The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Fredric Jameson
from
Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991.
The last few years have been
marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future,
catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or
that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of
Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken
together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called
postmodernism.
The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end
of the 1950s or the early 1960s.
As the word itself
suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or
extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or
aesthetic repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism
in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the
great auteurs,
or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the
works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary
flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them.
The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and
heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the
"new expressionism"; the moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the
synthesis of classical and "popular" styles found in composers like
Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and
the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more recent and
rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard, and experimental
cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which
more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the
French nouveau roman and its succession, on the other, along with alarming new
kinds of literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of textuality or
ecriture . . . The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply
any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion
changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic
innovation? [In other words, how "post" is it?]
It is in the realm of
architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically
visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised
and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own
conception of postmodernism -- as it will be outlined in the following pages --
initially began to emerge. More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist
positions in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of
architectural high modernism and of Frank Lloyd Wright or the so-called international
style (Le Corbusier, Mies, etc), where formal
criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building
into a virtual sculpture, or monumental "duck;" as Robert Venturi
puts it)1 are at one with reconsiderations
on the level of urbanism and of the aesthetic institution. High modernism is
thus credited with the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and
its older neighborhood culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new
Utopian high-modernist building from its surrounding context), while the
prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly
identified in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.
Postmodernism in
architecture will then logically enough stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi's influential
manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate
this populist rhetoric,2 it has at least the merit of
drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms
enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially
high-modernist) frontier between high culture
and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds
of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture
industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from
Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt
School. The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this
whole "degraded" landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's
Digest culture,
of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of
so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic
and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science
fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply "quote;" as
a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.
Nor should the break in
question be thought of as a purely cultural affair: indeed, theories of the
postmodern -- whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion
and denunciation -- bear a strong family resemblance to all those more
ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us
the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most
famously baptized "postindustrial society" (Daniel Bell) but often
also designated consumer society, media society, information society,
electronic society or high tech, and the like. Such theories have the obvious
ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social
formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely,
the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle.
The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with the
signal exception of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomize
the historic originality of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or
moment in the evolution of capital) but also to demonstrate that it is, if
anything, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it.
I will return to this argument later; suffice it for the moment to anticipate a
point that will be argued in chapter 2, namely, that every position on
postmodernism in culture -- whether apologia or stigmatization -- is also at
one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance
on the nature of multinational capitalism today.
[Forestalling
concerns about teleology, historical "periodization", and linear
history.] A last
preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as stylistic
description, as
the account of one cultural style or movement among others. I have rather
meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of
historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed. I have
argued elsewhere that all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always
involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodization; in any
case, the conception of the "genealogy" largely lays to rest
traditional theoretical worries about so-called linear history, theories of
"stages;" and teleological historiography. In the present context, however,
lengthier theoretical discussion of such (very real) issues can perhaps be
replaced by a few substantive remarks.
One of the concerns
frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate
difference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive
homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable chronological metamorphoses
and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me
essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the
presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate,
features.
Consider, for example,
the powerful alternative position that post-modernism is itself little more
than one more stage of modernism proper (if not, indeed, of the even older
romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all the features of postmodernism
I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding
modernism (including such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude
Stein, Raymond Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright
postmodernists, avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account by this view,
however, is the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its
passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for
whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant,
obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally "antisocial."
It will be argued here, however, that a mutation in the sphere of culture has
rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer
ugly; they now strike us, on the whole, as rather "realistic," and
this is the result of a canonization and academic institutionalization of the
modern movement generally that can be traced to the late 1950s. [A bit
of an exaggeration, I'd say.] This is surely one of the most plausible
explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger
generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern
movement as a set of dead classics, which "weigh like a nightmare on the
brains of the living;" as Marx once said in a different context. As for
the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed
that its own offensive features -- from obscurity and sexually explicit
material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political
defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most
extreme moments of high modernism -- no longer scandalize anyone and are not
only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become
institutionalized and are at one with the official or public culture of Western
society.
What has happened is
that aesthetic production today has become
integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of
producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to
airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly
essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.
Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of
institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants
to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively
to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has
a virtually unmediated relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to
find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage
of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly
contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even
deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of
this or that individual project. Yet this is the point at which I must remind
the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American,
postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole
new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout
class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.
The first point to be
made about the conception of periodization in dominance, therefore, is that even
if all the constitutive features of post-modernism were identical with and
coterminous to those of an older modernism -- a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous
but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel -- the
two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social
function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the
economic system of late capital and, beyond that, to the transformation of the very
sphere of culture in contemporary society.
[The danger of
homogenizing the heterogenous.] This point will be further discussed at the conclusion of
this book. I must now briefly address a different kind of objection to
periodization, a concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, one
most often expressed by the Left. And it is certain that there is a strange
quasi-Sartrean irony -- a "winner loses" logic -- which tends to
surround any effort to describe a "system;" a totalizing dynamic, as
these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is
that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic --
the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example -- the more powerless
the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by
constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree
he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the
impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social
transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of
the model itself.
I have felt, however,
that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic
or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could he measured and assessed. I am
very far from feeling that all cultural production today is
"postmodern" in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term.
The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of
cultural impulses -- what Raymond Williams has usefully termed
"residual" and "emergent" forms of cultural production --
must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant,
then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random
difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is
undecidable. At any rate, this has been the political spirit in which the
following analysis was devised: to project some conception of a new systematic
cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the
most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today.
[The central
features of the postmodern.] The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive
features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which
finds its prolongation both in contemporary "theory" and in a whole
new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our
relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality,
whose "schizophrenic" structure (following Lacan) will determine new
types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole
new type of emotional ground tone -- what I will call "intensities" -- which can best be grasped
by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships
of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world
system; and, after a brief account of postmodernist mutations in the lived
experience of built space itself, some reflections on the mission of
political art in
the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital.
I
We will begin with one of
the canonical works of high modernism in visual art, Van Gogh's well-known painting of the peasant shoes, an example which, as you can imagine, has not
been innocently or randomly chosen. I want to propose two ways of reading this
painting, both of which in some fashion reconstruct the reception of the work
in a two-stage or double-level process.
I first want to suggest
that if this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer
decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of
which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation -- which has vanished into the
past -- is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object,
a reified end product impossible to grasp as a symbolic act in its own right,
as praxis and as production.
This last term suggests
that one way of reconstructing the initial situation to which the work is
somehow a response is by stressing the raw materials, the initial content,
which it confronts and reworks, transforms, and appropriates. In Van Gogh
that content, those initial raw materials, are, I will suggest, to be grasped
simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural
poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a
world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state.
Fruit trees in this world
are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; the people of the
village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque
typology of basic human feature types. How is it, then, that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of color, while his village stereotypes
are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green? I will briefly
suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent
transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious
materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture,
an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the
senses, or at least of that supreme sense -- sight, the visual, the eye --
which it now reconstitutes for us as a semiautonomous space in its own right, a
part of some new division of labor in the body of capital, some new
fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations
and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely
such
fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them.
There is, to be sure, a
second reading of Van Gogh which can hardly be ignored when we gaze at this
particular painting, and that is Heidegger's central analysis in Der
Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, which is organized around the idea that the work of art emerges
within the gap between Earth and World, or what I would prefer to translate as
the meaningless materiality of the body and nature and the meaning endowment of
history and of the social. We will return to that particular gap or rift later on; suffice it
here to recall some of the famous phrases that model the process whereby these
henceforth illustrious peasant shoes slowly re-create about themselves the
whole missing object world which was once their lived context. "In them;"
says Heidegger, "there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet
gift of ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation
of the wintry field." "This equipment," he goes on,
"belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. .
. . Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of
peasant shoes, is in truth. . . . This entity emerges into the unconcealment of
its being;"3 by way of the mediation of the
work of art, which draws the whole absent world and earth into revelation
around itself, along with the heavy tread of the peasant woman, the loneliness
of the field path, the hut in the clearing, the worn and broken instruments of
labor in the furrows and at the hearth Heidegger's account needs to be
completed by insistence on the renewed materiality of the work, on the
transformation of one form of materiality -- the earth itself and its paths and
physical objects -- into that other materiality of oil paint affirmed and
foregrounded in its own right and for its own visual pleasures, but nonetheless
it has a satisfying plausibility.
At any rate, both
readings may be described as hermeneutical, in the sense in which the work in
its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or symptom for some vaster reality
which replaces it as its ultimate truth. Now we need to look at some shoes of a
different kind, and it is pleasant to be able to draw for such an image on the
recent work of the central figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol's
Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the
immediacy of Van Gogh's footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not
really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the
viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a museum corridor or gallery with
all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object. Or the level of the
content, we have to do with what are now far more clearly fetishes, in both the
Freudian and the Marxian senses (Derrida remarks, somewhere, about the
Heideggerian Paar Bauernschuhe, that the Van Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair,
which allows neither for perversion nor for fetishization). Here, however, we
have a random collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so
many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life world as the pile of shoes left
over from Auschwitz or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and
tragic fire in a packed dance hall. There is therefore in Warhol no way to
complete the hermeneutic gesture and restore to these oddments that whole
larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion
or glamour magazines. Yet this is even more paradoxical in the light of
biographical information: Warhol began his artistic career as a commercial
illustrator for shoe fashions and a designer of display windows in which
various pumps and slippers figured prominently. Indeed, one is tempted to raise
here -- far too prematurely -- one of the central issues about postmodernism
itself and its possible political dimensions: Andy Warhol's work in fact turns
centrally around commodification, and the great billboard images of the
Coca-Cola bottle or the Campbell's soup can, which explicitly foreground the
commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and
critical political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want
to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously
about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period
of late capital.
But there are some other
significant differences between the high-modernist and the postmodernist
moment, between the shoes of Van Gogh and the shoes of Andy Warhol, on which we
must now very briefly dwell. The first and most evident is the emergence of
a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new
kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal
feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of
other contexts. Then we must surely come to terms with the role of
photography and the photographic negative in contemporary art of this kind; and it is this, indeed, which
confers its deathly quality to the Warhol image, whose glacéd X-ray elegance
mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have
nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the
level of content. It is indeed as though we had here to do with the inversion
of Van Gogh's Utopian gesture: in the earlier work a stricken world is by some
Nietzschean fiat and act of the will transformed into the stridency of Utopian
color. Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and colored surface
of things -- debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to
glossy advertising images -- has been stripped away to reveal the deathly
black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them.
Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in
certain of Warhol's pieces, most notably the traffic
accidents
or the electric chair series, this is not, I think, a
matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the
object world itself -- now become a set of texts or simulacra
-- and in the disposition of the subject.
All of which brings me to
a third feature to be developed here, what I will call the waning of affect in postmodern culture. Of course, it would be
inaccurate to suggest that all affect, all feeling or emotion, all
subjectivity, has vanished from the newer image. Indeed, there is a kind of
return of the repressed in Diamond Dust Shoes, a strange, compensatory,
decorative exhilaration, explicitly designated by the title itself, which is,
of course, the glitter of gold dust, the spangling of gilt sand that seals the
surface of the painting and yet continues to glint at us. Think, however, of
Rimbaud's magical flowers "that look back at you," or of the august
premonitory eye flashes of Rilke's archaic Greek torso which warn the bourgeois
subject to change his life; nothing of that sort here in the gratuitous
frivolity of this final decorative overlay. In an interesting review of the
Italian version of this essay,4 Remo Ceserani expands this foot
fetishism into a fourfold image which adds to the gaping "modernist"
expressivity of the Van Gogh-Heidegger shoes the "realist" pathos of Walker
Evans and
James Agee (strange that pathos should thus require a team!); while what looked
like a random assortment of yesteryear's fashions in Warhol takes on, in
Magritte,
the carnal reality of the human member itself, now more phantasmic than the
leather it is printed on. Magritte, unique among the surrealists, survived the
sea change from the modern to its sequel, becoming in the process something of
a postmodern emblem: the uncanny, Lacanian foreclusion, without expression. The
ideal schizophrenic, indeed, is easy enough to please provided only an eternal
present is thrust before the eyes, which gaze with equal fascination on an old shoe
or the tenaciously growing organic mystery of the human toenail. Ceserani
thereby deserves a semiotic cube of his own:
The waning of affect is,
however, perhaps best initially approached by way of the human figure, and it
is obvious that what we have said about the commodification of objects holds as
strongly for Warhol's human subjects: stars -- like Marilyn Monroe -- who are themselves commodified and transformed into
their own images. And here too a certain brutal return to the older period of
high modernism offers a dramatic shorthand parable of the transformation in
question. Edward Munch's painting The Scream is, of course, a canonical
expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude,
social fragmentation, and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what
used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read as an embodiment not
merely of the expression of that kind of affect but, even more, as a virtual
deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to have
dominated much of what we call high modernism but to have vanished away -- for
both practical and theoretical reasons -- in the world of the postmodern. The
very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation within the
subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside, of
the wordless pain within the monad and the moment in which, often
cathartically, that "emotion" is then projected out and externalized,
as gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of
inward feeling.
This is perhaps the
moment to say something about contemporary theory, which has, among other
things, been committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very
hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside and of stigmatizing such models
as ideological and metaphysical. But what is today called contemporary theory
-- or better still, theoretical discourse -- is also, I want to argue, itself
very precisely a postmodernist phenomenon. It would therefore be inconsistent
to defend the truth of its theoretical insights in a situation in which the
very concept of "truth" itself is part of the metaphysical baggage
which poststructuralism seeks to abandon. What we can at least suggest is that
the poststructuralist critique of the hermeneutic, of what I will shortly call the depth model, is useful for us as a very
significant symptom of the very postmodernist culture which is our subject
here.
Overhastily, we can say
that besides the hermeneutic model of inside and outside which Munch's painting
develops, at least four other fundamental depth models have generally been repudiated in
contemporary theory:
(1) the dialectical one of essence and appearance (along with a whole range of
concepts of ideology or false consciousness which tend to accompany it);
(2) the Freudian model of latent and manifest, or of repression (which is, of
course, the target of Michel Foucault's programmatic and symptomatic pamphlet La
Volante de savoir
[The History of Sexuality]);
(3) the existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity whose heroic or tragic thematics
are closely related to that other great opposition between alienation and
disalienation, itself equally a casualty of the poststructural or postmodern
period; and
(4) most recently, the great semiotic opposition between signifier
and signified,
which was itself rapidly unraveled and deconstructed during its brief heyday in
the 1960s and 1970s.
What replaces these
various depth models is for the most part a conception of practices,
discourses, and textual play, whose new syntagmatic structures we will examine later
on; let it suffice now to observe that here too depth is replaced by surface,
or by multiple surfaces (what is often called intertextuality
is in that sense no longer a matter of depth).
Nor is this depthlessness
merely metaphorical: it can be experienced physically and "literally"
by anyone who, mounting what used to be Raymond Chandler's Bunker Hill from the
great Chicano markets on Broadway and Fourth Street in downtown Los Angeles,
suddenly confronts the great free-standing wall of Wells
Fargo Court
(Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) -- a surface which seems to be unsupported by
any volume, or whose putative volume (rectangular? trapezoidal?) is ocularly
quite undecidable. This great sheet of windows, with its gravity-defying
two-dimensionality, momentarily transforms the solid ground on which we stand
into the contents of a stereopticon, pasteboard shapes profiling themselves
here and there around us. The visual effect is the same from all sides: as
fateful as the great monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 which confronts its viewers like
an enigmatic destiny, a call to evolutionary mutation. If this new
multinational downtown effectively abolished the older ruined city fabric which
is violently replaced, cannot something similar be said about the way in which
this strange new surface in its own peremptory way renders our older systems of
perception of the city somehow archaic and aimless, without offering another in
their place?
Returning now for one
last moment to Munch's painting, it seems evident that The Scream subtly but elaborately
disconnects its own aesthetic of expression, all the while remaining imprisoned
within it. Its gestural content already underscores its own failure, since the
realm of the sonorous, the cry, the raw vibrations of the human throat, are
incompatible with its medium (something underscored within the work by the
homunculus's lack of ears). Yet the absent scream returns, as it were, in a
dialectic of loops and spirals, circling ever more closely toward that even
more absent experience of atrocious solitude and anxiety which the scream was
itself to "express." Such loops inscribe themselves on the painted
surface in the form of those great concentric circles in which sonorous
vibration becomes ultimately visible, as on the surface of a sheet of water, in
an infinite regress which fans out from the sufferer to become the very
geography of a universe in which pain itself now speaks and vibrates through
the material sunset and landscape. The visible world now becomes the wall of
the monad on which this "scream running through nature" (Munch's
words)5 is recorded and transcribed: one
thinks of that character of Lautreamont who, growing up inside a sealed and
silent membrane, ruptures it with his own scream on catching sight of the
monstrousness of the deity and thereby rejoins the world of sound and
suffering.
All of which suggests
some more general historical hypothesis: namely, that concepts such as anxiety
and alienation (and the experiences to which they correspond, as in The
Scream)
are no longer appropriate in the world of the postmodern. The great Warhol figures --
Marilyn herself or Edie Sedgewick -- the notorious cases of burnout and
self-destruction of the ending 1960s, and the great dominant experiences of
drugs and schizophrenia, would seem to have little enough in common any more
either with the hysterics and neurotics of Freud's own day or with those
canonical experiences of radical isolation and solitude, anomie, private
revolt, Van Gogh-type madness, which dominated the period of high modernism. This
shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology can be characterized as one in
which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the
latter's fragmentation. [Okay, fine…but why would
fragmentation, in itself, rule out anxiety? Cannot the split subject, in fact,
be seen as a source of anxiety in itself?]
Such terms inevitably
recall one of the more fashionable themes in contemporary theory, that of the
"death" of the subject itself -- the end of the autonomous bourgeois
monad or ego or individual -- and the accompanying stress, whether as some new
moral ideal or as empirical description, on the decentering of that formerly centered subject
or psyche. (Of the two possible formulations of this notion -- the historicist
one, that a once-existing centered subject, in the period of classical
capitalism and the nuclear family, has today in the world of organizational
bureaucracy dissolved; and the more radical poststructuralist position, for
which such a subject never existed in the first place but constituted something
like an ideological mirage -- I obviously incline toward the former; the latter
must in any case take into account something like a "reality of the
appearance.")
We must however add that
the problem of expression is itself closely linked to some conception of the
subject as a monad-like container, within which things felt are then expressed
by projection outward. What we must now stress, however, is the degree to
which the high-modernist conception of a unique style, along with the accompanying
collective ideals of an artistic or political vanguard or avant-garde,
themselves stand or fall along with that older notion (or experience) of the
so-called centered subject. [Why is this essential?]
Here too Munch's painting
stands as a complex reflection on this complicated situation: it shows us that
expression requires the category of the individual monad, but it also shows us
the heavy price to be paid for that precondition, dramatizing the unhappy
paradox that when you constitute your individual subjectivity as a
self-sufficient field and a closed realm, you thereby shut yourself off from
everything else and condemn yourself to the mindless solitude of the monad,
buried alive and condemned to a prison cell without egress.
Postmodernism presumably
signals the end of this dilemma, which it replaces with a new one. The end
of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the
psychopathologies of that ego -- what I have been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more -- the end,
for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of
the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy
of mechanical reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in
contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also
mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other
kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the
feeling. This is
not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid
of feeling, but rather that such feelings -- which it may be better and more
accurate, following J.-F. Lyotard, to call "intensities"
-- are now free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar
kind of euphoria, a matter to which we will want to return later on.
The waning of affect, however, might also have been
characterized, in
the narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of the great high
modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of duree and memory (something to be
understood fully as much as a category of the literary criticism associated
with high modernism as with the works themselves). We have often been told,
however, that we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I
think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic
experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space
rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high
modernism.6
II
The disappearance of the
individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing
unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice
today of what may be called pastiche.
This concept, which we owe to Thomas Mann (in Doktor Faustus), who owed it in turn to Adorno's
great work on the two paths of advanced musical experimentation (Schoenberg's
innovative planification and Stravinsky's irrational eclecticism), is to be
sharply distinguished from the more readily received idea of parody.
To be sure, parody found
a fertile area in the idiosyncrasies of the moderns and their
"inimitable" styles: the Faulknerian long sentence, for example, with
its breathless gerundives; Lawrentian nature imagery punctuated by testy
colloquialism; Wallace Stevens's inveterate hypostasis of nonsubstantive parts
of speech ("the intricate evasions of as"); the fateful (but finally
predictable) swoops in Mahler from high orchestral pathos into village
accordion sentiment; Heidegger's meditative-solemn practice of the false
etymology as a mode of "proof" . . . All these strike one as somehow
characteristic, insofar as they ostentatiously deviate from a norm which then
reasserts itself, in a not necessarily unfriendly way, by a systematic mimicry
of their willful eccentricities.
Yet in the dialectical
leap from quantity to quality, the explosion of modern literature into a host
of distinct private styles and mannerisms has been followed by a linguistic
fragmentation of social life itself to the point where the norm itself is
eclipsed: reduced to a neutral and reified media speech (far enough from the
Utopian aspirations of the inventors of Esperanto or Basic English), which
itself then becomes but one more idiolect among many. Modernist styles thereby
become postmodernist codes. And that the stupendous proliferation of social
codes today into professional and disciplinary jargons (but also into the
badges of affirmation of ethnic, gender, race, religious, and class-factional
adhesion) is also a political phenomenon, the problem of micropolitics
sufficiently demonstrates. If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant
(or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries
today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm.
Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain
our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are
henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world
reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the
unavailability of the older national language itself.
In this situation parody
finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new thing
pastiche slowly comes to take its place. Pastiche
is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style,
the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a
neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives,
amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that
alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy
linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind
eyeballs: it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original
modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth
calls the "stable ironies" of the eighteenth century.
It would therefore begin
to seem that Adorno's prophetic diagnosis has been realized, albeit in a
negative way: not Schönberg (the sterility of whose achieved system he already
glimpsed) but Stravinsky is the true precursor of postmodern cultural
production. For with the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of style --
what is as unique and unmistakable as your own fingerprints, as incomparable as
your own body (the very source, for an early Roland Barthes, of stylistic
invention and innovation) -- the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but
to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and
voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.
This situation evidently
determines what the architecture historians call "historicism," namely, the random
cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic
allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy
of the "neo." This omnipresence of pastiche is not incompatible with a certain
humor, however, nor is it innocent of all passion: it is at the least
compatible with addiction -- with a whole historically original consumer's
appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for
pseudo-events and "spectacles" (the term of the situationists). It is
for such objects that we may reserve Plato's conception of the
"simulacrum," the identical copy for which no original has ever
existed. Appropriately enough, the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a
society where exchange value has been generalized to the point at which the
very memory of use value is effaced, a society of which Guy Debord has
observed, in an extraordinary phrase, that in it "the image has become the
final form of commodity reification" (The Society of the Spectacle).
The new spatial logic of
the simulacrum can now be expected to have a momentous effect on what used to
be historical time. The past is thereby itself modified: what was once, in the
historical novel as Lukacs defines it, the organic genealogy of the bourgeois
collective project -- what is still, for the redemptive historiography of an E.
P Thompson or of American "oral history," for the resurrection of the
dead of anonymous and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension
indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future -- has
meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous
photographic simulacrum. Guy Debord's powerful slogan is now even more apt for
the "prehistory" of a society bereft of all historicity, one whose
own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles. In faithful
conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as "referent"
finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with
nothing but texts.
Yet it should not be
thought that this process is accompanied by indifference: on the contrary, the
remarkable current intensification of an addiction to the photographic image is
itself a tangible symptom of an omnipresent, omnivorous, and well-nigh
libidinal historicism. As I have already observed, the architects use this
(exceedingly polysemous) word for the complacent eclecticism of postmodern
architecture, which randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes
all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating
ensembles. Nostalgia does not strike one as an altogether satisfactory word for
such fascination (particularly when one thinks of the pain of a properly
modernist nostalgia with a past beyond all but aesthetic retrieval), yet it
directs our attention to what is a culturally far more generalized
manifestation of the process in commercial art and taste, namely the so-called
nostalgia film (or what the French call la mode retro).
Nostalgia films
restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and
social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now
refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of
the generation. The inaugural film of this new aesthetic discourse, George
Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), set out to recapture, as so many films have
attempted since, the henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era;
and one tends to feel, that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the
privileged lost object of desire7 -- not merely the stability and
prosperity of a pax Americana but also the first naive innocence of the countercultural
impulses of early rock and roll and youth gangs (Coppola's Rumble Fish will then be the contemporary
dirge that laments their passing, itself, however, still contradictorily filmed
in genuine nostalgia film style). With this initial breakthrough, other
generational periods open up for aesthetic colonization: as witness the stylistic
recuperation of the American and the Italian 1930s, in Polanski's Chinatown and Bertolucci's Il Conformista, respectively. More interesting,
and more problematical, are the ultimate attempts, through this new discourse,
to lay siege either to our own present and immediate past or to a more distant
history that escapes individual existential memory.
Faced with these ultimate
objects -- our social, historical, and existential present, and the past as
"referent" -- the incompatibility of a postmodernist
"nostalgia" art language with genuine historicity becomes
dramatically apparent. The contradiction propels this mode, however, into
complex and interesting new formal inventiveness; it being understood that the
nostalgia film was never a matter of some old-fashioned
"representation" of historical content, but instead approached the
"past" through stylistic connotation, conveying "pastness"
by the glossy qualities of the image, and "1930s-ness" or
"1950s-ness" by the attributes of fashion (in that following the
prescription of the Barthes of Mythologies, who saw connotation as the purveying of imaginary
and stereotypical idealities: "Sinité," for example, as some
Disney-EPCOT "concept" of China).
The insensible
colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode can be observed in Lawrence
Kasdan's elegant film Body Heat, a distant "affluent society" remake of James
M. Cain's Double Indemnity, set in a contemporary Florida small town a few hours'
drive from Miami. The word remake is, however, anachronistic to the degree to which our
awareness of the preexistence of other versions (previous films of the novel as
well as the novel itself) is now a constitutive and essential part of the
film's structure: we are now, in other words, in "intertextuality" as a deliberate, built-in
feature of the aesthetic effect and as the operator of a new connotation of
"pastness" and pseudohistorical depth, in which the history of
aesthetic styles displaces "real" history.
Yet from the outset a
whole battery of aesthetic signs begin to distance the officially contemporary
image from us in time: the art deco scripting of the credits, for example,
serves at once to program the spectator to the appropriate
"nostalgia" mode of reception (art deco quotation has much the same function
in contemporary architecture, as in Toronto's remarkable Eaton Centre).8 Meanwhile, a somewhat different
play of connotations is activated by complex (but purely formal) allusions to
the institution of the star system itself. The protagonist, William Hurt, is
one of a new generation of film "stars" whose status is markedly
distinct from that of the preceding generation of male superstars, such as
Steve McQueen or Jack Nicholson (or even, more distantly, Brando), let alone of
earlier moments in the evolution of the institution of the star. The
immediately preceding generation projected their various roles through and by
way of their well-known off-screen personalities, which often connoted
rebellion and nonconformism. The latest generation of starring actors continues
to assure the conventional functions of stardom (most notably sexuality) but in
the utter absence of "personality" in the older sense, and with
something of the anonymity of character acting (which in actors like Hurt
reaches virtuoso proportions, yet of a very different kind than the virtuosity
of the older Brando or Olivier). This "death of the subject" in the
institution of the star now, however, opens up the possibility of a play of historical
allusions to much older roles -- in this case to those associated with Clark
Gable -- so that the very style of the acting can now also serve as a
"connotator" of the past.
Finally, the setting has
been strategically framed, with great ingenuity, to eschew most of the signals
that normally convey the contemporaneity of the United States in its
multinational era: the small-town setting allows the camera to elude the
high-rise landscape of the 1970s and 1980s (even though a key episode in the
narrative involves the fatal destruction of older buildings by land
speculators), while the object world of the present day -- artifacts and
appliances, whose styling would at once serve to date the image -- is
elaborately edited out. Everything in the film, therefore, conspires to blur
its official contemporaneity and make it possible for the viewer to receive the
narrative as though it were set in some eternal thirties, beyond real historical
time. This approach to the present by way of the art language of the
simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present
reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a
glossy mirage. Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an
elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility
of experiencing history in some active way. It cannot therefore be said to
produce this strange occultation of the present by its own formal power, but
rather merely to demonstrate, through these inner contradictions, the enormity
of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning
representations of our own current experience.
As for "real
history" itself -- the traditional object, however it may be defined, of
what used to be the historical novel -- it will be more revealing now to turn
back to that older form and medium and to read its postmodern fate in the work
of one of the few serious and innovative leftist novelists at work in the
United States today, whose books are nourished with history in the more
traditional sense and seem, so far, to stake out successive generational
moments in the "epic" of American history, between which they
alternate. E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime gives itself officially as a panorama of the first two
decades of the century (like World's Fair); his most recent novel, Billy Bathgate, like Loon Lake addresses the thirties and the
Great Depression, while The Book of Daniel holds up before us, in painful juxtaposition, the
two great moments of the Old Left and the New Left, of thirties and forties
communism and the radicalism of the 1960s (even his early western may be said
to fit into this scheme and to designate in a less articulated and formally self-conscious
way the end of the frontier of the late nineteenth century).
The Book of Daniel is not the only one of these five
major historical novels to establish an explicit narrative link between the
reader's and the writer's present and the older historical reality that is the
subject of the work; the astonishing last page of Loon Lake, which I will not disclose, also
does this in a very different way; it is a matter of some interest to note that
the first version of Ragtime9 positions us explicitly in our
own present, in the novelist's house in New Rochelle, New York, which at once
becomes the scene of its own (imaginary) past in the 1900s. This detail has
been suppressed from the published text, symbolically cutting its moorings and
freeing the novel to float in some new world of past historical time whose
relationship to us is problematical indeed. The authenticity of the gesture,
however, may be measured by the evident existential fact of life that there no
longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American history we
learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current multinational,
high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life.
A crisis in historicity,
however, inscribes itself symptomatically in several other curious formal
features within this text. Its official subject is the transition from a
pre-World War I radical and working-class politics (the great strikes) to the
technological invention and new commodity production of the 1920s (the rise of
Hollywood and of the image as commodity): the interpolated version of Kleist's Michael
Kohlhaas, the
strange, tragic episode of the black protagonist's revolt, may be thought of as
a moment related to this process. That Ragtime has political content and even
something like a political "meaning" seems in any case obvious and
has been expertly articulated by Linda Hutcheon in terms of
its
three paralleled families: the Anglo-American establishment one and the
marginal immigrant European and American black ones. The novel's action
disperses the center of the first and moves the margins into the multiple
"centers" of the narrative, in a formal allegory of the social
demographics of urban America. In addition, there is an extended critique of
American democratic ideals through the presentation of class conflict rooted in
capitalist property and moneyed power. The black Coalhouse, the white Houdini,
the immigrant Tateh are all working class, and because of this -- not in spite
of it -- all can therefore work to create new aesthetic forms (ragtime,
vaudeville, movies).10
But this does everything
but the essential, lending the novel an admirable thematic coherence few
readers can have experienced in parsing the lines of a verbal object held too
close to the eyes to fall into these perspectives. Hutcheon is, of course,
absolutely right, and this is what the novel would have meant had it not been a
postmodern artifact. For one thing, the objects of representation, ostensibly
narrative characters, are incommensurable and, as it were, of incomparable
substances, like oil and water -- Houdini being a historical figure, Tateh a
fictional one, and Coalhouse an intertextual one -- something very difficult
for an interpretive comparison of this kind to register. Meanwhile, the theme
attributed to the novel also demands a somewhat different kind of scrutiny,
since it can be rephrased into a classic version of the Left's "experience
of defeat" in the twentieth century, namely, the proposition that the
depolitization of the workers' movement is attributable to the media or culture
generally (what
she here calls "new aesthetic forms"). This is, indeed, in my
opinion, something like the elegiac backdrop, if not the meaning, of Ragtime, and perhaps of Doctorow's work
in general; but then we need another way of describing the novel as something
like an unconscious expression and associative exploration of this left doxa,
this historical opinion or quasi-vision in the mind's eye of "objective
spirit." What such a description would want to register is the paradox
that a seemingly realistic novel like Ragtime is in reality a
nonrepresentational work that combines fantasy signifiers from a variety of
ideologemes in a kind of hologram.
My point, however, is not
some hypothesis as to the thematic coherence of this decentered narrative but
rather just the opposite, namely, the way in which the kind of reading this
novel imposes makes it virtually impossible for us to reach and thematize those
official "subjects" which float above the text but cannot be
integrated into our reading of the sentences. In that sense, the novel not only
resists interpretation, it is organized systematically and formally to
short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpretation which it
perpetually holds out and withdraws. When we remember that the theoretical
critique and repudiation of interpretation as such is a fundamental component
of poststructuralist theory, it is difficult not to conclude that Doctorow has
somehow deliberately built this very tension, this very contradiction, into the
flow of his sentences.
The book is crowded with
real historical figures -- from Teddy Roosevelt to Emma Goldman, from Harry K.
Thaw and Stanford White to J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford, not to mention
the more central role of Houdini -- who interact with a fictive family, simply
designated as Father, Mother, Older Brother, and so forth. All historical
novels, beginning with those of Sir Walter Scott himself, no doubt in one way
or another involve a mobilization of previous historical knowledge generally
acquired through the schoolbook history manuals devised for whatever
legitimizing purpose by this or that national tradition -- thereafter
instituting a narrative dialectic between what we already "know"
about The Pretender, say, and what he is then seen to be concretely in the
pages of the novel. But Doctorow's procedure seems much more extreme than this;
and I would argue that the designation of both types of characters --
historical names and capitalized family roles -- operates powerfully and
systematically to reify all these characters and to make it impossible for us
to receive their representation without the prior interception of already
acquired knowledge or doxa -- something which lends the text an extraordinary
sense of deja vu
and a peculiar familiarity one is tempted to associate with Freud's
"return of the repressed" in "The Uncanny" rather than with
any solid historiographic formation on the reader's part.
Meanwhile, the sentences
in which all this is happening have their own specificity, allowing us more
concretely to distinguish the moderns' elaboration of a personal style from
this new kind of linguistic innovation, which is no longer personal at all but
has its family kinship rather with what Barthes long ago called "white
writing." In this particular novel, Doctorow has imposed upon himself a
rigorous principle of selection in which only simple declarative sentences
(predominantly mobilized by the verb "to be") are received. The
effect is, however, not really one of the condescending simplification and
symbolic carefulness of children's literature, but rather something more
disturbing, the sense of some profound subterranean violence done to American
English, which cannot, however, be detected empirically in any of the perfectly
grammatical sentences with which this work is formed. Yet other more visible
technical "innovations" may supply a clue to what is happening in the
language of Ragtime: it is, for example, well known that the source of many of the
characteristic effects of Camus's novel The Stranger can be traced back to that
author's willful decision to substitute, throughout, the French tense of the passe
compose for the
other past tenses more normally employed in narration in that language.11 I suggest that it is as if
something of that sort were at work here: as though Doctorow had set out
systematically to produce the effect or the equivalent, in his language, of a
verbal past tense we do not possess in English, namely, the French preterite
(or passe simple),
whose "perfective" movement, as Emile Benveniste taught us, serves to
separate events from the present of enunciation and to transform the stream of
time and action into so many finished, complete, and isolated punctual event
objects which find themselves sundered from any present situation (even that of
the act of story telling or enunciation).
E. L. Doctorow is the
epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past, of the suppression
of older traditions and moments of the American radical tradition: no one with
left sympathies can read these splendid novels without a poignant distress that
is an authentic way of confronting our own current political dilemmas in the
present. What is culturally interesting, however, is that he has had to convey
this great theme formally (since the waning of the content is very precisely
his subject) and, more than that, has had to elaborate his work by way of that
very cultural logic of the postmodern which is itself the mark and symptom of
his dilemma. Loon Lake much more obviously deploys the strategies of the pastiche (most
notably in its reinvention of Dos Passos); but Ragtime remains the most peculiar and stunning
monument to the aesthetic situation engendered by the disappearance of the
historical referent. This historical novel can no longer set out to represent
the historical past; it can only "represent" our ideas and
stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes "pop
history"). Cultural production is thereby driven back inside a mental
space which is no longer that of the old monadic subject but rather that of
some degraded collective "objective spirit": it can no longer gaze
directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history
which was once itself a present; rather, as in Plato's cave, it must trace our
mental images of that past upon its confining walls. If there is any realism
left here, it is a "realism" that is meant to derive from the shock
of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original
historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our
own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out
of reach.
III
The crisis in
historicity now dictates a return, in a new way, to the question of temporal
organization in general in the postmodern force field, and indeed, to the
problem of the form that time, temporality, and the syntagmatic will be able to
take in a culture increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic. If, indeed, the subject has lost
its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the
temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience,
it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a
subject could result in anything but "heaps of fragments" and in a
practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory. These
are, however, very precisely some of the privileged terms in which
postmodernist cultural production has been analyzed (and even defended, by its
own apologists). They are, however, still privative features; the more
substantive formulations bear such names as textuality, ecriture, or schizophrenic writing, and it
is to these that we must now briefly turn.
I have found Lacan's
account of schizophrenia useful here not
because I have any way of knowing whether it has clinical accuracy but chiefly
because -- as description rather than diagnosis -- it seems to me to offer a
suggestive aesthetic model.12 I am obviously very far from
thinking that any of the most significant postmodernist artists -- Cage,
Ashbery, Sollers, Robert Wilson, Ishmael Reed, Michael Snow, Warhol, or even
Beckett himself -- are schizophrenics in any clinical sense. Nor is the point
some culture-and-personality diagnosis of our society and its art, as in
psychologizing and moralizing culture critiques of the type of Christopher Lasch's
influential The Culture of Narcissism, from which I am concerned to distance the spirit and the
methodology of the present remarks: there are, one would think, far more
damaging things to be said about our social system than are available through
the use of psychological categories.
Very briefly, Lacan
describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the
interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or
a meaning. I must
omit the familial or more orthodox psychoanalytic background to this situation,
which Lacan transcodes into language by describing the Oedipal rivalry in terms
not so much of the biological individual who is your rival for the mother's
attention but rather of what he calls the Name-of-the-Father, paternal
authority now considered as a linguistic function.13 His conception of the signifying
chain essentially presupposes one of the basic principles (and one of the great
discoveries) of Saussurean structuralism, namely, the proposition that meaning
is not a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified, between the
materiality of language, between a word or a name, and its referent or concept.
Meaning on the new view is generated by the movement from signifier to
signifier. What we generally call the signified -- the meaning or conceptual
content of an utterance -- is now rather to be seen as a meaning-effect, as that objective mirage of
signification generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers among
themselves. When
that relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap,
then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated
signifiers. The connection between this kind of linguistic malfunction and
the psyche of the schizophrenic may then be grasped by way of a twofold
proposition:
first,
that personal identity is
itself the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with
one's present;
and,
second,
that such active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still of the sentence,
as it moves along its hermeneutic circle through time.
If we are unable to unify
the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to
unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or
psychic life. With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the
schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in
other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. We will want to
ask questions about the aesthetic or cultural results of such a situation in a
moment; let us first see what it feels like:
I
remember very well the day it happened. We were staying in the country and I
had gone for a walk alone as I did now and then. Suddenly, as I was passing the
school, I heard a German song; the children were having a singing lesson. I
stopped to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling came over me, a
feeling hard to analyze but akin to something I was to know too well later -- a
disturbing sense of unreality. It seemed to me that I no longer recognized the
school, it had become as large as a barracks; the singing children were
prisoners, compelled to sing. It was as though the school and the children's
song were set apart from the rest of the world. At the same time my eye
encountered a field of wheat whose limits I could not see. The yellow vastness,
dazzling in the sun, bound up with the song of the children imprisoned in the
smooth stone school-barracks, filled me with such anxiety that I broke into
sobs. I ran home to our garden and began to play "to make things seem as
they usually were," that is, to return to reality. It was the first
appearance of those elements which were always present in later sensations of
unreality: illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness
of material things.14
In our present context,
this experience suggests the following: first, the breakdown of temporality
suddenly releases this present of time from all the activities and
intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis; thereby
isolated, that present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable
vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively
dramatizes the power of the material -- or better still, the literal --
signifier in isolation. This present of the world or material signifier comes
before the subject with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect,
here described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which
one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an
intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity.
What happens in
textuality or schizophrenic art is strikingly illuminated by such clinical
accounts, although in the cultural text, the isolated signifier is no longer an
enigmatic state of the world or an incomprehensible yet mesmerizing fragment of
language but rather something closer to a sentence in free-standing isolation.
Think, for example, of the experience of John Cage's music, in which a cluster
of material sounds (on the prepared piano, for example) is followed by a
silence so intolerable that you cannot imagine another sonorous chord coming
into existence and cannot imagine remembering the previous one well enough to
make any connection with it if it does. Some of Beckett's narratives are also
of this order, most notably Watt, where a primacy of the present sentence in time
ruthlessly disintegrates the narrative fabric that attempts to reform around
it. My example, however, will be a less somber one, a text by a younger San
Francisco poet whose group or school -- so-called Language Poetry or the New
Sentence -- seem to have adopted schizophrenic fragmentation as their
fundamental aesthetic.
China
We
live on the third world from the sun. Number three. Nobody
tells us what to do.
The
people who taught us to count were being very kind.
It's
always time to leave.
If
it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don't.
The
wind blows your hat off.
The
sun rises also. I'd rather the stars didn't describe us to each other; I'd
rather we do it for ourselves.
Run
in front of your shadow.
A
sister who points to the sky at least once a decade is a
good sister.
The
landscape is motorized.
The
train takes you where it goes.
Bridges
among water.
Folks
straggling along vast stretches of concrete, heading
into the plane.
Don't
forget what your hat and shoes will look like when you
are nowhere to be found.
Even
the words floating in air make blue shadows.
If
it tastes good we eat it.
The
leaves are falling. Point things out.
Pick
up the right things.
Hey
guess what? What?
I've learned how to talk. Great.
The
person whose head was incomplete burst into tears.
As
it fell, what could the doll do? Nothing.
Go
to sleep.
You
look great in shorts. And the flag looks great too.
Everyone
enjoyed the explosions.
Time
to wake up.
But
better get used to dreams.
Bob
Perelman15
Many things could be said
about this interesting exercise in discontinuities; not the least paradoxical
is the reemergence here across these disjoined sentences of some more unified
global meaning. Indeed, insofar as this is in some curious and secret way a
political poem, it does seem to capture something of the excitement of the
immense, unfinished social experiment of the New China -- unparalleled in world
history -- the unexpected emergence, between the two superpowers, of
"number three", the freshness of a whole new object world produced by
human beings in some new control over their collective destiny; the signal
event, above all, of a collectivity which has become a new "subject of
history" and which, after the long subjection of feudalism and
imperialism, again speaks in its own voice, for itself, as though for the first
time.
But I mainly wanted to
show the way in which what I have been calling schizophrenic disjunction or ecriture, when it becomes generalized as a
cultural style, ceases to entertain a necessary relationship to the morbid
content we associate with terms like schizophrenia and becomes available for
more joyous intensities, for precisely that euphoria which we saw displacing
the older affects of anxiety and alienation.
Consider, for example,
Jean-Paul Sartre's account of a similar tendency in Flaubert:
His
sentence [Sartre tells us about Flaubert] closes in on the object, seizes it,
immobilizes it, and breaks its back, wraps itself around it, changes into stone
and petrifies its object along with itself. It is blind and deaf, bloodless,
not a breath of life; a deep silence separates it from the sentence which
follows; it falls into the void, eternally, and drags its prey down into that
infinite fall. Any reality, once described, is struck off the inventory.16
I am tempted to see this
reading as a kind of optical illusion (or photographic enlargement) of an
unwittingly genealogical type, in which certain latent or subordinate, properly
postmodernist, features of Flaubert's style are anachronistically foregrounded.
However, it affords an interesting lesson in periodization and in the
dialectical restructuring of cultural dominants and subordinates. For these
features, in Flaubert, were symptoms and strategies in that whole posthumous
life and resentment of praxis which is denounced (with increasing sympathy)
throughout the three thousand pages of Sartre's Family Idiot. When such features become
themselves the cultural norm, they shed all such forms of negative affect and
become available for other, more decorative uses.
But we have not yet fully
exhausted the structural secrets of Perelman's poem, which turns out to have
little enough to do with that referent called China. The author has, in fact,
related how, strolling through Chinatown, he came across a book of photographs
whose idiogrammatic captions remained a dead letter to him (or perhaps, one
should say, a material signifier). The sentences of the poem in question are
then Perelman's own captions to those pictures, their referents another image,
another absent text; and the unity of the poem is no longer to be found within
its language but outside itself, in the bound unity of another, absent book.
There is here a striking parallel to the dynamics of so-called photorealism,
which looked like a return to representation and figuration after the long
hegemony of the aesthetics of abstraction until it became clear that their
objects were not to be found in the "real world" either but were
themselves photographs of that real world, this last now transformed into images,
of which the "realism" of the photorealist painting is now the
simulacrum.
This account of
schizophrenia and temporal organization might, however, have been formulated in
a different way, which brings us back to Heidegger's notion of a gap or rift
between Earth and World, albeit in a fashion that is sharply incompatible with
the tone and high seriousness of his own philosophy. I would like to
characterize the postmodernist experience of form with what will seem, I hope,
a paradoxical slogan: namely, the proposition that "difference
relates." Our own recent criticism, from Macherey on, has been concerned
to stress the heterogeneity and profound discontinuities of the work of art, no
longer unified or organic, but now a virtual grab bag or lumber room of disjoined
subsystems and random raw materials and impulses of all kinds. The former work
of art, in other words, has now turned out to be a text, whose reading proceeds
by differentiation rather than by unification. Theories of difference, however,
have tended to stress disjunction to the point at which the materials of the
text, including its words and sentences, tend to fall apart into random and
inert passivity, into a set of elements which entertain separations from one
another.
In the most interesting postmodernist
works, however, one can detect a more positive conception of relationship,
which restores its proper tension to the notion of difference itself. This new
mode of relationship through difference may sometimes be an achieved new and
original way of thinking and perceiving; more often it takes the form of an
impossible imperative to achieve that new mutation in what can perhaps no
longer be called consciousness. I believe that the most striking emblem of this
new mode of thinking relationships can be found in the work of Nam June Paik,
whose stacked or scattered television screens, positioned at intervals within
lush vegetation, or winking down at us from a ceiling of strange new video
stars, recapitulate over and over again prearranged sequences or loops of
images which return at dyssynchronous moments on the various screens. The older
aesthetic is then practiced by viewers, who, bewildered by this discontinuous
variety, decided to concentrate on a single screen, as though the relatively
worthless image sequence to be followed there had some organic value in its own
right. The postmodernist viewer, however, is called upon to do the impossible,
namely, to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference;
such a viewer is asked to follow the evolutionary mutation of David Bowie in The
Man Who Fell to Earth
(who watches fifty-seven television screens simultaneously) and to rise somehow
to a level at which the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of
itself a new mode of grasping what used to be called relationship: something
for which the word collage is still only a very feeble name.
IV
Now we need to complete
this exploratory account of postmodernist space and time with a final analysis
of that euphoria or those intensities which seem so often to characterize the
newer cultural experience. Let us reemphasize the enormity of a transition which
leaves behind it the desolation of Hopper's buildings or the stark Midwest syntax of
Sheeler's forms, replacing them with the extraordinary surfaces of the photorealist
cityscape, where even the automobile wrecks gleam with some new hallucinatory
splendor. The exhilaration of these new surfaces is all the more paradoxical in
that their essential content -- the city itself -- has deteriorated or
disintegrated to a degree surely still inconceivable in the early years of the
twentieth century, let alone in the previous era. How urban squalor can be a
delight to the eyes when expressed in commodification, and how an unparalleled
quantum leap in the alienation of daily life in the city can now be experienced
in the form of a strange new hallucinatory exhilaration -- these are some of
the questions that confront us in this moment of our inquiry. Nor should the
human figure be exempted from investigation, although it seems clear that for
the newer aesthetic the representation of space itself has come to be felt as
incompatible with the representation of the body: a kind of aesthetic division
of labor far more pronounced than in any of the earlier generic conceptions of
landscape, and a most ominous symptom indeed. The privileged space of the newer
art is radically antianthropomorphic, as in the empty bathrooms of Doug Bond's
work. The ultimate contemporary fetishization of the human body, however, takes
a very different direction in the statues of Duane Hanson ["Museum
Guard"]
["Tourist II"]: what I have already called the
simulacrum, whose peculiar function lies in what Sartre would have called the derealization
of the whole
surrounding world of everyday reality. Your moment of doubt and hesitation as
to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures, in other words, tends to
return upon the real human beings moving about you in the museum and to
transform them also for the briefest instant into so many dead and
flesh-colored simulacra in their own right. The world thereby momentarily loses
its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a
rush of filmic images without density. But is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating
experience?
It has proved fruitful to
think of such experiences in terms of what Susan Sontag, in an influential
statement, isolated as "camp." I propose a somewhat different
cross-light on it, drawing on the equally fashionable current theme of the
"sublime," as it has been rediscovered in the works of Edmund Burke
and Kant; or perhaps one might want to yoke the two notions together in the
form of something like a camp or "hysterical" sublime. The sublime
was for Burke an experience bordering on terror, the fitful glimpse, in
astonishment, stupor, and awe, of what was so enormous as to crush human life
altogether: a description then refined by Kant to include the question of
representation itself, so that the object of the sublime becomes not only a
matter of sheer power and of the physical incommensurability of the human
organism with Nature but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity of
the human mind to give representation to such enormous forces. Such forces
Burke, in his historical moment at the dawn of the modern bourgeois state, was
only able to conceptualize in terms of the divine, while even Heidegger
continues to entertain a phantasmatic relationship with some organic
precapitalist peasant landscape and village society, which is the final form of
the image of Nature in our own time.
Today, however, it may be
possible to think all this in a different way, at the moment of a radical
eclipse of Nature itself: Heidegger's "field path" is, after all,
irredeemably and irrevocably destroyed by late capital, by the green
revolution, by neocolonialism and the megalopolis, which runs its superhighways
over the older fields and vacant lots and turns Heidegger's "house of
being" into condominiums, if not the most miserable unheated, rat-infested
tenement buildings. The other of our society is in that sense no longer Nature
at all, as it was in precapitalist societies, but something else which we must
now identify.
I am anxious that this
other thing not overhastily be grasped as technology per se, since I will want
to show that technology is here itself a figure for something else. Yet
technology may well serve as adequate shorthand to designate that enormous
properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labor stored up in our
machinery -- an alienated power, what Sartre calls the counterfinality of the
practico -- inert, which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms
and seems to constitute the massive dystopian horizon of our collective as well
as our individual praxis.
Technological development
is however on the Marxist view the result of the development of capital rather
than some ultimately determining instance in its own right. It will therefore
be appropriate to distinguish several generations of machine power, several stages
of technological revolution within capital itself. I here follow Ernest Mandel,
who outlines three such fundamental breaks or quantum leaps in the evolution of
machinery under capital:
The
fundamental revolutions in power technology -- the technology of the production
of motive machines by machines -- thus appears as the determinant moment in
revolutions of technology as a whole. Machine production of steam-driven motors
since 1848; machine production of electric and combustion motors since the 90s
of the 19th century; machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered
apparatuses since the 40s of the 20th century -- these are the three general
revolutions in technology engendered by the capitalist mode of production since
the "original" industrial revolution of the later 18th century.17
This periodization
underscores the general thesis of Mandel's book Late Capitalism; namely, that there have been
three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion
over the previous stage. These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called
postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital. I have already pointed
out that Mandel's intervention in the postindustrial debate involves the
proposition that late or multinational or consumer capitalism, far from being
inconsistent with Marx's great nineteenth-century analysis, constitutes, on the
contrary, the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious
expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas. This purer capitalism
of our own time thus eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization it
had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way. One is tempted to speak
in this connection of a new and historically original penetration and
colonization of Nature and the Unconscious: that is, the destruction of
precapitalist Third World agriculture by the Green Revolution, and the rise of
the media and the advertising industry. At any rate, it will also have been clear that
my own cultural periodization of the stages of realism, modernism, and
postmodernism is both inspired and confirmed by Mandel's tripartite scheme.
We may therefore speak of
our own period as the Third Machine Age; and it is at this point that we must
reintroduce the problem of aesthetic representation already explicitly
developed in Kant's earlier analysis of the sublime, since it would seem only logical
that the relationship to and the representation of the machine could be
expected to shift dialectically with each of these qualitatively different
stages of technological development.
It is appropriate to
recall the excitement of machinery in the moment of capital preceding our own,
the exhilaration of futurism, most notably, and of Marinetti's celebration of
the machine gun and the motorcar. These are still visible emblems, sculptural
nodes of energy which give tangibility and figuration to the motive energies of
that earlier moment of modernization. The prestige of these great streamlined
shapes can be measured by their metaphorical presence in Le
Corbusier's
buildings, vast Utopian structures which ride like so many gigantic steamship
liners upon the urban scenery of an older fallen earth.18 Machinery exerts another kind of
fascination in the works of artists like Picabia and Duchamp, whom we have no time to consider here; but let me mention, for
completeness' sake, the ways in which revolutionary or communist artists of the
1930s also sought to reappropriate this excitement of machine energy for a
Promethean reconstruction of human society as a whole, as in Fernand Leger and Diego Rivera.
[From the productive
to the reproductive.]
It is immediately obvious that the technology of our own moment no longer
possesses this same capacity for representation: not the turbine, nor even
Sheeler's grain elevators or smokestacks, not the baroque elaboration of pipes
and conveyor belts, nor even the streamlined profile of the railroad train --
all vehicles of speed still concentrated at rest -- but rather the computer, whose outer shell has no
emblematic or visual power, or even the casings of the various media
themselves, as with that home appliance called television which articulates nothing but
rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within itself.
Such machines are
indeed machines of reproduction rather than of production, and they make very
different demands on our capacity for aesthetic representation than did the
relatively mimetic idolatry of the older machinery of the futurist moment, of some older speed-and-energy
sculpture. Here we have less to do with kinetic energy than with all kinds of
new reproductive processes; and in the weaker productions of postmodernism the
aesthetic embodiment of such processes often tends to slip back more
comfortably into a mere thematic representation of content -- into narratives
which are about the processes of reproduction and include movie cameras, video,
tape recorders, the whole technology of the production and reproduction of the
simulacrum. (The shift from Antonioni's modernist Blow-Up to DePalma's postmodernist Blowout is here paradigmatic.) When
Japanese architects, for example, model a building on the decorative imitation
of stacks of cassettes, then the solution is at best thematic and allusive,
although often humorous.
Yet something else does
tend to emerge in the most energetic post-modernist texts, and this is the
sense that beyond all thematics or content the work seems somehow to tap the
networks of the reproductive process and thereby to afford us some glimpse into
a postmodern or technological sublime, whose power or authenticity is documented by the success
of such works in evoking a whole new postmodern space in emergence around us.
Architecture therefore remains in this sense the privileged aesthetic language;
and the distorting and fragmenting reflections of one enormous glass surface to
the other can be taken as paradigmatic of the central role of process and
reproduction in postmodernist culture.
As I have said, however,
I want to avoid the implication that technology is in any way the
"ultimately determining instance" either of our present-day social
life or of our cultural production: such a thesis is, of course, ultimately at
one with the post-Marxist notion of a postindustrial society. Rather, I want
to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and
computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even
deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational
capitalism. The
technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not
so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged
representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even
more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new
decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself. This is a
figural process presently best observed in a whole mode of contemporary
entertainment literature -- one is tempted to characterize it as
"high-tech paranoia" -- in which the circuits and networks of some
putative global computer hookup are narratively mobilized by labyrinthine
conspiracies of autonomous but deadly interlocking and competing information
agencies in a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind.
Yet conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as
a degraded attempt -- through the figuration of advanced technology -- to think
the impossible totality of the contemporary world system. It is in terms of
that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of
economic and social institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodern sublime
can alone be adequately theorized. [Cf. Brazil.]
Such narratives, which
first tried to find expression through the generic structure of the spy novel,
have only recently crystallized in a new type of science fiction, called cyberpunk, which is fully as much an
expression of transnational corporate realities as it is of global paranoia
itself: William Gibson's representational innovations, indeed, mark his work as
an exceptional literary realization within a predominantly visual or aural
postmodern production.
V
Now, before concluding, I
want to sketch an analysis of a full-blown postmodern building -- a work which
is in many ways uncharacteristic of that postmodern architecture whose
principal proponents are Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Michael Graves, and,
more recently, Frank Gehry, but which to my mind offers some
very striking lessons about the originality of postmodernist space. Let me
amplify the figure which has run through the preceding remarks and make it even
more explicit: I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of
something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we
ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept
pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied
as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet possess the
perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part
because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have
called the space of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore -- like
many of the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding remarks --
stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our
sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately
impossible, dimensions.
The building whose
features I will very rapidly enumerate is the Westin
Bonaventure Hotel, built in the new Los Angeles downtown by the architect and developer
John Portman, whose other works include the various Hyatt Regencies, the
Peachtree Center in Atlanta, and the Renaissance Center in Detroit. I have
mentioned the populist aspect of the rhetorical defense of postmodernism
against the elite (and Utopian) austerities of the great architectural
modernisms: it is generally affirmed, in other words, that these newer
buildings are popular works, on the one hand, and that they respect the
vernacular of the American city fabric, on the other; that is to say, they no
longer attempt, as did the masterworks and monuments of high modernism, to
insert a different, a distinct, an elevated, a new Utopian language into the
tawdry and commercial sign system of the surrounding city, but rather they seek
to speak that very language, using its lexicon and syntax as that has been
emblematically "learned from Las Vegas."
On the first of these
counts Portman's Bonaventure fully confirms the claim: it is a popular
building, visited with enthusiasm by locals and tourists alike (although
Portman's other buildings are even more successful in this respect). The
populist insertion into the city fabric is, however, another matter, and it is
with this that we will begin. There are three entrances to the Bonaventure, one
from Figueroa and the other two by way of elevated gardens on the other side of
the hotel, which is built into the remaining slope of the former Bunker Hill.
None of these is anything like the old hotel marquee, or the monumental porte
cochere with
which the sumptuous buildings of yesteryear were wont to stage your passage
from city street to the interior. The entryways of the Bonaventure are, as it
were, lateral and rather backdoor affairs: the gardens in the back admit you to
the sixth floor of the towers, and even there you must walk down one flight to
find the elevator by which you gain access to the lobby. Meanwhile, what one is
still tempted to think of as the front entry, on Figueroa, admits you, baggage
and all, onto the second story shopping balcony, from which you must take an
escalator down to the main registration desk. What I first want to suggest
about these curiously unmarked ways in is that they seem to have been imposed by
some new category of closure governing the inner space of the hotel itself (and this over and above
the material constraints under which Portman had to work). I believe that,
with a certain number of other characteristic postmodern buildings, such as the
Beaubourg
in Paris or the Eaton Centre in Toronto, the Bonaventure
aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to
this new total space, meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new
mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a
new and historically original kind of hypercrowd. In this sense, then, ideally the
minicity of Portman's Bonaventure ought not to have entrances at all, since the
entryway is always the seam that links the building to the rest of the city
that surrounds it: for it does not wish to be a part of the city but rather its
equivalent and replacement or substitute. That is obviously not possible,
whence the downplaying of the entrance to its bare minimum.19 But this disjunction from the
surrounding city is different from that of the monuments of the International
Style, in which the act of disjunction was violent, visible, and had a very
real symbolic significance -- as in Le Corbusier's great pilotis, whose gesture radically
separates the new Utopian space of the modern from the degraded and fallen city
fabric which it thereby explicitly repudiates (although the gamble of the
modern was that this new Utopian space, in the virulence of its novum, would
fan out and eventually transform its surroundings by the very power of its new
spatial language). The Bonaventure, however, is content to "let the fallen
city fabric continue to be in its being" (to parody Heidegger); no further
effects, no larger protopolitical Utopian transformation, is either expected or
desired.
This diagnosis is
confirmed by the great reflective glass skin of the Bonaventure, whose function
I will now interpret rather differently than I did a moment ago when I saw the
phenomenon of reflection generally as developing a thematics of reproductive
technology (the two readings are, however, not incompatible). Now one would
want rather to stress the way in which the glass skin repels the city outside,
a repulsion for which we have analogies in those reflector sunglasses which
make it impossible for your interlocutor to see your own eyes and thereby
achieve a certain aggressivity toward and power over the Other. In a similar
way, the glass skin achieves a peculiar and placeless dissociation of the
Bonaventure from its neighborhood: it is not even an exterior, inasmuch as when
you seek to look at the hotel's outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself but
only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it.
Now consider the
escalators and elevators. Given their very real pleasures in Portman,
particularly the latter, which the artist has termed "gigantic kinetic
sculptures" and which certainly account for much of the spectacle and
excitement of the hotel interior -- particularly in the Hyatts, where like
great Japanese lanterns or gondolas they ceaselessly rise and fall -- given
such a deliberate marking and foregrounding in their own right, I believe one
has to see such "people movers" (Portman's own term, adapted from
Disney) as somewhat more significant than mere functions and engineering
components. We know in any case that recent architectural theory has begun to
borrow from narrative analysis in other fields and to attempt to see our
physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives or stories,
as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors are asked to
fulfill and to complete with our own bodies and movements. In the Bonaventure,
however, we find a dialectical heightening of this process: it seems to me that
the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace movement but also, and
above all, designate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of movement
proper (something which will become evident when we come to the question of
what remains of older forms of movement in this building, most notably walking
itself). Here the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified,
and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical
signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our
own: and this is a dialectical intensification of the autoreferentiality of all
modern culture, which tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural
production as its content.
I am more at a loss when
it comes to conveying the thing itself, the experience of space you undergo
when you step off such allegorical devices into the lobby or atrium, with its
great central column surrounded by a miniature lake, the whole positioned
between the four symmetrical residential towers with their elevators, and
surrounded by rising balconies capped by a kind of greenhouse roof at the sixth
level. I am tempted to say that such space makes it impossible for us to use
the language of volume or volumes any longer, since these are impossible to
seize. Hanging streamers indeed suffuse this empty space in such a way as to
distract systematically and deliberately from whatever form it might be
supposed to have, while a constant busyness gives the feeling that emptiness is
here absolutely packed, that it is an element within which you yourself are
immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of
perspective or volume. You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your
body; and if it seemed before that that suppression of depth I spoke of in
postmodern painting or literature would necessarily be difficult to achieve in
architecture itself, perhaps this bewildering immersion may now serve as the
formal equivalent in the new medium.
Yet escalator and
elevator are also in this context dialectical opposites; and we may suggest
that the glorious movement of the elevator gondola is also a dialectical
compensation for this filled space of the atrium -- it gives us the chance at a
radically different, but complementary, spatial experience: that of rapidly
shooting up through the ceiling and outside, along one of the four symmetrical
towers, with the referent, Los Angeles itself, spread out breathtakingly and
even alarmingly before us. But even this vertical movement is contained: the
elevator lifts you to one of those revolving cocktail lounges, in which,
seated, you are again passively rotated about and offered a contemplative
spectacle of the city itself, now transformed into its own images by the glass
windows through which you view it.
We may conclude all this
by returning to the central space of the lobby itself (with the passing
observation that the hotel rooms are visibly marginalized: the corridors in the
residential sections are low-ceilinged and dark, most depressingly functional,
while one understands that the rooms are in the worst of taste). The descent is
dramatic enough, plummeting back down through the roof to splash down in the
lake. What happens when you get there is something else, which can only be
characterized as milling confusion, something like the vengeance this space
takes on those who still seek to walk through it. Given the absolute symmetry
of the four towers, it is quite impossible to get your bearings in this lobby;
recently, color coding and directional signals have been added in a pitiful and
revealing, rather desperate, attempt to restore the coordinates of an older
space. I will take as the most dramatic practical result of this spatial
mutation the notorious dilemma of the shopkeepers on the various balconies: it
has been obvious since the opening of the hotel in 1977 that nobody could ever
find any of these stores, and even if you once located the appropriate
boutique, you would be most unlikely to be as fortunate a second time; as a
consequence, the commercial tenants are in despair and all the merchandise is
marked down to bargain prices. When you recall that Portman is a businessman as
well as an architect and a millionaire developer, an artist who is at one and
the same time a capitalist in his own right, one cannot but feel that here too
something of a "return of the repressed" is involved.
So I come finally to
my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space -- postmodern
hyperspace -- has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the
individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings
perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.
It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body
and its built environment -- which is to the initial bewilderment of the older
modernism as the velocities of spacecraft to those of the automobile -- can itself
stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the
incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global
multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves
caught as individual subjects.
But as I am anxious that
Portman's space not be perceived as something either exceptional or seemingly
marginalized and leisure-specialized on the order of Disneyland, I will
conclude by juxtaposing this complacent and entertaining (although bewildering)
leisure-time space with its analogue in a very different area, namely, the
space of post-modern warfare, in particular as Michael Herr evokes it in Dispatches, his great book on the experience
of Vietnam. The extraordinary linguistic innovations of this work may still be
considered postmodern, in the eclectic way in which its language impersonally
fuses a whole range of contemporary collective idiolects, most notably rock
language and black language: but the fusion is dictated by problems of content.
This first terrible postmodernist war cannot be told in any of the traditional
paradigms of the war novel or movie -- indeed, that breakdown of all previous
narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown of any shared language through
which a veteran might convey such experience, among the principle subjects of
the book and may be said to open up the place of a whole new reflexivity.
Benjamin's account of Baudelaire, and of the emergence of modernism from a new
experience of city technology which transcends all the older habits of bodily
perception, is both singularly relevant and singularly antiquated in the light
of this new and virtually unimaginable quantum leap in technological
alienation:
He
was a moving-target-survivor subscriber, a true child of the war, because
except for the rare times when you were pinned or stranded the system was
geared to keep you mobile, if that was what you thought you wanted. As a
technique for staying alive it seemed to make as much sense as anything, given
naturally that you were there to begin with and wanted to see it close; it
started out sound and straight but it formed a cone as it progressed, because
the more you moved the more you saw, the more you saw the more besides death
and mutilation you risked, and the more you risked of that the more you would
have to let go of one day as a "survivor." Some of us moved around
the war like crazy people until we couldn't see which way the run was taking us
anymore, only the war all over its surface with occasional, unexpected penetration.
As long as we could have choppers like taxis it took real exhaustion or
depression near shock or a dozen pipes of opium to keep us even apparently
quiet, we'd still be running around inside our skins like something was after
us, ha ha, La Vida Loca. In the months after I got back the hundreds of
helicopters I'd flown in began to draw together until they'd formed a
collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going;
saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny
and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling
and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in
the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder.20
In this new machine,
which does not, like the older modernist machinery of the locomotive or the
airplane, represent motion, but which can only be represented in motion, something of the mystery of the
new postmodernist space is concentrated.
VI
The conception of
postmodernism outlined here is a historical rather than a merely stylistic one.
I cannot stress too greatly the radical distinction between a view for which
the postmodern is one (optional) style among many others available and one which
seeks to grasp it as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism: the
two approaches in fact generate two very different ways of conceptualizing the
phenomenon as a whole: on the one hand, moral judgments (about which it is
indifferent whether they are positive or negative), and, on the other, a
genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History.
[On the question of
the moral assessment of postmodernism.] Of some positive moral evaluation of postmodernism
little needs to be said: the complacent (yet delirious) camp-following
celebration of this aesthetic new world (including its social and economic
dimension, greeted with equal enthusiasm under the slogan of
"postindustrial society") is surely unacceptable, although it may be
somewhat less obvious that current fantasies about the salvational nature of
high technology, from chips to robots -- fantasies entertained not only by both
left and right governments in distress but also by many intellectuals -- are
also essentially of a piece with more vulgar apologias for postmodernism.
But in that case it is
only consequent to reject moralizing condemnations of the postmodern and of its
essential triviality when juxtaposed against the Utopian "high
seriousness" of the great modernisms: judgments one finds both on the Left
and on the radical Right. And no doubt the logic of the simulacrum, with its
transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely
replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it.
Meanwhile, for political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and
to modify its otherwise passive momentum (whether with a view toward channeling
it into a socialist transformation of society or diverting it into the
regressive reestablishment of some simpler fantasy past), there cannot but be
much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction
which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts,
effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective
project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer
catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from visions of "terrorism"
on the social level to those of cancer on the personal. Yet if postmodernism
is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualize it in terms of
moral or moralizing judgments must finally be identified as a category mistake. All of which becomes more
obvious when we interrogate the position of the cultural critic and moralist;
the latter, along with all the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in
post-modernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural
categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the
indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.
The distinction I am
proposing here knows one canonical form in Hegel's differentiation of the
thinking of individual morality or moralizing (Moralitat) from that whole very different
realm of collective social values and practices (Sittlichkeit).21 But it finds its definitive form
in Marx's demonstration of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those
classic pages of the Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of some more
genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and change. The topic
of the lesson is, of course, the historical development of capitalism itself
and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In a well-known passage
Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this
development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words,
a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful
features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism
simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the
force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible
to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that
has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse from this austere
dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral
positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject
demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of
late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.
[Problems with such an
approach.] Such
an effort suggests two immediate questions, with which we will conclude these
reflections. Can we in fact identify some "moment of truth" within
the more evident "moments of falsehood" of postmodern culture? And,
even if we can do so, is there not something ultimately paralyzing in the
dialectical view of historical development proposed above; does it not tend to
demobilize us and to surrender us to passivity and helplessness by
systematically obliterating possibilities of action under the impenetrable fog
of historical inevitability? It is appropriate to discuss these two (related)
issues in terms of current possibilities for some effective contemporary
cultural politics and for the construction of a genuine political culture.
To focus the problem in
this way is, of course, immediately to raise the more genuine issue of the fate
of culture generally, and of the function of culture specifically, as one
social level or instance, in the postmodern era. Everything in the previous
discussion suggests that what we have been calling postmodernism is inseparable
from, and unthinkable without the hypothesis of, some fundamental mutation of
the sphere of culture in the world of late capitalism, which includes a
momentous modification of its social function. Older discussions of the space,
function, or sphere of culture (mostly notably Herbert Marcuse's classic essay
"The Affirmative Character of Culture") have insisted on what a
different language would call the "semiautonomy" of the cultural
realm: its ghostly, yet Utopian, existence, for good or ill, above the
practical world of the existent, whose mirror image it throws back in forms
which vary from the legitimations of flattering resemblance to the contestatory
indictments of critical satire or Utopian pain.
What we must now ask
ourselves is whether it is not precisely this semiautonomy of the cultural
sphere which has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is
today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level
among others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in precapitalist societies)
is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Quite the
contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous
sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a
prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at
which everything in our social life -- from economic value and state power to
practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself -- can be said to have
become "cultural" in some original and yet untheorized sense. This proposition is, however,
substantively quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the
image or the simulacrum and a transformation of the "real" into so
many pseudoevents.
It also suggests that
some of our most cherished and time-honored radical conceptions about the
nature of cultural politics may thereby find themselves outmoded. However
distinct those conceptions -- which range from slogans of negativity,
opposition, and subversion to critique and reflexivity -- may have been, they
all shared a single, fundamentally spatial, presupposition, which may be
resumed in the equally time-honored formula of "critical distance."
No theory of cultural politics current on the Left today has been able to do
without one notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the
possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of
capital, from which to assault this last. What the burden of our preceding
demonstration suggests, however, is that distance in general (including
"critical distance" in particular) has very precisely been abolished
in the new space of post-modernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused
volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates
and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation;
meanwhile, it has already been observed how the prodigious new expansion of
multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very
precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered
extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity. The
shorthand language of co-optation is for this reason omnipresent on the left,
but would now seem to offer a most inadequate theoretical basis for understanding
a situation in which we all, in one way or another, dimly feel that not only
punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla
warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The
Clash are all somehow
secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might
well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it.
What we must now
affirm is that it is precisely this whole extraordinarily demoralizing and
depressing original new global space which is the "moment of truth"
of postmodernism.
What has been called the postmodernist "sublime" is only the moment
in which this content has become most explicit, has moved the closest to the
surface of consciousness as a coherent new type of space in its own right --
even though a certain figural concealment or disguise is still at work here,
most notably in the high-tech thematics in which the new spatial content is
still dramatized and articulated. Yet the earlier features of the postmodern
which were enumerated above can all now be seen as themselves partial (yet
constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object. The argument for a
certain authenticity in these otherwise patently ideological productions
depends on the prior proposition that what we have been calling postmodern (or
multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy but has
genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great original
expansion of capitalism around the globe (after the earlier expansions of the
national market and the older imperialist system, which each had their own
cultural specificity and generated new types of space appropriate to their
dynamics). The distorted and unreflexive attempts of newer cultural production
to explore and to express this new space must then also, in their own fashion,
be considered as so many approaches to the representation of (a new) reality
(to use a more antiquated language). As paradoxical as the terms may seem, they
may thus, following a classic interpretive option, be read as peculiar new
forms of realism (or at least of the mimesis of reality), while at the same
time they can equally well be analyzed as so many attempts to distract and
divert us from that reality or to disguise its contradictions and resolve them
in the guise of various formal mystifications.
As for that reality
itself, however -- the as yet untheorized original space of some new
"world system" of multinational or late capitalism, a space whose
negative or baleful aspects are only too obvious -- the dialectic requires us
to hold equally to a positive or "progressive" evaluation of its
emergence, as Marx did for the world market as the horizon of national
economies, or as Lenin did for the older imperialist global network. For
neither Marx nor Lenin was socialism a matter of returning to smaller (and
thereby less repressive and comprehensive) systems of social organization;
rather, the dimensions attained by capital in their own times were grasped as
the promise, the framework, and the precondition for the achievement of some
new and more comprehensive socialism. Is this not the case with the yet more
global and totalizing space of the new world system, which demands the
intervention and elaboration of an internationalism of a radically new type? The disastrous realignment of
socialist revolution with the older nationalisms (not only in Southeast Asia),
whose results have necessarily aroused much serious recent left reflection, can
be adduced in support of this position.
But if all this is so,
then at least one possible form of a new radical cultural politics becomes
evident, with a final aesthetic proviso that must quickly be noted. Left
cultural producers and theorists -- particularly those formed by bourgeois
cultural traditions issuing from romanticism and valorizing spontaneous,
instinctive, or unconscious forms of "genius"; but also for very
obvious historical reasons such as Zhdanovism and the sorry consequences of
political and party interventions in the arts -- have often by reaction allowed
themselves to be unduly intimidated by the repudiation, in bourgeois aesthetics
and most notably in high modernism, of one of the age-old functions of art --
the pedagogical and the didactic. The teaching function of art was, however,
always stressed in classical times (even though it there mainly took the form
of moral lessons), while the prodigious and still imperfectly understood work
of Brecht reaffirms, in a new and formally innovative and original way, for the
moment of modernism proper, a complex new conception of the relationship
between culture and pedagogy. The cultural model I will propose similarly
foregrounds the cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of political art and
culture, dimensions stressed in very different ways by both Lukacs and Brecht
(for the distinct moments of realism and modernism, respectively).
We cannot, however,
return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations
and dilemmas which are no longer ours. Meanwhile, the conception of space that
has been developed here suggests that a model of political culture appropriate
to our own situation will; necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its
fundamental organizing concern. I will therefore provisionally define the
aesthetic of this new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping.
In a classic work, The
Image of the City,
Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which
people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the
urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none
of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built
perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples. Disalienation in the
traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place
and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be
retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the
moments of mobile, alternative trajectories. [Cf. the hypertext in which one loses a sense of
place and location.] Lynch's own work is limited by the deliberate restriction
of his topic to the problems of city form as such; yet it becomes
extraordinarily suggestive when projected outward onto some of the larger
national and global spaces we have touched on here. Nor should it be too
hastily assumed that his model -- while it clearly raises very central issues
of representation as such -- is in any way easily vitiated by the conventional
poststructural critiques of the "ideology of representation" or
mimesis. The cognitive map is not exactly mimetic in that older sense; indeed,
the theoretical issues it poses allow us to renew the analysis of
representation on a higher and much more complex level.
There is, for one thing,
a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch
in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition
of ideology as
"the representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to his or her real
conditions of existence.22 Surely this is exactly what the
cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in
the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the
individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which
is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole.
Yet Lynch's work also
suggests a further line of development insofar as cartography itself
constitutes its key mediatory instance. A return to the history of this science
(which is also an art) shows us that Lynch's model does not yet, in fact,
really correspond to what will become mapmaking. Lynch's subjects are rather
clearly involved in precartographic operations whose results traditionally are
described as itineraries rather than as maps: diagrams organized around the
still subject-centered or existential journey of the traveler, along which
various significant key features are marked -- oases, mountain ranges, rivers,
monuments, and the like. The most highly developed form of such diagrams is the
nautical itinerary, the sea chart, or portulans, where coastal features are noted
for the use of Mediterranean navigators who rarely venture out into the open
sea.
Yet the compass at once
introduces a new dimension into sea charts, a dimension that will utterly
transform the problematic of the itinerary and allow us to pose the problem of
a genuine cognitive mapping in a far more complex way. For the new instruments
-- compass, sextant, and theodolite -- correspond not merely to new geographic
and navigational problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude,
particularly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler
matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically determine
by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce a whole new
coordinate: the relationship to the totality, particularly as it is mediated by
the stars and by new operations like that of triangulation. At this point,
cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of
existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract
conceptions of the geographic totality.
Finally, with the first
globe (1490) and the invention of the Mercator projection at about the same
time, yet a third dimension of cartography emerges, which at once involves what
we would today call the nature of representational codes, the intrinsic
structures of the various media, the intervention, into more naive mimetic
conceptions of mapping, of the whole new fundamental question of the languages
of representation itself, in particular the unresolvable (well-nigh
Heisenbergian) dilemma of the transfer of curved space to flat charts. At this
point it becomes clear that there can be no true maps (at the same time it also
becomes clear that there can be scientific progress, or better still, a
dialectical advance, in the various historical moments of mapmaking).
Transcoding all this now
into the very different problematic of the Althusserian definition of ideology,
one would want to make two points. The first is that the Althusserian concept
now allows us to rethink these specialized geographical and cartographic issues
in terms of social space -- in terms, for example, of social class and national
or international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily also
cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national, and
international class realities. Yet to reformulate the problem in this way is
also to come starkly up against those very difficulties in mapping which are
posed in heightened and original ways by that very global space of the
postmodernist or multinational moment which has been under discussion here.
These are not merely theoretical issues; they have urgent practical political
consequences, as is evident from the conventional feelings of First World
subjects that existentially (or "empirically") they really do inhabit
a "postindustrial society" from which traditional production has
disappeared and in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist
-- a conviction which has immediate effects on political praxis.
The second point is that
a return to the Lacanian underpinnings of Althusser's theory can afford some
useful and suggestive methodological enrichments. Althusser's formulation
remobilizes an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between
science and ideology that is not without value for us even today. The
existential -- the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of
daily life, the monadic "point of view" on the world to which we are
necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted -- is in Althusser's formula
implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which, as Lacan
reminds us, is never positioned in or actualized by any concrete subject but
rather by that structural void called le sujet suppose savoir (the subject supposed to know), a subject-place of knowledge.
What is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some
abstract or "scientific" way. Marxian "science" provides
just such a way of knowing and conceptualizing the world abstractly, in the
sense in which, for example, Mandel's great book offers a rich and elaborated
knowledge of that global world system, of which it has never been said here
that it was unknowable but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a very
different matter. The Althusserian formula, in other words, designates a gap, a
rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge. Ideology has
then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating those two distinct
dimensions with each other. What a historicist view of this definition would
want to add is that such coordination, the production of functioning and living
ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations, and, above all,
that there may be historical situations in which it is not possible at all --
and this would seem to be our situation in the current crisis.
But the Lacanian system
is threefold, and not dualistic. To the Marxian-Althusserian opposition of
ideology and science correspond only two of Lacan's tripartite functions: the
Imaginary and the Real, respectively. Our digression on cartography, however,
with its final revelation of a properly representational dialectic of the codes
and capacities of individual languages or media, reminds us that what has until
now been omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic itself.
An aesthetic of cognitive
mapping -- a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual
subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system --
will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic
and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not then,
clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and
more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring
perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at
all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its
fundamental object -- the world space of multinational capital -- at the same
time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode
of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning
as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle
which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of
postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention
and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial
scale.
NOTES
1
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, Learning from Las Vegas, (Cambridge, Mass. 1972). [return]
2 The
originality of Charles Jencks's pathbreaking Language of Post-Modern
Architecture
(1977) lay in its well-nigh dialectical combination of postmodern architecture
and a certain kind of semiotics, each being appealed to to justify the
existence of the other. Semiotics becomes appropriate as a mode of analysis of
the newer architecture by virtue of the latter's populism, which does emit
signs and messages to a spatial "reading public;" unlike the
monumentality of the high modern. Meanwhile, the newer architecture is itself
thereby validated, insofar as it is accessible to semiotic analysis and thus
proves to be an essentially aesthetic object (rather than the transaesthetic
constructions of the high modern). Here, then, aesthetics reinforces an
ideology of communication (about which more will be observed in the concluding
chapter), and vice versa. Besides Jencks's many valuable contributions, see
also Heinrich Klotz, History of Postmodern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Pier
Paolo Portoghesi, After Modern Architecture (New York, 1982). [return]
3
Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art;" in Albert Hofstadter and
Richard Kuhns, eds. Philosophies of Art and Beauty (New York, 1964), p.663. [return]
4 Remo
Ceserani, "Queue scarpe di Andy Warhol;" Il Manifesto (June 1989). [return]
5 Ragna
Stang, Edvard Munch (New York, 1979), p.90. [return]
6 This
is the moment to confront a significant translation problem and to say why, in
my opinion, the notion of a postmodern spatialization is not incompatible with
Joseph Frank's influential attribution of an essentially "spatial
form" to the high modern. In hindsight, what he describes is the vocation
of the modern work to invent a kind of spatial mnemonics, reminiscent of
Frances Yates's Art of Memory -- a "totalizing" construction in the stricter
sense of the stigmatized, autonomous work, whereby the particular somehow
includes a battery of re- and pre-tensions linking the sentence or the detail
to the Idea of the total form itself. Adorno quotes a remark about Wagner by
the conductor Alfred Lorenz in precisely this sense: "If you have
completely mastered a major work in all its details, you sometimes experience
moments in which your consciousness of time suddenly disappears and the entire
work seems to be what one might call 'spatial; that is, with everything present
simultaneously in the mind with precision" (W 36/33). But such mnemonic
spatiality could never characterize postmodern texts, in which
"totality" is eschewed virtually by definition. Frank's modernist
spatial form is thus synedochic, whereas it is scarcely even a beginning to
summon up the word metonymic for postmodernism's universal urbanization, let alone its
nominalism of the here-and-now. [return]
7 For
further on the 50s, see chapter 9. [return]
8 See
also "Art Deco," in my Signatures of the Visible (Routledge, 1990). [return]
9
"Ragtime," American Review no.20 (April 1974): 1-20. [return]
10
Lynda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), pp.61-2. [return]
11
Jean-Paul Sartre, "L'Etranger de Camus," in Situations II (Paris, Gallimard. 1948). [return]
12 The
basic reference, in which Lacan discusses Schreber, is "D'Une question
preliminaire a' tout traitement possible de la psychose," in Ecrits, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York,
1977), pp.179-225. Most of us have received this classical view of psychosis by
way of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. [return]
13 See
my "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," in The Ideologies of Theory, volume I (Minnesota, 1988),
pp.75-115. [return]
14
Marguerite Sechehaye, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, G. Rubin-Rabson, trans. (New
York, 1968), p.19. [return]
15 Primer
(Berkeley,
Calif., 1981). [return]
16
Sartre, What Is Literature? (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). [return]
17
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London, 1978), p.118. [return]
18
See, particularly on such motifs in Le Corbusier, Gert Kahler, Architektur
als Symbolverfall: Dos Dampfermotiv in der Baukunst (Brunswick, 1981). [return]
19
"To say that a structure of this type 'turns its back away' is surely an
understatement, while to speak of its 'popular' character is to miss the point
of its systematic segregation from the great Hispanic-Asian city outside (whose
crowds prefer the open space of the old Plaza). Indeed, it is virtually to
endorse the master illusion that Portman seeks to convey: that he has
re-created within the precious spaces of his super-lobbies the genuine popular
texture of city life.
"(In fact, Portman
has only built large vivariums for the upper middle classes, protected by
astonishingly complex security systems. Most of the new downtown centres might
as well have been built on the third moon of Jupiter. Their fundamental logic
is that of a claustrophobic space colony attempting to miniaturize nature
within itself. Thus the Bonaventure reconstructs a nostalgic Southern
California in aspic: orange trees, fountains, flowering vines, and clean air.
Outside, in a smog-poisoned reality, vast mirrored surfaces reflect away not
only the misery of the larger city, but also its irrepressible vibrancy and
quest for authenticity including the most exciting neighbourhood mural movement
in North America)." (Mike Davis, "Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of
Postmodernism," New Left Review 151 [May-June 1985): 112).
Davis imagines I am being
complacent or corrupt about this bit of second-order urban renewal; his article
is as full of useful urban information and analysis as it is of bad faith.
Lessons in economics from someone who thinks sweatshops are
"precapitalist" are not helpful; meanwhile it is unclear what mileage
is to be gained by crediting our side ("the ghetto rebellions of the late
1960s") with the formative influence in bringing postmodernism into being
(a hegemonic or "ruling class" style if there ever was one), let
alone gentrification. The sequence is obviously the other way round: capital
(and its multitudinous "penetrations") comes first, and only then can
"resistance" to it develop, even though it might be pretty to think
otherwise. ("The association of the workers as it appears in the factory
is not posited by them but by capital. Their combination is not their being,
but the being of capital. To the individual worker it appears fortuitous. He
relates to his own association with other workers and to his cooperation with
them as alien, as to modes of operation of capital;' [Karl Marx, Grundrisse,
Collected Works,
volume 28 (New York, 1986), p.5051).
Davis's reply is
characteristic of some of the more "militant" sounds from the Left;
right-wing reactions to my article generally take the form of aesthetic
handwringing, and (for example) deplore my apparent identification of
postmodern architecture generally with a figure like Portman, who is, as it
were, the Coppola (if not the Harold Robbins) of the new downtowns. [return]
20
Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York, 1978), pp.8-9. [return]
21 See
my "Morality and Ethical Substance," in The Ideologies of Theory, volume I (Minneapolis, 1988). 22
Louis Althusser, "Ideological State Apparatuses;" in Lenin and
Philosophy (New
York, 1972). [return]
22
Louis Althusser, "Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and
Philosophy (New
York, 1972). [return]
Glossary
Synecdoche: a trope in
which a part is used to signify the whole or the whole is used to signify the
part, e.g. "12 screens" for 12 computers. [return]
Metonymy: a trope using
the name of one object to signify another to which it is related, e.g.
"the scepter" for the sovereign. [return]