Post-modernism, broadly speaking, thus meant a turning away from the ethic of purification and differentiation in high modernism, and an embracing of the contrary impulse in the avant-garde. This reversal was evident, inter alia, in the return of figuration into its no longer abstract painting, an appreciation of the referential rather than merely formal or symbolic dimension of its photography, and the conflation of fiction and non-fiction in its literature. Rather than seeking stylistic refinement, postmodernists fused together different, even conflicting styles to create visual palimpsests, reminiscent of the carnivalesque confusion of rhetorical codes the ancient Greek Cynics had called Menippean satire. But unlike modernist champions of radical in-tertexuality, such as Joyce, post-modernists rejected the goal of an aesthetic sublimation of the seemingly random and unintelligible results. Countering the austere Bauhaus slogan of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), ‘less is more’, post-modernists such as the American architect Robert Venturi (1925- ) puckishly claimed instead that ‘less is a bore’.
Whereas modernism sought to privilege form over content, the medium over the substance of what was expressed, postmodernism saw the hesitant return of what had been banished, often, to be sure, placed in quotation marks to undermine its foundational status. Or it came to appreciate what the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille (1897-1962) had called informe, the heterogeneous formlessness that sabotaged all attempts to contain excess and suppress noise. Surrealist photographers such as Man Ray were now celebrated for having presented the human form in images of undecidable meaning. German artists such as Georg Baselitz (1938- ) and A. R. Penck (1939-1998) were recognized for having revived the disfiguring excesses of pre-abstract expressionism. Others such as Joseph Beuys (1921-86) and Anselm Kiefer (1945- ) were lauded for leaving behind the transcendental internationalism of high modernism in favour of more nationally inflected natural and historical themes.
Similarly, post-modernist architecture rejected the geometric purity and authenticity of materials of international-style buildings; form need not follow function, historical citation ceased being a sin, and ornament lost its criminal status. It was no longer progressive, post-modern architects contended, to generate abstract models of built form indifferent to the specific natural, historical, and cultural contexts in which they were inserted. The isotropic, repetitive space of international-style buildings needed to be supplemented by new spatial variations that harkened back to the baroque at its most dazzling. Likewise, post-modern sculpture, moving beyond the minimalism and conceptualism of the 1960s, rediscovered the importance of specific sites and the temporality of creation and decay; artists such as the Bulgarian Christo (1935- ) wrapped historical buildings and features of the natural landscape in ways that extended the already diffuse definition of sculptural form.
The post-modernist rediscovery of the (non-modernist) avant-garde assault on the institution of art did, however, selfconsciously jettison one essential dimension of most earlier avant-garde movements: their redemptive hopes for a revitalization of the fragmented social totality. That is, whereas movements like the Bauhaus, surrealism, and futurism had wanted to revivify life through the realization of artistic values — to aes-theticize existence, we might say, by overcoming the reified differentiations of bourgeois society—most post-modernists lost faith in the possibility of such a project, whose failure they claimed was now self-evident. The constructivist spirit was supplanted by that of deconstruction, which replaced both differentiation and dedifferentiation by what its most celebrated spokesman Jacques Derrida (1930- ) called diVerance, a neologism implying endless deferral as well as unbridgeable difference. Yearnings for plenitudinous order and the revival of totalized meaning, the post-modernists scoffed, were exercises in nostalgia for a golden past that never really existed. Although they sought to level oppositions, it was thus not in the tri-umphalist spirit of the Hegelian or Hegelian-Marxist Aufhebung (sublation) of contradictions, a spirit which had often tacitly infused the avant-garde. According to a leading champion of postmodernist architecture, the American Charles Jencks, the end of such hopes can even be symbolically dated. On 15 July 1972, when the Pruit-Igoe housing project in St Louis, Missouri, was ignominiously dynamited, the goal of providing humanizing mass housing through what the French modernist architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) had called ‘machines for living’ was definitively laid to rest.
Indeed, the very image of an avant-garde preparing the way for a broad-based revitalized culture was rejected by post-modernists as complicitous with a totalizing and teleological metanarrative, whose elitist political implications were inherently problematic. The widespread repudiation in the late twentieth century of political vanguards claiming to represent the interests of the whole, a repudiation exemplified by the debacle of Leninism, was extended to cultural vanguards as well. They too were damned for arrogating to themselves the right to condemn present values and tastes as ideological in the name of a putatively superior future. The age of what the French theorist Michel Foucault (1926-1984) called the ‘universal intellectual’ with his — specific gender intended — search for synoptic meta-theories was now over; in its place was the ‘local intellectual’ content to remain within the modest limits of what the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (1936- ) dubbed ‘weak thought’.
Thus, for post-modernists, such avant-garde techniques as baring the device or defamiliarization could no longer be placed in the service of exploding ideological mystifications through exposing the ‘real workings’ of cultural signification, which would in turn inspire radical political praxis. Instead, they were redirected at demonstrating that in culture there were nothing but devices ‘all the way down’, nothing but artifice, rhetoric, and contrivance. The goal of full transparency was unattainable; indeed the priority of the visual over the other senses, which had been tacitly maintained in the modernist fetish of formal clarity, should be overturned.
Although the institution of art lost its special status as a realm apart from the other spheres of a differentiated modernity, its reintegration brought with it no Utopian pay-off. If life were to be aestheticized, theoreticians like Lyotard insisted, the aesthetics involved was that of the sublime rather than the beautiful, an aesthetics of absence, unrepresentability, and even terror, rather than formal purity, sensual presence, and organic order. In the place of the romantic and modernist symbol, the concrete embodiment of an abstract idea or fragment of a latent whole, postmodernists put a process of infinite allegorization with no expectation of final closure or plenitudinous meaning. Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard (1929- ) insisted, have no originals to which they refer; images must therefore be set adrift from their putative referents. Rejecting both synchronic, spatialized time and the smoothly meaningful flow of narrative, post-modernists also embraced multiple and heterogeneous temporalities that never cohered into a single story, and endorsed as well the endless circulation of signifiers that refused to adhere to a definitive signified. As a result, they denied the possibility of unmediated authenticity, complete subjective autonomy, or non-ideological consciousness — a conclusion that tied them to late nineteenth-century ‘decadent’ writers like Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), whose playful, ironic defence of mendacity the deadly serious modernists thought they had somehow transcended.
At times, post-modernism, in fact, seemed hostile to all emancipatory projects, even those with more modest, non-redemptive goals. Emerging to prominence after the failures of the countercultural cum new leftist politics of the 1960s, it was taken by some to be an expression of a dangerous, new cynicism, a turn towards uncritical inwardness, or an acceptance of the shallow consumer society cultured Europeans had long identified with meretricious America. In Germany, in particular, where the memory of past counter-Enlightenment and anti-modernist movements was particularly raw, the wholesale repudiation of what the second-generation Frankfurt School theorist Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) called the ‘uncompleted project of modernity’ appeared especially ominous. Other critics darkly warned against post-modernism’s nihilistic and anti-humanist implications — and in so doing unwittingly repeated the same charges made against many of the early modernists almost a century before.
What, for example, in the 1960s became known as ‘pop art’ was attacked for recycling mass-produced commercial images with no attempt to purify them of their origins in the economic market-place or undermine their unapologetically pleasure-giving function. Whereas the efforts in the mid-1950s of the British Independent Group led by Richard Hamilton (1922- ) to incorporate such images had caused little negative comment, those of the more successful American Andy Warhol a decade later were often greeted with dismay by the embattled defenders of the last high modernist movement, abstract expressionism. Warhol, moreover, achieved global notoriety for turning himself into a product: the artist as shallow celebrity rather than creative genius, who churned out mechanical reproductions without originals in a studio he significantly dubbed ‘the factory’.
Indeed, the very distinction between art and commodity, which had been a staple of western aesthetics ever since the romantics, was now gleefully abandoned in ways that outraged purists, both aesthetic and political. Although a vague residue of the apocalyptic mood surrounding early modernism still often accompanied its successor, it was an apocalypse without the expectation of a revelation after the destruction of the old order. History returned to post-modernism, it was often remarked, but in the form of a helter-skelter pastiche of older styles rather than in that of a faith in the historical process as a story of potential emancipation. History as post-histoire, a term first popularized after the Second World War by conservatives unhappy with its outcome, meant the ironizing of all such plots of meaningful development.
It would, however, be misleading, its defenders responded, to infer that all artists and critics who identified themselves with post-modernism shared the same quietist or cynical politics. In certain ways the adversarial, subversive spirit of high modernism was not entirely lost, they pointed out, even if it was now directed against some of modernism’s own most sacred shibboleths. A salient example was the deliberate blurring of the very boundary between high—whether traditional or modernist—and low art. Modernism itself, to be sure, had often drawn on the popular and even mass culture surrounding it; fragments of newspapers, retail catalogues, advertisements, even music-hall reviews found their way into cubist collages and Dada poetry, and the noises of the city informed the music of composers such as Edgar Varese (1883-1965) and Luigi Russolo (1885-1947). But whereas modernists generally sought the elevation of low into high through a process of aesthetic sublimation, hoping for the redemption of elements from everyday life through artistic transfiguration, post-modernists questioned the very hierarchy on which such an outcome might be based. It was possible, they defiantly argued in the words of Venturi and his collaborators Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour, to ‘learn from Las Vegas’, the very epitome of mass-culture vulgarity. A post-modernist novel like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose could thus combine esoteric metaphysical and linguistic conundrums and subtle accounts of medieval theology with a plot that provided all the painlessly accessible rewards of a detective thriller.
The unapologetic mimesis or recycling—if now in quotation marks — of what had earlier been dismissed as kitsch also challenged the very distinction between ‘authentic’ genuine and ‘fraudulent’ copy, which had been so important a pillar of the differentiated and sacralized institution of art. In literary terms, the distinction between citation and original text was blurred, as everything became a second-order quotation without a first-order referent. Even the distinction between natural body and artificial prosthesis was called into question by the post-modern fascination with cyborgs, body piercing, the paintings of Francis Bacon (1909- 1992) (which turned human bodies into animal meat), and the transformational magic of computer ‘morphing’.
What the German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin (18921940) had famously called the cultish ‘aura’ surrounding unique artworks was deliberately effaced in post-modernism, as ephemeral, dematerialized ‘installations’ or ‘performances’, like those of the Austrian Hermann Nitzsch (1938- ), replaced objects made for the ages. New technologies like television allowed video artists to augment the decline of the aura already begun by such earlier innovations as the cinema and phonograph. Some post-modernists, rejecting the cynical example of Warhol, worked to thwart the transformation of art into commodity,
Which modernism, for all its distaste for bourgeois values, had clearly failed to undermine (indeed, as the tens of millions spent on canvases by a Van Gogh or Monet show, it had the very opposite effect). What became known as ‘auto-destructive art’, first developed by anti-artists such as Gustav Metzger (1926- ) and Jean Tingueley (1925- ) in the 1960s, mocked the goal of timeless works of art. Equally challenged was the privileged site of the museum as the repository of such works, whose most idealized form was to be found in Andre Malraux’s (1901-70) postSecond World War notion of a photographic super ‘museum without walls’. Politically motivated critics such as the German Hans Haacke (1936- ) stressed the increasing financial dependency of museums on corporate sponsorship.
The populist defence of such a demolition of hierarchy did not, however, always convince its critics, who variously worried about the erosion of cultural standards, the schizophrenic liter-alization of signifiers blocking access to meaningful signification, and the ideological aestheticization of daily life. Post-modernism, they charged, was uncomfortably close to craven capitulation before what the French situationist Guy De-bord (1931-1994) had castigated as the mystifying ‘society of the spectacle’. Its eclectic pluralism and self-indulgent playfulness was an example of what another radical critic Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) had called ‘repressive desublimation’.
Feminism, Multiculturalism, and Post-modern Inclusivity
Even its critics had to acknowledge, however, that post-modernism’s inclusive rather than exclusive aesthetic had opened certain new possibilities that modernism had shunned. One of the most significant concerned the addressing of gender issues in a more complex way than was evident in the heyday of modernism. During the late nineteenth century, mass society had been often figured as a woman-irrational, out of control, lacking in higher cultural values-by crowd psychologists such as Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), literary critics such as Hippolyte Taine (1828-93), and novelists such as Emile Zola (18401902). Not surprisingly, mass culture also came to have similar associations, which allowed it to be invidiously compared with the virile spirituality of the elite modernists. For all their subversive intentions, many modernists remained wedded to traditional misogynist notions of women as culturally inferior and somehow complicitous with a mass culture that was regressive, engulfing, and debased. Whereas men were cultural producers, able to embark on a lonely quest for artistic redemption, women were understood to be consumers of such cultural kitsch as sentimental fiction, cynically devised to console them for their inferior status. Even when they renewed the nineteenth-century bohemian challenge to bourgeois mores and glorified free sexual expression, modernists such as the English novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and avant-garde movements such as surrealism perpetuated many conventional attitudes towards the object of (male) desire.
Post-modernism, which emerged at a time when powerful feminist critiques of these assumptions were impossible to ignore, lost its taste not only for master narratives, but also for narratives of male masters. Often parodically appropriating the dominant culture’s image of women, such post-modern feminists as the Americans Cindy Sherman (1954- ) and Barbara Kruger (1945- ) self-consciously sought to undermine the hegemony of what was darkly called the ‘male gaze’. Theoretically inspired by the Nietzschean and post-structuralist critique of centred subjectivity in the name of heterological difference that initially came into prominence in post-1968 France, they developed practices that contested the modernist demand for authenticity and presence. Defiantly valorizing the traditionally feminine (and often gay) tactics of masquerade, cross-dressing, and posing, which had been negatively valued by mainstream modernists (although adopted by heterodox figures such as Duchamp), they raised parody, dissimulation, camp, and mimesis to the level of cultural norm.
Post-modern inclusiveness also entailed the incorporation of the work done by so-called post-colonial artists, some of whom lived in the former possessions of the European powers, others of whom were now hybridized citizens of the ‘mother countries’. The ‘magical realism’ evident in the work of Latin American novelists such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928- ) was also developed by post-colonial Europeans such as the Pakistani-born Salman Rushdie (1947- ), whose most notorious work, The Satanic Verses, affronted not only western modernist sensibilities, but also the non-western and anti-modernist sensibilities of the Islamic world that he had thought—as it turned out in vain—he had left behind to come to England. The post-modern fascination with alterity, difference, and the non-identical reflected the new realities of an increasingly multicultural Europe struggling to accommodate its new ‘impurity’, adjusting to the long-awaited ‘decline of the West’, and hoping to forge politically effective, post-Marxist ‘rainbow coalitions’ of disparate groups.
Because post-modernism self-consciously sought to break down the barriers between the aesthetic and its other, such considerations as gender, ethnicity, and multiculturalism inevitably entered the rapidly expanding theoretical discussion surrounding it. Attempts were also made to link it with the larger, noncultural processes of modernization (or post-modernization). As had been the case with modernism, the impact of new technolo-gies—then, aeroplanes, cinema, and the radio, now computers, fibre optics, and video — was credited with revolutionizing the cultural ‘imaginary’ of the day. ‘Virtual reality’, ‘simulacrum’, and a host of words cloned from the Greek kybernan (to steer), such as ‘cyborg’, ‘cyberspace’, and ‘cyberpunk’, all became catchwords of the critical discourse that both reflected on and stimulated the changes in artistic production.
For those less interested in what one commentator called the ‘mode of information’ than the more traditional mode of production, post-modernism could be understood to express in some complex way developments in late capitalism. One analyst, the English geographer David Harvey, sought to tie it to the transition from an economy based on centralized, large-scale ‘Fordist’ accumulation to one grounded in a more flexible and fluid alternative that involved, inter alia, the radical decoupling of the financial system from real production and the rapid, if ephemeral, dispersion of capital flows. Another, the American literary critic Fredric Jameson, linked it to the virtual completion of the modernization process, which meant the ubiquity of market relations and the loss of any palpable resistance in the form of a classical proletariat.
However post-modernism as a cultural condition was construed, however its origins were explained in terms of larger social, technological, or economic forces, however its political imperatives were understood, one implication of its arrival could not be denied: its radical disruption of the triumphalist mid-century narrative of modernism described above. It is, of course, still too early to write a final balance sheet on post-modernism itself; indeed, such an outcome may well be permanently thwarted, if the post-modernist insistence on multiple narratives, heterogeneous subject positions, and the impossibility of totalizing perspectives survives its own heyday. We remain, in any case, still too much in the middle of this uncertainly defined, internally contested, and discursively exfoliating cultural paradigm to imagine what will come next. What can be called the uncompleted project of post-modernity has, it seems, still to run its course.
1 The cultural appropriation of this originally military term (which meant an army’s fore-guard) can be traced back as far as the 17th-cent. Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, but its i9th-cent. use dates from the Utopian socialist Saint-Simon. It came into common usage, however, only in France in the 1870s. As its later version as Leninist vanguard theory shows, it often gained political as well as aesthetic acceptations.
World History
