• Against Romantic idea of poetry as a “work of spontaneous emotion and artistic inspiration” (72).
• British PM poetry: “struggle over the means of representation, as well as a politics of identity (regional, class, racial, and sexual)” (75).
• Questions “construction of sexuality and femininity” (75).
• “Tend to acknowledge openly their debt to writers present and past” from Romanticist to modernists (76).
• PM poetry: “resistance to preconceived forms dictating the arrangement of language and ideas,” “resistance to closure,” so “open field”; “challenge to the ‘lyric subject’–the unified voice which orders the consciousness in the poem–and the adoption of a more dispersed, multiple voice,” “suspicion of the ‘poetics of presence’ embedded in the priority accorded to oral forms, and a rigorous exploration of the written or textual dimension of language,” “insistence on the materiality of the signifier, and a delight in opening up the possibilities of that recognition”; emphasis on “poetic community” rather than the individual (76).
• Lyn Hejinian: “closure is a fiction”; reader should participate in an “open text” (77).
• There’s a flattening of the register, a shifting site of enunciation,” using breaks and non-sequiturs in order to deconstruct the lyric subject to bring in multiple and dispersed voices (77).
• Relishes that “words are the world that we inhabit.” “A language of inquiry” (77).
• Displaces “linguistic elements into brief fragmentary phrases” and attends “to the material basis of the meaning production within its own context” (79).
• For theatre, it’s “a discursive space which refused any clear-cut consciousness of character, and, as Purvis has put it, ‘the text is maintained as an object of questioning, the workings of codes’” (80).
• “Texts are treated as possessing an infinite openness to significance and a space for the perpetual deferment of conclusive meaning” (80).
• All Kaprow: chance procedures with improvisation, anti-totalization with no closure or ending, and non-teleological, having “no goal or motive other than the spectacle itself” (81).
• It lets the audience “connect things he did not consider before,” making him a creator of meaning and removing that exclusive right from the creator (81).
• Richard Foreman: his plays reduce “narrative coherence” and “magnify so many other aspects of experience that you simply lose interest in trying to hold onto narrative richness and instead, allow yourself to become absorbed in the moment-by-moment representation of psychic freedom” (82).
• It does forms which “refuse totalizing experiences and resist ironing out contradictions” and disrupt closure, “frustrating continuities and coherences” (82).
• Nick Kaye says about him: his play “never finally appears,” expectations always being let down (82).
• Michael Kirby and Robert Wilson–Kaye says they frustrate “the reading of structure, sequence, pattern, and image” because PM sees these things as ultimately ephemeral, so they focus on surface of representation because it’s the relation of these surfaces that produces meaning. They have “value as spectacle”; “contingency of the work” is exposed (83).
• PM dance “seeks to break with the conventions of western conceptions of classical grace and harmony” to better reject clean, essentialist Euclideanism and embrace living in a quantum universe (82).
• Michael Kirby: PM dance doesn’t choose movements based on visual characteristics but allows movements to be formed “from certain decisions, goals, plans, schemes, rules, concepts, or problems”; whatever occurs from those is acceptable.
• Augusto Boal: revolutionary theatre which models resistance to “passive complicity with an oppressive situation” (83).
• PM performance becomes “more about itself–its processes, and less and less about an objective reality and life in the world.”
• PM theatre focused on overlapping performances or happenings (79) with a plurality of different forms (88).
• Architecture is as follows:
• Walter Gropius (1883-1969), Le Corbusier (born Charles Edouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965), and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe (1886-1960) of Bauhaus School (89): the Modernists.
• Corbusier: “low cost, rationalized and standardized architecture for mass production,” functionalism and rejection of 19th century concern for “style” (89).
• Against non-structural decoration (89), wants to create a new society with the complete building which is a “collective participation in a unity of a single habitation” (89).
• International Style: “simple, geometric intensity” and “devotion to logic and clarity of structure” (91).
• 3 principles of modernism: reductivism, determinism, and mechanism (91).
• Style “removed from vocabulary[?] of form,” “tyranny of historicism” rejected because ornament is crime (Loos) (91).
• Mies: “form follows function” (91).
• “Regularity, rationalization, and standardization,” “universalist and abstract style” (91).
• Wanted to be “democratic housing and business quarters for a mass population” but became icon of impersonal technocratic capitalist big business (91).
• Charles Jencks: Modern architecture died in St. Louis, MO, July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m. when Pruitt-Igoe was dynamited (93).
• Modernism was never free of corporate capital image (93).
• Frederic Jameson: Postmodern architecture is “unapologetic celebration of aestheticism” (94).
• Frederic Jameson: Bonaventure Hotel (74-76) in LA: “not consciously interventionist and polemical,” and confrontational, like modernism; Bonaventure Hotel is indifferent, repelling outside “through aesthetic dissociation and aloofness” and thereby “imitates the cultural logic of late capitalism, which is a consumer-led triumphalism” (94).
• International Style: eviscerate historical reference; this was “stylistically restrictive, rootless, and meaningless” (95).
• Robert Venturi (postmodern): use “decorative molding, traditional symbol and popular culture” (95).
• Venturi, Steven Izenour and Jessie Scott Brown Learning from Las Vegas (1972) (95).
• They denounce “puritanically moral language of orthodox Marxist architecture” and support “difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion” and “less is a bore” rather than less is more.
• Postmodern architecture: “history, language, form, symbolism, and the dialectics of high and pop culture” it “includes,” like the Las Vegas strip (96).
• It’s “rooted in the regional and historical” and postmodernism stresses “the importance of the communicative function of architecture” with “inclusion, allusion, and articulation” and “notions of irony, playfulness, multivalenced lexicons and a celebration of the ordinary into architecture, resisting the austere, monumental and heroic quality of modern architecture” (96).
• Also has idiosyncratic corners, odd walls, and “post-modern space” (97).
• Charles Jencks: Venturi focused on “semiotic dimension of architecture,” and “as a language,” Jencks explicitly formulated this (98).
• Johnson: John Burgee’s AT&T Corporate HQ (79-84): “Pop icon of a “Chippendale Highboy,” architecture of “bricolage” (98).
• Dates from late ‘50s, “Italian Neo-Liberty architects like Luigi Moretti” (98).
• Postmodernism: “historical ambivalence,” “’dual-coding’ or ‘double-coding,’ or a conscious schizophrenia,” “architectural irony, or pastiche” (98).
• Makes “ironic use of local context,” “quotes” context, uses a “metaphorical quality” with “pluralism or hybridity of style,” makes “a new ambiguous space.” “Plural concept with a ’narrative content’” replaces function with fiction as primary relationship (99).
• Rules or evolving practices: dissonant beauty, pluralism, urbane urbanism, anthropomorphism, anamnesis, radical eclecticism, double-coding, multi-valence, tradition reinterpreted, new rhetorical figures, and a return to the absent center” (99).
• Motto: “more is more” (99).
• Stern: as contextualism, allusionism, ornamentalism (99).
• “’An architecture of the image for a civilization of the image’” (Paulo Portoghesi) (99).
• No more “faith in the great centered designs, and the anxious pursuits of salvation,” but now “the concreteness of small circumstantial struggles with its precise objections capable of having a great effect because they change systems of relations” (Portoghesi, Post-Modern, p. 12).
• Dual-coding like Derrida’s “writing as a mime, parasitism, equivocation, montage, superimposition, a layered signification, or super-imprinting one text or another” (101).
• PM architecture “embraces high-tech materials and symbolic ornamentation,” and “gestures to pop culture.” (102)
• Ricardo Bofill’s designs show “an amplification and displacement of architectural elements, owing as much to the Renaissance as to the modernist tradition” (102).
• Robert Krier with the IBA in his Ritterstrasse Block (1984) in Berlin, and his brother Leon Krier” influenced a “new classical urbanism, with their utopian and arcadian designs incorporating social and political dimensions of decentralization in their use of public space and small-block planning” which some called fascist for “its use of the monumental in perpetuating and maintaining a collective historical memory” (102).
• PM arch: “metaphor and similes in buildings” and “anthropomorphic metaphors” (103).
• Arata Isozaki’s Tsukuba Civic Center (1980-3) which has a “motif of ‘absent presence’” with gaps and blanks strategically placed about it. (103).
• PM architects “bind together various symbolic systems” (103).
• “Unclear boundaries, exaggerated perspective, ambiguous spacing, the idiosyncratic collision of walls” (104).
• “Peter Eisenmann, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Hiromi Fujii, Rem Koolhaas, Frank O. Gehry, Daniel Liebeskind and Coop Himmelbau”; they “challenged the humanist construction of space, or the way in which conceptions of space have relied upon unities and harmonies established in reason, representation, and truth”; sometimes called “archetexture” and an “aesthetics of fragmentation” which “decentralizes the conventional syntax and iconography of buildings” and strips “the architectural model of the aura and familiarity which normally reconcile us to it” (104).
• They “break away from the automatic link between architecture and habitation” and “prevent any conventional or ‘naturalizing’ conception of architecture dominating the discipline”; Tschumi wants to be “disruptive and ‘unsettling’” with “a dislocating architecture [that] must struggle against celebrating, or symbolizing [expectations, projections, and desires]; it must dislocate its own meaning,” “shifting but not obliterating the boundaries of meaning.” Because “meaning necessarily implies absence through the absent referent, then a dislocating architecture must be at once presence and absence” (Eisenmann, “Misreading”, in Peter Eisenmann house of cards). (104).
• A continual sense of placement and displacement. Eisenmann recognizes the paradox that one cannot escape what is handed down from the past, and yet attempts to prevent architecture from being policed and controlled by that history.” He “seeks the ‘unthought’ in an architecture of implication” with “’adventures’ in possible spaces, emphasizing the mysterious, ambiguous, sensual, with features such as skew-angled walls which disorient scale and distort perspective” (104)
• Tschumi wants to “shape unconscious desire and the sensual or erotic aspects of humans” (105).
• He also “looks to the manner in which city spaces can generate unexpected social and cultural manifestations”; he wants a “post-humanist architecture” that stresses the “dispersion of the subject” and “the effect of such decentering on the entire notion of unified, coherent, architectural form”; he does this by “‘questioning structures’ rather than ‘formal composition’” “to show the city as a fractured space of accidents” (105).
• Tschumi “deliberately flouted the modernist hierarchy of structure over ornamentation” with “insides of structures” “exposed as exteriors and used as decoration”; he’s encouraging “conflict over synthesis, fragmentation over unity, madness and play over careful management”; the Parc de la Villette “stresses the self-reflexive spatial organization of consciousness, in the belief that being aware of one’s position and location are contemporary imperatives”. It includes “follies” “placed every 120 meters on a grid pattern,” a “conjunction of irrationalities [that] can be interpreted as a pleasurable kind of instability. Derrida approved of these. The Villette “is meant to stimulate rather than repress the multiplicity of spaces” (107).
• Eisenmann: “The tradition of history in fact coves up potential types which evolve today… not in what we see in history but what we have not seen in history” (Eisenmann and Leon Krier, “My Ideology is Better than Yours”); seeks “an architecture as an infinite text of superimpositions” and “interrogations of the conventional assumptions about what constitutes shelter, foundations, boundaries, constructions—indeed, the whole relationship between self-identity and the specificity of the space(s) one inhabits. Eisenmann and Tschumi are concerned with challenging the boundaries between inside and outside” maintaining that “there is no completely rational space—space is ‘now-here’ and ‘no-where’” at the same time (109).
• “Strong community element and concern with locale” like “Ralph Erskine’s development of Byker (72-74) a working class area in Newcastle or “Lucien Kroll’s design for the Medical Facility Buildings (1970-77) at the University of Louvain in Belgium” (109).
• Prince Charles called “the planned extension to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square … a ‘monstrous carbuncle’ on the face ‘of a much loved friend’” (109).
• “Abstraction and geometricism give way to an interest in referential and gestural styles; the self-regarding concentration on the building as an autonomous entity defers to an awareness of the context in which a building occurs; ahistoricism and purity give way to a critical engagement with the past; preoccupations with plurality and hybridity replace the desire for simplicity and non-contradiction; popular and mass culture get precedence over the rules of the elite” (110).
• Kenneth Frampton’s “Towards a Critical Regionalism” in 1985 says “architecture must develop a critical ‘consciousness,’ which will cause the human subject to be constantly alert to the historical specifics of a place. The result is a ‘regionalism’ which shuns pastoral myth, but remains open to the possibilities of different traditions” (110).
• PM arch “ironically seems to depend upon the very means of mass production so scathingly attacked as the linchpin of modernism.” And “it merely becomes another style transmitted across the globe as speedily as a fax of the latest design alteration” (110).
• Architects are worried about whether PM is “merely another form of aestheticism” or “rather a real attempt to open up architecture to the community?” (112).
• Key characteristics of PM arch: celebration of spectacle (112), radical eclecticism (113), random historicism (113), irrational space (113), parodic metaphor: not “buried vestiges of faces and bodies in pre-postmodern architecture” but now such that they are “made exaggeratedly explicit” (113).
• Double-coding evident in Stirling’s Stuttgart State Gallery with “a collage of quotations” and “traces of the past”; “punk” coloring plays “a joke in colour on the expectations of the building’s users as to what constitutes a color scheme for a monument of ‘high’ culture in a state art gallery”; demonstrates “ironic representation and contextual response” (114).
• Eisenmann’s Fin D’Ou T Hou S does not conform to “logic of known orders and human-centered values, but instead plays with presence and absence in shape and volume.” “It presumes that its own origins are unknowable, as the building dissimulates with ambivalent spaces and teases with indeterminate closure”; it’s “conceived of as an object in process, going nowhere and emerging from nowhere” (116).
• Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at OSU “is fractured and incomplete-looking, thus resisting any holistic or straightforward unification with the campus or wider community” (116).
• Geographers Harvey, Edward Soja, and Jameson “have argued that whereas the modern era was preoccupied with temporality, the postmodern era is dominated by spatiality. Space is the new cultural dominant” (117).
• Jameson: “postmodern’s dependence on a ‘supplement of spatiality’ that results from postmodernism’s depletion of history and its consequent exaggeration of the present”; “The politics of space, the cultural function of geography, and the importance of place are increasingly being contested and asserted” (118).
• Foucault: “Of Other Spaces”: “describes his concept of a ‘heterotopia’ as ‘something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’ (Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics (Spring 1986): 22-7)” (118)
• PM involves “Discussions of the nature and utilization of space” (118).
• Mike Davis: analyses of LA in City of Quartz, Dayan Sudjic: analysis of “development of postmodern urban sprawls in 100 Mile City”; Sharon Zukin: “commodifying function of capital upon cities and inner-city gentrification in Landscape of Power”; “Regarded now as primarily representations or as imagined environments, cities need to be reconceived as new models and metaphors emerge in response to structural changes in the organization of capital” (118).
• Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space: “argues that space is the key component in the analysis of economic production” (119).
• “Lefebvre deconstructs the illusions of the naturalness and transparency of space and erects a typology of spatialities.” Demystifies and politicizes “the spatiality of social life is the critical nexus of contemporary retheorization” (Edwdard Soja, Regions in Context) (119)
• Consequence of PM “is a different and new sense of social subjectivity and ontology”; “Being, consciousness, and action are necessarily and contingently spatial, existing not simply ‘in’ space but ‘of’ space as well”; participation in the “social production of space, shaping and being shaped by a constantly evolving spatiality” (119).
• Soja: “whereas history has been construed in the past as disguising our ‘real’ relations, Soja argues that space ought to be subject to the same scrutiny: ‘We must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology’ (Soja, Postmodern Geography)” (119).
• Builds on previous PM ideas with “a focus on ‘real’ material space and ‘imagined’ representations of space, developing what he calls a ‘thirdspace’, a multiplicity of real-and-imagined places. Indeed, as early as the 1970s, Foucault was conceding the need for attention to geography and space in critical theory”; Foucault: “the organization of the carcel space of the body, which are so vital to surveillance techniques” (119).
• Modernism: “instrumental rationalization, standardization, and uniformity of space,” “a total annihilation of space” that “destroyed sensitive place-making and ignored human perspectives”; PM seeks “to reintroduce human sensibilities and human proportions into urban design” with “‘the return of the missing body’, an attempt to restore meaning, rootedness and human proportions to place in an era dominated by depersonalizing bulk and standardization” (120).
• Feminists: “Both Soja and Harvey are blind to the way in which gender constructs their conditions of postmodernity” (Massey, Space, Place and Gender) (121).
• Visual Arts are as follows:
• PM art “not so much a recognizable ‘school’ as a tendency which invades and infringes upon a wide range of art ‘isms’ and groups”; Arthur Danto calls it “post-historical” art, “referring to its practice to erase history” (125). Generally “art produced after the ‘death’ of modern art in the late 1960s” (125).
• Types: Pattern Painting: “against the puritanism of minimal and conceptual art”; Neo-expressionism: “a late 1970s and early 1980s ‘return’ to the more traditional art forms of painting and sculpture” “large, figurative and crudely executed, emphasizing the personal, imaginative, and subjective experience” (125); Neo-Geo: “a mid-1980s penchant for neo-geometric art, usually abstract and using dayglo colors, often parodying earlier movements”; New British Sculpture: “a synthesis of pop and kitsch, a bricolage (assemblage) of the decaying UK urban environment and the waste of consumer society”; Super-realism: “challenge the accuracy of photography in painting” (126).
• Against Clement Greenberg, who “championed and established the ideology of ‘Late Modern’ American painting, applauding its desire for purity, clarity, and order” saying it can “only rely on its characteristic features to determine what is unique and irreducible in painting: ’Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or part to anything not itself’” (126).
• Modernist color field abstractions: Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt. (126).
• Modernism: “task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every  effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art,” leaving “purity” which meant “self-definition” or “self-definition with a vengeance” (Greenberg, Modernist Painting) (126).
• PM reacting against modernist “obsession with a clinical purity of form and autonomous abstraction” so it was “a reintroduction of ornament, morals, allegories, and decoration into art”; “in form and content the postmodern condition of post-history and stylistic pluralism”; replacing sleek cubic forms “by natural substances, ongoing process, photographic images, language and art ‘happenings’ in real time. This disillusionment with the art object, with consumer culture and with the scientific pretence of objectivity” (126).
• Levin, Beyond Modernism: PM “uses memory, research, confession, fiction—with irony, whimsy, and disbelief… It is about identity and behavior” (126).
• Conceptual artists: “an emphasis on the work of art as an idea, attention to the critical function itself, and drawing attention to the languages which surround art objects and which mediate their meaning”; “a demystification of both process and content as a release from this romantic inwardness” of modernism and “an attack on the humanist and modernist conception of art as ‘expression,’ through strategies of pastiche and a critique of ‘originality’” (128).
• Paul Crowther: “critical postmodern art offers the sublime as an ‘affective jolt’ which has the effect of reawakening and rejuvenating our sense of being alive” with “a life-enhancing force in the midst of social monotony and accelerating standardization and reification.” “Deconstruction has opened up the instability of correspondence between concept and object. Crowther relates this to the sublime in the following way: if meaning is only producible within an unstable field, then the relation of self to work, and to its own understanding, is at best provisional. It is constantly being renegotiated and remade, as the overall field of meaning itself undergoes reconfiguration” (129).
• PM: “a systematic borrowing, an appropriation of images which looks back self-consciously to earlier art.” “‘Appropriation,’ like myth, is a distortion rather than a negation of prior semiotic images.” Artists are Craig Owens, Hal Foster, Douglas Crimp, and Benjamin Buchloh (129).
• Critic of PM: Donald Kuspit: senses “conservatism in postmodern art.” It doesn’t “embody and epitomize the experience of the object for the sake of the subject” but “overobjectifies art, reifying it until its subjective implications seem beside its visible point, its spectacular appearance. This is a kind of narcissistic self-assurance, as it were.” (130).
• Hal Foster: says both radical and reactionary axes in PM. Some like Jencks and Carlo Maria Mariani “who celebrate the cynical recycling of worn-out styles like neo-classicism.” The left-wing and feminist aspect deals “with political issues and critiques of various suffocating hegemonies like the art world, patriarchy, heterosexuality, and racism.” (131).
• Craig Owens: “return of allegory in recent art marks the advent of the post-modern: it creates an art which ‘no longer proclaims transcendence, but rather narrates its own contingency, insufficiency, lack of transcendence’”; principal thing: “its interrogation of the modernist emphasis on the artwork as self-sufficient and universal in its essence; and it contests the vestiges of Romantic expressivism in modernism, which privileges the formal and expressive over the discursive”; it “challenges the notion that the artwork is the coherent fusion of accurate empirical observation and the incisive expression of the perceptions and emotions of the artist who has a particularly heightened and penetrating intelligence.” PM “understands the artwork as produced by the network of inconsistent social structures and contradictory ideologies” (131).
• Allegory in PM art “sustains a mood of mystery and catastrophe in the work of artists such as Eric Fischl, Salle, Schnabel and Ron Kitaj.” Allegorical work is synthetic, “producing a ‘confusion of boundaries’” according to Owens (132).
• Owens: features “the appropriation of images” which “challenges the uniqueness of the art image”; site-specificity embeds “works firmly within a defined context, subverting the apparently timeless and universal persistence of a great painting within a prestigious gallery” and it’s “deliberately impermanent”; Transience or impermanence; agglomeration or accumulation; discursivity where “words are often treated as purely visual phenomena, while visual images are offered as script to be deciphered”; Hybridization which contravenes “the purity of the art object”  (133) like “sticking bits of broken crockery and other found objects onto his painted canvases”. “Owens presents allegory with a critical function, as it replaces the redemptive, purified, and organic concept of form with textuality and the arbitrariness of meaning as it exists in fragments” (133).
• Modern art was male-dominated. PM encourages “a redirection of artistic efforts into an aesthetics more specifically informed by identity and gender politics” for feminist art. (134).
• Fem artists “have been committed to interrogating and reworking the mass media stereotypes of femininity, exploring eroticism and sexuality as represented and perpetuated by masculine hegemonies, and contesting the dominant iconographies of women in art as sex objects of objectified spectacle. Feminist artists argue that sexuality is non-essentialist and that sexuality is a set of effects and positions” (135)
• Kelly’s Post-Partum Document in late 1970s: examines “conscious and subconscious struggles over femininity, ideas of motherhood and how a child enters language, or the symbolic realm” using “text in a combination with many other elements” “relies upon the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.” “Use of text demonstrates that no single narrative could account for the multiplicity of human experience, and that there is no single theoretical discourse to explain all forms of social relations and political praxis” (135).
• “In opening up the ontological question of what is real, it has deprived women of their history” by making feminism just one among a tangle of squabbling identities. (136).
• In 1980s, many “had to reassess their attitude to postmodernism” with “an increased awareness of identity politics within PM theory” (136).
• Can “feminist art escape the fate of being merely an additional category within a pluralist perspective”? (137)
• Photography: argued that its advent “marks the advent of PM itself” because it “most effectively exposes the notion of artistic ‘originality’ as a myth perpetuated by modern culture” (137).
• Uses “its technical processes to undercut and bring into question the mystique or sacred ‘halo’ which has surrounded art for hundreds of years.” It can “interrogate the issue of ‘authenticity’ and ‘origins’ in art” and “query the expressivity of the unique artefact” and “challenge the apparent neutrality of objective recording through its subjective framing perspective” (137).
• Sherman: “My ‘stills’ were about the fakeness of the role-playing as well as contempt for the domineering ‘male’ audience who would mistakenly read the image as ‘sexy’”. She draws “attention to the cultural construction of ‘femininity’ as a result of media manipulation” and “offers ‘types’ of women” to the gaze. She “interrogates the fantasy roles we play and of the selves we adopt.” Laura Mulvey says “her work represents the wordlessness and despair that ensues when a fetishistic structure, the means of erasing history and memory, collapse, leaving a void in its wake” (139).
• What about “Owens’ argument that since all quotation represents authority, postmodernist artistic citations are really a return of authoritarianism disguised as anti-authoritarianism?” Is it “being appropriated by a neo-conservatism which smuggles in a reaffirmation of conservative values within a rhetoric of renewal”? (139
• Key characteristics: combines “a number of different styles of art in one work” involves “return of the vernacular” has “unconstrained use of colors and shapes” lacks “any systematic approach” and “celebrates contradiction” and displays “ego” “in a narcissistic or exhibitionistic way” (140).
• Jean-Michel Basquita: “extremely exhibitionist, combining heterogeneous and vastly different influences, and pluralism is evident in every aspect of his work, from technique to materials” uses “poor-grade detritus from everyday life” “juxtaposing figurative and abstract elements with figures derived from cartoons, street graffiti, and African American jazz culture”; “suggests a perpetual struggle to articulate and clarify signs” with “a continual mutation of signs and meanings” (140).
• Basquiat’s interest is “appropriating different images and then sending them off in new and unusual directions” (141).
• “One can only deal with the existing fragment rather than any original whole” (142). It’s for the artist “who thinks that all he can do is draw from a bank of already-existing images and techniques” (142).
• Basquiat paintings: “coding, ironic distance, and eclecticism” which problematize “meaning through unresolved conflicts” (143).
• Barbara Kruger: her technique is “ ‘semiotic interference’: the images intercept codes that signify power, commodity status and gender identity, and then redirect them, interrogating the sites of the enunciation of the message and the politics of that discourse”; she uses “appropriated photographic images [which are] are overlaid with gender-laden slogans which call attention to the imbalance in western patriarchal power” (143).
• Also “assert a vigorous materialist critique of commodity capitalism” and reflect idea that “there is no unmediated access to the real” and that there is “power invested in the discourses surrounding these images which gives the representation its social impact” (144).
• Sculpture: “ ‘Natural’ forms, like land art, installations, performance art, and video and electronic media have come to the forefront and become highly politicized as a result”; Robert Morris says “that the forms utilized in contemporary three-dimensional work have ‘the feel and look of openness, extendability, accessibility, publicness, repeatability, equanimity, directness, immediacy” that disturbs modernists and trads who “long for access to an exclusive specialness, the experience of which reassures their superior perception” (146).
• PM sculpture is against sculpture “as a willful and expressive exploitation of malleable material” and for “a more passive view, predicated on a sense of achieved reconciliation with the world. This means the normal processes of weather, growth, ageing, and so on be admitted into the work, as necessary forming agencies in human culture” (146).
• Rosalind Krauss: says they follow Owen’s term of ‘site-specific’ development of land art concerned with “work of art as a total environment” (147).
• Land art: “involved digging and removing soil and stones, and the restructuring of a site into a symbolic form” like “Walking in a Line in Peru (1972) was the result of walking backwards and forwards along a plotted line until a path had been worn into the earth. By nature transient and temporary” (148).
• “Yet its very irrationality, with thought, labour and materials expended to make a temporary mark of no apparent significance, is a form of protest against the exploitation of people and materials, against the increasing demolition by which we recognize the modern city, and against the wanton destruction of nature by humans in search of their accumulative pleasures” (148).
• It’s a “structural transformation of the cultural field” of sculpture’ and it “resists assimilation by the dominant modernist concepts of sculpture”; ruptures “the siteless spatial aspirations of modernism—sculpture as loss of site, the monument as an abstraction—in a deconstructive behavior.” Exhibits “the rationale of space and mapping at the heart of the logic of PM” (149).
• Actual locale important because PM is concerned with the particular, the contingent.
• Installation and performance art: “offers viewers the opportunity to cowrite the ‘text’” and can “revive art as entertainment” (149).
• It derives “from Dada, ‘happenings’ and the alternative theatre of the 1960s, performance art appeared able to resist the commodification of art (it could not be easily bought and sold)” and allows “spectator’s freedom to construct and alter meanings” and is preoccupied with “narcissism, masochism, and sexuality” with “precedents in the work of Yves Klein” “Tending to be one-off occasions, performances are response to what are construed as society’s anaesthetization and alienation processes” (150).
• PM sculpture, plastic, and performance art has “an increasing interest in process and procedure as opposed to the finished artefact” (151).
• Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty with its spiral is described as “coming from nowhere, going nowhere, shattered, fractured, open and irreversible, a lexicon which clearly dovetails with the postmodern emphasis on multiplicity, open-endedness, fragmentation, and the absence of origins.” “It has been submerged since 1972,” and has ironically become more PM since because now it “relies entirely on discursive systems for its ‘existence’” (151).
• Joseph Beuys works give tell to the lie of “the ‘great artist,’ genius, innately born rather than trained” and “attempt to overcome the bifurcation of modern sensibility into thinking and feeling.” (153). See How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, a “mock-shamanistic ritual [that] appears to suggest a state of pre-civilized consciousness and a tragic sense of history with the impending disintentegration of Europe” (153).
• Carolee Schneeman: “interrogates the restrictions of traditional western categories by creating a space of complementarity and mutuality” (154).
• Her “explicit use of the body is also a direct challenge to the suppression of sexuality and somatic activity in the history of western culture, a seductive liberation of physical form from the hierarchical priority accorded to the mental process” (154).
• Creative design generally: “the design impulse was anti-functional and super-sensual. In a shift from function to expression, for Andrea Branzi, design was a way of constructing the self and forging one’s identity.” He writes: it is “recovering a system of ties and functions that cannot be explained in purely ergonomic or functional terms” anymore like modernism (156).
• Ettore Sottass: designs “depart from modernist clarity of form and static functionalism.” (157)
• His studios: “their cultivation of ‘bad taste’”; “postmodern designs are inclined towards restoration and historicism, whereas the ‘neo-modern’ Memphis is concerned with the present” (157).
• His work is like “extracts from a figurative iconography found in spaces uncorrupted by the sophistication of the standard culture of private design”; shows PM’s anti-elitism. (157)
• PM is “almost anything which is not a celebration of the inter-war ‘heroic period’ of modern architecture and design” with “reactions against pure ideas of ‘good form.’” Even employing modernist design self-consciously is PM: “modernist functionalism has itself become a style in its own right, as can be seen in recent designs for Braun shavers.” (158).
• How it translates to fashion is “not altogether straightforward.” Vivienne Westwood’s “designs drawn upon a rich visual syntax, generating a greater sense of freedom to express affinities with different ‘lifestyles’” (158).
• “In its preoccupation with surfaces, style has itself become the presiding rationale for postmodernism. The social or radical cultural politics of a subculture is rapidly undermined by the relentless commercialization of style, as it becomes an ‘off-the-peg’ option available at a variety of high-street retail shops. For example, punk was once regarded as the affirmation of the working-class urban reality of unemployment. However, it quickly became absorbed into mainstream culture and its outcry against the establishment was neutralized by the way in which ready-torn and slashed clothes appeared pervasively. Postmodern style is inevitably linked to big business” (159).
• Key characteristic: “ironic or parodic rearticulation of previous styles; a ‘sampling’ of elements of different styles or eras” and “anti-functional design features” (160).
• Hans Hollein, with his “sofa entitled ‘Marilyn’ in 1981 is an example.
• Pop Culture chapter as follows:
• PM challenges “modernism’s relentless hostility to mass culture” (164).
• Under PM, “popular culture became the expression of, as well as the construction of, youth culture and ultimately enabled the formation of sites of enunciation for a variety of ‘marginal’ groups” (164).
• Dick Hebdige: “Subcultures are both a play for attention and a refusal, once attention has been granted, to be read according to the Book” (164).
• “In their deliberately ambiguous and heterogenous situations—one might almost say in their deconstructive sites—subcultures appear to be characteristically postmodern phenomena”. Yes, there have always been cultures outside the “domains of hegemonic cultural practice,” but under PM its more pervasive and commoditized and fetishized. (164).
• Theorists Roland Barthes and Marxists like Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall took Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and applied him. Williams: ideology “seen to depend for its hold not only on its expression of the interest of a ruling class but also on its acceptance as ‘normal reality’ or ‘commonsense’ by those in practice subordinated to it” (165).
• “Hegemony seeks to explain how people are complicit with their own ideological construction: ideology works in and through us, forming our very identity and sense of self” so now it’s important to “‘read’ popular culture forms as the sites of political contests over language” (165).
• “Signs now took on increasing importance in the contemporary world, which caused people to pay new attention to the heterogenous surface activities of everyday life. A sensitivity to what is local, partial and temporary has demanded that the theorist pay closer attention to the complexities of mobile meanings, shifting connections, temporary encounters and the world of intertextual connections” (166).
• PM forces “away from the search for ‘immanent’ meaning in a text, towards the sociological interrelationship between images and different cultural forms and institutions.” (167)
• Angela McRobbie in Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994), “argues that postmodern theory opens up a more pluralistic vision of social practices than other theories hitherto” (167).
• She sees “postmodern popular culture as the site of ‘new agency’: as a way in which new pluralist forms of possible identity are being constructed, which often lie outside the traditional perspective on the formation of identity” (167).
• McRobbie: “The term, postmodernity, indicates something of the scope and the scale of the new global and local social relations and identities set up between individuals, groups, and populations as they interact with and are formed by the multiplicity of texts, images and representations which are a constitutive part of contemporary reality and experience” (167).
• She says: “postmodern culture: an embrace of pastiche, a defiant pleasure in being dressed up or ‘casual’, an exploration of fragmented subjectivity, the incursion of imagery and communication into areas and spaces hitherto considered private (Baudrillard’s ‘ecstasy of communication’), and the way one set of media practices become the reference points for another (how soap-opera characters form the basis for Saturday morning teenage phone-ins, etc.)” (168).
• Lawrence Grossberg: “Postmodernity demands that one live schizophrenically, trying on the one hand to live the inherited meanings and, on the other hand, recognizing that such meanings cannot enable one to respond to one’s affective situation” (168).
• Grossberg: “one of the dominant sensibilities put into place by popular culture is what I have called a ‘postmodern logic’ of ‘authentic inauthenticity.’ It legitimates and even privileges an ironic cynicism: You know you are faking it and you don’t care. Everything is an image and so you put on an image” (168).
• Ann Brooks says, “Drawing on the concepts of simulation, artifice, and ‘make-overs’, it has been pointed out how such Baudrillardian concepts may challenge the stability of gender as sexual difference and the normative edifice of heterosexuality” (169).
• Feminists: “Madonna’s images make a particularly clear strategic use of simulation, masquerade, and fantasy to prise open a crack in stable sexual identity and offer a sexual pluralism which does not reflect a political reactionism.” (170).
• Music as follows…
• “Dominic Strinati has argued that reggae, rap, house, and hip-hop all demonstrate the postmodern concern: ‘with collage, pastiche, and quotation, with the mixing of styles which remain musically distinctive, with the random and selective pasting together of different musics and styles, with the rejection of divisions between serious and fun music, and with the attack on the notion of rock as serious artistic music which merits the high cultural accolade of the respectful concert—a trend started by punk” (171)
• “His principle example is Jive Bunny and the Master Mixers” (171)
• Jon Stratton “perceives popular music to have three moments: the first is the period around 1954 and the formulation of rock and roll; the second is the years 1964-68, when pop music shifted from a working-class discourse to one which included the middle classes; the third is the emergence of postmodern pop music between 1975 and 1978, when punk, and postpunk plurality, ‘was integrated in its material practices within the coterminous concerns of so-called high cultural avant-garde’” (172).
• It’s “based on excess” (172).
• Terry Bloomfield: rock in the 1980s “endlessly plagiarizes and recycles 1960s styles in a (doomed) attempt to rekindle their original legitimacy” and has “auto-referentiality (referring back to the lyrics or styles of earlier bands in a parodic or ironic way)” (174).
• Cornel West: rap is: “a tremendous articulateness is syncopated with the African drumbeat, the African funk, into an American post-modernist product: there is no subject expressing originary anguish here but a fragmented subject, pulling form past and present, innovatively producing a heterogeneous product” (174).
• Prince’s high levels of irony in his new name, AFKAP- ‘The artist formerly known as prince’” a decentering of the artist (175).
• Some disagree and say stuff like “Britpop’s sound is its ‘modernist’ yearning (consider the nostalgic and evocative string introduction to Verve’s ‘Uban Symphony’ and Oasis’ Beatles-sound” (175).
• Also, pop “still seem to work with fairly traditional notions of authenticity and creativity” (176). Andrew Goodwin said this and the above point.
• “Cultural practices emerge in parallel with one another, often challenging each other’s cultural dominance” (177).
• “Sampling, rap, and sequencing” are a critique of “authenticity and creativity” and “a popular culture” “is local, partial and temporary” with “immediate participation and expendable criteria” (178).
• Hebdige analyzes David Byrnes video by Talking Heads called The Road to Nowhere (1984); points out it’s PM because of its “fascination with the play of signification, representational and generic codes” and “ironic humor” (178).
• Contemporary composers don’t want to talk about PM (179).
• Serialism, high point of modernism, came out of Second Viennese School of 1920s: “focused tightly on the organization of pitch, and might well be compared with Abstract Expressionism in visual art—where a highly rationalist and structuralist aesthetic which aspired to a pure, universal language of sound was developed” and it had a “total disdain for popular music, based as the latter is on a tonal system geared to harmony and melody”, and it was championed by Adorno (180).
• In US, Milton Babbit: “rationalism, determinism, and control stretched not only to pitch, but to all aspects of composition: rhythm, dynamics, timbre, etc.” (180).
• It “was increasingly becoming ‘research’ into the parameters of physical sounds” (181).
• John Cage: “introducing chance and indeterminate procedures” and “‘New Simplicity’” whose radical concept is “unfixing relationships, since all Post-Renaissance music has been concerned with fixing with increasing exactitude the relationships between sounds” (Michael Nyman). They turned to “anti-rationalist cosmologies (Cage and his penchant for Zen and eastern mysticism)” “often preserving only the briefest of notes to give the maximum interpretative room for manoeuvre during the performance” (182).
• “Cage proposed time as central to music and sound” and “non-cumulative, non-directional, static music, in which rhythm was cyclical, repetitive and, importantly, processual.” He “wanted a ‘purposeless music’” which is best illustrated in 4’33” (1952): “Rather than being simply a huge practical joke at the expense of the audience, 4’33” demonstrates that silence is non-existent, since there is a whole series of non-intentional sounds which permanently surround us; that they are worth attention, and that these ‘environmental’ sounds are just as aesthetically useful as the sounds produced by the world’s musical structures.” It’s not a negation of music but “an avowal of its universality” (182).
• PM music desires to “erase the hierarchical musical segregation of labour between the composer as creative authority, the performer as constrained interpreter, and the listener as passive receiver.” (183).
• PM reaction to serialism contains “a certain demasculinization of music from the male hegemony of serial modernism” and wants to have “a cyclical rather than hierarchical tonality” with no center it’s based around. Nyman says experimental music has “symmetrical rhythms (i.e. regular beats)” and other features that classical and modernist high music eschewed. It also has “the reintroduction of ornamentation and spectacle to music” and has these features: “stasis and a non-directional, non-dramatic, non-dynamic approach to musical structure” with no hierarchies, tension, transitions, relaxation, etc. (184).
• Another type is Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia which combines “musical allusions” and “readings from passages”, “where the past is present but impossible, while the present is ungraspable except as an anarchy of conflicting utterances” (Michael Chanan). (185).
• But does PM still have modernist baggage of “an idealized and untainted, non-commercial, authentic people’s music, and a disdain for the aesthetics and sites of commercial popular music”? (187).
• PM music is against “linear, cumulative, and teleological” and for “cyclical, repetitive, and static” as in John Cage’s tape collage, Fontana Mix (1958) (188).
• Philip Glass’s “resistance to inscribing a recognizable narrative and teleological progression in the music” (188).
• “Glass’s music attains length not through the classical musical patterns of evolution and development of material, but through repetition.” “Called mesmeric’ and ‘mystic,’ Glass’s music is perceived by some to be too static and rudimentary, although these qualities appear necessary to the Minimalist who wishes to direct his music towards a public which seeks withdrawal from the world.” (190).
• Glass: PM music “embodies itself without any mediation.” “Music must be listened to as pure sound-event, an act without dramatic structure” (Glass). He says he has “abandoned teleological elements, being left with mere duration and stasis, in a concentration of perception and physical being on the immediate moment and thus on particularity of place.” “A self-reflexive process which constantly generates its own shifting structure.” (190).
• Televisual realm as follows…
• Baudrillard: “late capitalist American society is dependent on televisual construction for its sense of social and cultural identity” (194).
• Frederic Jameson: “thesis of the ‘depthlessness’ of postmodern culture”; some say “TV has always been a ‘proto-postmodern’ medium” while others think there was an earlier “modern” phase (194).
• Baudrillard: “concept of the ‘simulacrum’ refers to the fact that ‘the ecstasy of communication’ in the postmodern era has caused ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ to coalesce (from “The Ecstasy of Communication” in Hal Foster’s Postmodern Culture). “Meaning has ‘imploded’ because of our intensive exposure to the mass media” therefore the statement that the Gulf War didn’t happen: “war was so mediated through the images constructed by the media” that all we got was “ a ‘simulation’ of the war, a war made with media condoms and the ‘televisual subterfuge’” so “what was really at stake was the very status of war itself”” (195).
• However, Christopher Norris disagreed and so Bau’s position leads to “there can be no appeal to a higher truth, nor can one get outside the discourse itself”; “Just because we live in a society where there are competing media narratives or claims does not make us foolish dupes, nor does it mean that soldiers and civilians did not die.” The difference is, “Baudrillard’s position offers a reality which is wholly constructed by signs and images with no outside referent, and Norris’s position argues that a knowledge of the real world which lies outside the discourse used to describe it is possible” (195).
• “Television commercials pull apart cultural signifiers of every kind and allow them to float around in a loose space, which Baudrillard calls hyperreality, where they attach themselves to commodities.” Commercials have gone from “moving from promoting the product directly to adverts which say less about the product and more about the cultural representations of the advertisement itself as opposed to its referential product.” (196).
• Michel Foucault: “TV and cinema act as an ‘effective means … of reprogramming popular memory’ in which ‘people are shown not what they were but what they must remember having been … Since memory is a very important factor in struggle … if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism’ (Focualt, Foucault Live (New York, Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 92)” (197).
• “PM television privileges the medium over the message, style over substance and form over content.” (197).
• Nicholas Abercrombie: “We are no longer able to perceive any difference between the image and the reality. For example, when we travel to the West Indies, we do not see the real islands, but the way they are mediated through advertisements for Bacardi, glamorous locations in James Bond movies, and so on. Consequently, we now live in an image-saturated society, in which the collapse of image and reality results in a ‘simulational culture’ (Baudrillard)” (198).
• “Contemporary societies are about creating an image, refining a look, presenting a style” (Abercrombie, Television and Society p. 38) (198).
• “The self referentiality of PM culture is evident in the way in which television feeds off itself, taking itself as material for its own programmes in chat shows and even news programmes” (198).
• “In the early days of television, producers made every effort to hide the cameras and the production equipment; now a series like Moonlighting can finish with the crew coming onto the set and dismantling the apparatus around the actors.” (198)
• John Fiske: “The fast editing, the dislocation of narrative sequence, the disruption of the diegesis may produce the sensation of fragmentariness, of images remaining signifiers, of the signifieds being not sold, but swamped, by the sensualities, of the physical uniqueness of experience rather than its meaning. Images are neither the bearers of ideology, nor the representations of the real, but what Baudrillard calls ‘the hyperreal”” and “their sensuous imperative is so strong that they are our experience, they are our pleasure” “The pleasure here is not in resisting ideology, nor in challenging it with a ‘better’ one, but in evading it, in liberating oneself from it” (Television Culture p. 260) (199).
• “Effectivity of TV is precisely the complex effects it generates by operating, in specific ways, on the line of in-difference” (Grossberg) it uses “irony, repetition and excess”; he echoes Deleuze and Guattari: “Rejecting the existential subject who has a simple unified identity that somehow exists in the same way in every practice, it proposed a subject that is constantly remade, reshaped as a mobilely situated set of vectors in a fluid context (In-Difference). (200).
• Arthur Kroker and David Cook: “It’s society as a mirror of television” with “social cohesion is provided by the pseudo-solidarities (pseudo-mediations) of electronic television images” and tv is the surrogate for sociality “as a result of the total collapse of social unity” which is why TV Soap operas are “all mainly about communities” which provide “a substitute neighborhood for their audiences” (202).
• “Music videos exemplify pastiche, a knowing appropriation of other audiovisual media right across the range, self-reflexive and ironic approaches in their portrayal of stars, and montage strategies with intertextual cross-referencing at all times” (204).
• Kaplan: “each textual element is undercut by others; narrative is undercut by pastiche; signifying is undercut by images that do not form a coherent chain; the text is ‘flattened out’; and the spectator is decentred, fixated on one particular image, and eager for the next video to give satisfaction” (206).
• Kaplan is optimistic: “the elision of boundaries is ‘an exhilarating move toward heteroglossia that calls into question moribund pieties of a now archaic humanism” (Rocking) (206).
• Andrew Goodwin: “Contrary to the postmodern literature on this topic, music television does not, generally speaking, indulge in a rupture with the Symbolic; nor does it defy our understanding or attempt to elude logic and rationality through its refusal to make sense. Far from constituting a radical break with the processes of meaning production, music television constantly reworks themes (work, school, authority, romance, poverty, and so on) that are deeply implicated in the question of how meaning serves (or resists) power” (Dancing) (208).
• Television as follows…
• “Yet upon its arrival in the early stages, although a modernist artifact, cinema was paradoxically more wedded to realism than modernism, as it held out the potential for reproducing reality with an incomparable exactitude” and “the evolution of a modernist cinema was a rejection of this seamless verisimilitude of realism” like “director John Cassavetes use to offer ‘close-up’ sound of a conversation in a scene too distant to hear realistically.” (209).
• “Modernist cinema included the work of the avant-garde (surrealist, counter-cinema and underground cinema), and explored and exposed the formal concerns of the medium by placing them at the forefront of consciousness. Modernist cinema questioned and made visible the meaning-production practices of film: It interrogated the technology it used, the power of its gaze, and its power to represent; and through an exploration of the plasticity of its spatial and temporal qualities, it turned the gaze of the camera back on itself as a critical tool, questioning how and what it represented. For example, this might manifest itself in a shot of a conversation without ‘cross-cutting’ so that the camera ‘whizzes’ from speaker to speaker.” (209)
• “Hence, in the light of these formal innovations, it might appear that cinema was always a ‘proto-postmodern’ form” (210).
• John Orr in Cinema and Modernity: “many of the characteristics of postmodernist film—pastiche, self-conscious narrative, game-playing, polyvalence—are no more than ‘neo-modern inventions’” (210).
• Tony Wilson: “To investigate the transparency of the image is modernist but to undermine its reference to reality is to engage with the aesthetics of postmodernism” (Reading the PM Image) (210).
• Frederic Jameson: “The great modernisms were… predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body. But this means that the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style (PM in Consumer Society) (210)
• “PM film departs from this by uncoupling style from the author-director, which opens up the arena for a plurality of styles and voices which circulate within a flattened, dehistoricised space” (210).
• James: “PM film is governed by ‘nostalgia’ or la mode retro (‘retrospective styling’), and he treats this as the PM cultural paradigm of film, ‘an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history’” (Jameson, PM) (211).
• Norman Denzin: PM film effaces boundaries between past and present, manifests the unpresentable and challenges boundary between private and public life, introduces wild sexuality and violence that is at once abhorrent and attractive, and emphasizes reality of unreal and hyperreal. David Lynch is the signature example (212).
• Denzin against PM movies: “Confronting this vision, it attempts to find safe regions of escape in the fantasies and nostalgia of the past. Dreams are the PM solution to life in the present.” (Cinematic). So these are “dangerous texts” and “ARE pop culture” leading to “a culture of indifference” whose “ideological logic is conservative to the core” (213).
• “To what extent are all films in some sense ‘postmodern’, in so far as they partake of similar stylistic features (jump cuts, montage, allusions to other genres, etc.)? Are films therefore only ‘postmodern’ as a consequence of the era in which they are made?” (214).
• Characteristics: “pastiche of other genres and styles”; flattening of history with ‘retro cinema and nostalgia, like Batman, Back to the Future, Goldeneye, and Indiana Jones; “self-reflexivity of technique” like “The Simpsons works with a knowing, ironic self-conscious referentiality, as when episodes introduce cartoon versions of real people into plot-lines, or when episodes are based upon famous American texts”; and “celebration of the collapse of the distinction between high and low cultural styles and techniques” like in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) (214).
• Jameson: “modernist film” has artist with “uniqueness of his or her personal idiom simultaneously of potency and alienated helplessness” but PM has “detachment from the concept of a powerful originating author” (216).
• Blade Runner: “this is a future built upon the detritus of a retrofitted past (our present)” and “qualitative or other distinctions between replicant and human are blurred and even effaced”; “film’s main investigation into what constitutes the identity of an authentic human” (218).
• Arthur and Marielouise Kroker: “body is no longer here: that it has been superseded by the new technology and by the decentering effects of post-Enlightenment philosophies”; Baudrillard, Battaille, and Deleuze and Guattari: “a body-without-organs’, which reveals that it has been processed by the media, and that we experience our bodies only as ‘fantastic simulacra of body rhetorics’” (Krokers) (218).
• “The posthuman body is a techno-body, a screen, a hybridized version of pluralities: a cyborg, a hybrid, a body-without-organs, a virtual body, a body-in-process” (219).
• “Cyborg is part of a feminist exploration of ways to restructure traditional gender oppositions; and as such, it features all the characteristics of partiality, hybridity, pastiche and playful irony one expects in models of postmodern subjectivity” (221)
• “In cyberspace I change myself as easily as I change my clothes. Identity becomes infinitely plastic in a play of images that knows no end. Consistency is no longer a virtue but becomes a vice; integration is limitation. With everything always shifting, everyone is no one” (Taylor and Saarinen, Imagologies) (222).
• “The popular fantasy is that cyberspace is the rhizomatic space of Deleuze and Guattari made concrete, where everything is connected to everything else, and where all trajectories are nomadic and rootless, and all space is deterritorialized” (222).
• “The social sciences have been intimately tied up with the Enlightenment and modernization, part of a massive attempt to demythologize society and to wrest it from the grip of the arbitrary power of church and monarchy, which based its legitimacy in theology. This has occurred through a rationalization of social structures, for example, by explaining the origins of social structures in terms of such things as economic competition and the establishment of power bases which protect privilege, rather than seeing them as ‘natural’ or ‘god-given’, and a differentiation of branches of knowledge into discrete disciplines, allowing humans to build up bodies of knowledge of specific areas in great detail” (227).
• Positivist approach: logicism, empirical verificationism, theory and observation distinction (“view that there is a strict separation between observations and theories, with observations being construed as theoretically neutral”; theory of causation, (“posit the existence of regularities in unobserved phenomena”) (227).
• Steve Smith: fallacies of positivist international relations: “concept of unified stance” “facts are considered to be unmediated by any theoretical framework” “empirical validation or falsification that is the stamp of ‘real’ inquiry” (Positivism and Beyond) (227).
• “In a nutshell, positivism believes that facts are out there waiting to be discovered and that the only reliable way to achieve this knowledge is to follow methods based on the natural sciences” (227).
• “Time and again science proved to be deeply entrammelled with the dynamics of social control and domination. The mode of natural science as a paradigm for knowledge began to be rejected because people increasingly saw it as part of a larger, corrupting, techno-scientific cultural imperative” (228).
• “PM social sciences appear to ‘locate’ meaning rather than ‘discover’ it” (228).
• “Jurisprudence interprets texts of law to discover their meaning and reason. PM critical theory reads all types of texts to discover their law” (Douzinas and Warrington, PM Jurisprudence) “Jurisprudence attempts to fabricate legal texts into a monological, seamless thread, in which authorized and uniform structures are endlessly invoked and repeated” (229).
• “Demystifying the positivist mentality of the neutrality of the law: Mary Joe Frug” and “Anthony Carty”: “In all cases, postmodern legal theorists are concerned to subvert the modernist notion of the law as a grand narrative of impartiality and objectivity, demonstrating that it is deeply imbricated in textual representations and linguistic rhetoric” (229).
• Against cultural anthropology: “Modernist organization interpretative model covertly embeds within it a monologic neo-colonial narrative of foreign cultures, which effectively protects authorial priority in the production of meaning”; all results from “One-way interpretation, which maintains a colonialist hierarchy of power in the interpretative model” (230).
• “PM anthropology opens up the contingency of cultural interpretation, raising questions like (a) who is speaking for any group’s identity and authenticity, (b) what are the essential elements or boundaries of any culture, and (c) how do ‘self’ and the ‘other’ clash in the encounters of interethnic relations?” (230).
• “Agreeing that the traditional concept of ‘exchange-value’ has been transformed into ‘sign-value’, and that signs float free of their referents, they read postmodern culture as the logical manifestation of capital as described by Marx, in which ‘all fast-fixed frozen relations melt into air’” (231).
• “Against the rigid job classifications, the mass form of assembly-line production system, the deskilled jobs and adversarial labour relations that characterize modernist/’Fordist’ business organization, postmodern organization theorists pose the alternative post-Fordist or Japanese ‘Fujitsuist’ structures, of workforce participation schemes, production centered upon team co-operation, flexible, niche markets and a multiskilled labor force” (232).
• “A critical debate which frequently occurs in education is the extent to which pedagogical practices are neutral in terms of their theoretical underpinnings: the extent to which teaching is a matter of possessing skills and tools. PM pedagogy is a search for practices which enact a democratic use of knowledge, texts and cultural practices” (233).
• Cultural studies (Henry Giroux): “Language is no longer treated as a technical and expressive device, but as a site of social contestation in which historical and contingent practices actively engage in the formation, production, organization and circulation of texts and institutional powers” (233).
• History: rethought “in terms of a series of ruptures and displacements” (233).
• Peter McLaren: pedagogy. He “criticizes Enlightenment epistemology and economic liberalism in favor of a ‘new socialist imaginary grounded not in specific forms of rationality but in forms of detotalized agency and the expansion of the sphere of radical democracy to new forms of social life’” (234).
• “There is no sustained postmodern economic theory” (234).
• John Haldane: “if relativism is true then social science is impossible” (Cultural Theory, Philosophy, and the Study of Human Affairs) (235).
• Social Psychology as follows…
• Modernist version: “It argued for the existence of a basic, knowable subject matter of psychology, it believed in universal psychological processes, it held to the view that method was a guarantee of truth, it was convinced that research was progressive, it was behaviorist as well as humanist.” “Some have argued that PM social psychology is a move from modernist positivism to an interpretative, value-constituting science; that it is an acknowledgment that subjectivity is decentred and multi-sited; and that what was previously held to be an autonomous agent of power is now dispersed into anonymous fields of language structures and matrices of power relations” (235).
• Foucauldian: postmodern social psychology is “deliberately self-reflexive about its own truth-claims and hence eschewing any universalist, totalizing perspective, discourse analysis in psychology draws attention to the discursive construction of the subject’s own theoretical position. In other words, the power relationships in which the psychologist finds himself or herself with regard to the object of analysis, the nature of the terminology used in carrying out and reporting the experiments, and the methods of experimentation themselves, all now become part of the experimental research. Discourse analysis struggles to resist the closure of much social psychology, and corrodes the truth-claims of other supposedly scientific ‘discoveries,’ drawing attention to the power invested in certain lines of inquiry” (236).
• “Ian Parker notes: ‘Discourse analysis can be put to progressive uses, but only because we also hold to narratives about progress which are more important than social psychology’ (Discourse Discourse)” (237).
• John “Shotter argues that psychology has to move from the modernist paradigm of a detached, theory-testing observer to a ‘postmodern’, involved, participatory engager: ‘a shift from a way of knowing by “looking at” to a way of knowing by being “in contact, or in touch with” … the adoption of an involved rather than an external, uninvolved standpoint”; “a shift away from individuals’ thought processes to a focus on the social environment and what this ‘allows’ or ‘permits’” (238).
• International theory as follows…
• Realist theorists: “the positivist stance espouses the positions that there are universal laws which govern social behavior and that these are objectively discernible through empirical investigation” (240).
• They believed “that there are universal human characteristics and that these are unchanging qualities” (240).
• Says “there can be no room for moral values, in a state’s pursuit of power. For a rational state’s interest is inevitably power, and for Morgenthau, this principle is universally valid” (241).
• “It is not difficult to see how the logic of this theory of the international system leads inevitably to the escalation of military power and a political confrontation like the Cold War, in which a precarious ‘balance of power’ existed between the great powers and their alliances (i.e., NATO and the ‘Eastern bloc’)” (241).
• “Can Realism actually be conceived of in the singular, or are there realisms?” (243)
• Does not Morgenthau’s argument ignore the power politics between domestic institutions?” (243)
• James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics): say there’s “emerging consensus among the contributors that there is a need to question the fallacies and aporiae (or sites of acute textual indeterminacy of self-contradiction) of rationalist empiricism that has held sway for so long in the field” (244).
• Also from it: “an intertextual strategy attempts to understand the placement and displacement of theories, how one theory comes to stand above and silence other theories, but also how theory as a knowledge practice has been historically and often arbitrarily separated from ‘events,’ that is, the materially inspired practices comprising the international society” (244).
• “Much of this position derives from Derridean theories of ‘textual supplementarility.’ This means that no text stands alone, since something always has to be added to it in order for meaning to be constructed. Consequently, all texts are constantly gesturing or drawing attention to their ‘margins’ or their peripheral contexts. Der Derian’s postmodern conviction is that politics also does not lie behind text, but is intrinsic to the way they are structured and written. The reality of power politics is not divorced from its representations, but is constituted and inscribed in them. Consequently, Der Derian contests the Realist’s separation of the subject from the object of knowledge, as well as the ‘pure’ autonomy of the ‘discipline’ of international relations (IR) theory” (244).
• “Postmodern theorists of IR have studied the ‘intertexts’ of contemporary politics: the relationship between events and their textual representation” (245).
• RBJ Walker says “‘Inside’ is regarded as the sphere of steady electoral politics, while the ‘outside’ is construed as the disturbance of politics.” And Walker is “concerned to deconstruct this illusory dichotomy and move beyond state sovereignty” (246).
• “PM theorists are just as interested (if not more so) in the power invested in the different discourses of IR as a discipline (itself establishing an inside/outside hierarchy) as they are in the power invested in the world political stage: ‘Theories of international relations are more interesting as aspects of contemporary world politics that need to be explained than as explanations of contemporary world politics’” (246).
• PM IR theorists “sensitize theory to the importance and functions of paradox and ambiguity in political life” and raise “awareness of the implications of constructs of race, gender, ethnicity, nativity, exile, needs and rights in practices of statecraft; but with a painstaking attention to the difficulties, dangers, and paradoxes involved in any attempt to theorize and speak a radical alterity” (247).
• And they “reinterpret and restructure traditional practices of international law and diplomacy, which have hitherto taken for granted stable communities and fixed identities” (247).
• “To what degree does the postmodernist attack on the ideals of the Enlightenment, particularly the concept of rationality as an emancipatory mechanism, disable the subject as agent in politics? Can the anti-foundationalist and relativist postmodernist position accommodate the notion of political dialogue between ethical subjects, especially if it regards subjectivity as merely the effect of textual representation?” (248)
• Conclusion of the book as follows…
• “In its escape from what it perceived as the logical excesses of rationality, postmodernism can be seen to be an intellectual recoil from Hiroshima and the Holocaust, and these in turn were understood as the end to which western civilization was doomed, of which the effects of the regimentation and standardization of consciousness in the assembly line, the Somme and Guernica were but the fatal phantoms” (253).
• Hal Foster “aims at a mode of inquiry that continually disrupts the structures of intelligibility that provide both individual and collective identities for persons and communities, as well as the assumptions of social order within which people are defined and confined” (253).
• “Conservatives advocated a ‘return’ to representation, which they understood as an intimate correlation between the existence of things and the techniques of expressing them. More radical forms of postmodernism, such as poststructuralism, shunned this mimetic or verificationist approach to representation, and have concentrated upon the spheres of power and authority invested in various modes of representation. This has meant that discourses are scrutinized for being resistant or complicit with the predominant forms of intelligibility. The difficulty occurs in deciding whether such analytical consciousness can operate without the aid of the benefit of metanarrative critiques.” “Society needs to work out a form of cultural analysis which can yoke the positive elements of an ambivalent cultural politics with a narrative of greater freedoms, of greater self-reflexivity about our situations within cultural and economic power, and of greater social responsibility” (254).
• Patterns: “history is taken as a crucial site of debate and contest” and “the body has never simply been one’s own: yet now, under highly technologically proficient and efficient mechanisms, it is scrutinized, surveilled, regularized, sanitized and corralled by systems and forces in ways hitherto unparalleled” (255).
• “The radical nature of postmodernism is its production of new spaces, e.g. an atrium, which is space as spectacle (an atrium isn’t much use, even for promenading)” (255).
• “People have begun to theorize the disappearance of the world and the appearance of the word and image” (255).
• Tony Blair (Guardian, 27 May 1996): “The spirit of the times has changed beyond recognition since 1964. The totalizing ideologies of left and right no longer hold much purchase” (256).
• “This appears to be a rhetoric of political capitulation rather than political initiative. It signals a retreat from the notion that politicians and people can change the world” (256).
• “Roughly in the mid-1970s,” “it shows postmodernism declining as a serious contender for the historical periodization of culture during the last twenty-five years of the millennium, as it appears to be losing much of its intellectual kudos and power in some disciplines (literature, cultural theory). On the other hand, it is quite clearly becoming a major issue in other disciplines (international relations theory, history, some of the social sciences), as positivism and modernist scientism lose their hold” (257).