Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism

1. Postmodernism Or The Cultural Logic
Of Late Capitalism
M.Sohaib Afzaal

2. Fredric Jameson
• Fredric Jameson (born 14 April 1934) is an American literary critic and Marxist
political theorist.
• He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends he once
described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of
organized capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism: The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Political Unconscious, and Marxism and
Form.
• Jameson is currently William A. Lane Professor in The Program in Literature and
Romance Studies at Duke University.
• In 2012, the MLA gave Jameson their sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly
Achievement.

3. Postmodernism
• Postmodernism is a late-20th-century movement in the arts, architecture, and
criticism that was a departure from modernism.
• Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art,
philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. It is
often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage
as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century
post-structural thought.
• The term postmodernism has been applied to a host of movements, many in
art, music, and literature, that reacted against tendencies in the imperialist
phase of capitalism called "modernism," and are typically marked by revival of
historical elements and techniques.

4. Postmodernism History
• The term postmodern was first used around the 1870s.
• John Watkins Chapman suggested "a Postmodern style of painting" as a way
to move beyond French Impressionism.
• J. M. Thompson, in his 1914 article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly
philosophical review), used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in
the critique of religion: "The raison d'etre of Post-Modernism is to escape
from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism
by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to
Catholic tradition.“
• In 1917, Rudolf Pannwitz used the term to describe a philosophically-oriented
culture.
• His idea of post-modernism drew from Friedrich Nietzsche's analysis of
modernity and its end results of decadence and nihilism.
• Pannwitz's post-human would be able to overcome these predicaments of
the modern human. Contrary to Nietzsche, Pannwitz also included nationalist
and mythical elements in his use of the term.

5. • In 1921 and 1925, postmodernism had been used to describe new forms of
art and music.
• In 1942 H. R. Hays described it as a new literary form. However, as a general
theory for a historical movement it was first used in 1939 by Arnold J.
Toynbee: "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general
war of 1914-1918.“
• In 1949 the term was used to describe a dissatisfaction with modern
architecture, and led to the postmodern architecture movement, perhaps
also a response to the modernist architectural movement known as the
International Style. Postmodernism in architecture is marked by the re-
emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban
architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal
angles.
• In 1971, in a lecture delivered at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London,
Mel Bochner described "post-modernism" in art as having started with Jasper
Johns, "who first rejected sense-data and the singular point-of-view as the
basis for his art, and treated art as a critical investigation."

6. • Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society
expanded the importance of critical theory and has been the point of
departure for works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as being
visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and
culture, starting in the late 20th century.
• These developments re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love,
marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took
place since the 1950s and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of
1968—are described with the term Postmodernity, Influences on postmodern
thought, Paul Lützeler (St. Louis) as opposed to Postmodernism, a term
referring to an opinion or movement.
• Postmodernism has also been used interchangeably with the term post-
structuralism out of which postmodernism grew, a proper understanding of
postmodernism or doing justice to the postmodernist thought demands an
understanding of the poststructuralist movement and the ideas of its
advocates.
• Post-structuralism resulted similarly to postmodernism by following a time of
structuralism. It is characterized by new ways of thinking through
structuralism, contrary to the original form."Postmodernist" describes part of
a movement; "Postmodern" places it in the period of time since the 1950s,
making it a part of contemporary history.

7. Postmodernism Influence on Art
• Architecture
• Urban planning
• Literature
• Music

8. Postmodern Architecture
• The idea of Postmodernism in architecture began as a response
to the perceived blandness and failed Utopianism of the Modern
movement. Modern Architecture, as established and developed
by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, was focused on the pursuit
of a perceived ideal perfection, and attempted harmony of form
and function, and dismissal of "frivolous ornament.“
• Critics of modernism argued that the attributes of perfection
and minimalism themselves were subjective, and pointed out
anachronisms in modern thought and questioned the benefits of
its philosophy.
• Definitive postmodern architecture such as the work of Michael
Graves and Robert Venturi rejects the notion of a 'pure' form or
'perfect' architectonic detail, instead conspicuously drawing
from all methods, materials, forms and colors available to
architects.

9. • Modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is associated with the
phrase "less is more"; in contrast Venturi famously said, "Less is
a bore." Postmodernist architecture was one of the first
aesthetic movements to openly challenge Modernism as
antiquated and "totalitarian", favoring personal preferences and
variety over objective, ultimate truths or principles.
• It is this atmosphere of criticism, skepticism, and emphasis on
difference over and against unity that distinguishes the
postmodernism aesthetic.
• Among writers defining the terms of this discourse is Charles
Jencks, described by Architectural Design Magazine as "the
definer of Post-Modernism for thirty years" and the
"internationally acclaimed critic, whose name became
synonymous with Post-modernism in the 80s".

10. Urban Planning
• Postmodernism is a rejection of 'totality', of the notion that planning could
be 'comprehensive', widely applied regardless of context, and rational.
• In this sense, Postmodernism is a rejection of its predecessor: Modernism.
From the 1920s onwards, the Modern movement sought to design and plan
cities which followed the logic of the new model of industrial mass
production; reverting to large-scale solutions, aesthetic standardisation and
prefabricated design solutions (Goodchild 1990).
• Postmodern also brought a break from the notion that planning and
architecture could result in social reform, which was an integral dimension of
the plans of Modernism (Simonsen 1990).
• Modernism eroded urban living by its failure to recognise differences and aim
towards homogenous landscapes (Simonsen 1990, 57).
• Within Modernism, urban planning represented a 20th-century move
towards establishing something stable, structured, and rationalised within
what had become a world of chaos, flux and change.
• The role of planners predating Postmodernism was one of the 'qualified
professional' who believed they could find and implement one single 'right
way' of planning new urban establishments. In fact, after 1945, urban
planning became one of the methods through which capitalism could be
managed and the interests of developers and corporations could be
administered.

11. • Considering Modernism inclined urban planning to treat buildings and
developments as isolated, unrelated parts of the overall urban
ecosystems created fragmented, isolated, and homogeneous urban
landscapes (Goodchild, 1990).
• One of the greater problems with Modernist-style of planning was the
disregard of resident or public opinion, which resulted in planning
being forced upon the majority by a minority consisting of affluent
professionals with little to no knowledge of real 'urban' problems
characteristic of post-Second World War urban environments; slums,
overcrowding, deteriorated infrastructure, pollution and disease,
among others (Irving 1993).
• These were precisely the 'urban ills' Modernism was meant to 'solve',
but more often than not, the types of 'comprehensive', 'one size fits
all' approaches to planning made things worse., and residents began
to show interest in becoming involved in decisions which had once
been solely entrusted to professionals of the built environment.
Advocacy planning and participatory models of planning emerged in
the 1960s to counter these traditional elitist and technocratic
approaches to urban planning.
• Furthermore, an assessment of the 'ills' of Modernism among
planners during the 1960s, fuelled development of a participatory
model that aimed to expand the range of participants in urban
interventions

12. Postmodern Literature
• Postmodern literature is literature characterized by heavy reliance on
techniques like fragmentation, paradox, and questionable narrators, and is
often (though not exclusively) defined as a style or trend which emerged in
the post–World War II era.
• Postmodern works are seen as a reaction against Enlightenment thinking and
Modernist approaches to literature.
• Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, tends to resist
definition or classification as a "movement".
• Indeed, the convergence of postmodern literature with various modes of
critical theory, particularly reader-response and deconstructionist
approaches, and the subversions of the implicit contract between author, text
and reader by which its works are often characterised, have led to pre-
modern fictions such as Cervantes' Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne's
eighteenth-century satire Tristram Shandy being retrospectively inducted into
the fold

13. • While there is little consensus on the precise characteristics, scope, and
importance of postmodern literature, as is often the case with artistic
movements, postmodern literature is commonly defined in relation to a
precursor.
• For example, a postmodern literary work tends not to conclude with the
neatly tied-up ending as is often found in modernist literature (Woolf, Joyce,
Faulkner), but often parodies it. Postmodern authors tend to celebrate
chance over craft, and further employ metafiction to undermine the writer's
authority.
• Another characteristic of postmodern literature is the questioning of
distinctions between high and low culture through the use of pastiche, the
combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature.

14. Postmodern music
• Postmodern music is either simply music of the postmodern era, or music
that follows aesthetical and philosophical trends of postmodernism.
• As the name suggests, the postmodernist movement formed partly in
reaction to modernism.
• Even so, postmodern music still does not primarily define itself in opposition
to modernist music; this label is applied instead by critics and theorists.
• Postmodern music is not a distinct musical style, but rather refers to music of
the postmodern era. The terms "postmodern", "postmodernism",
"postmodernist", and "postmodernity" are exasperating terms (Bertens
1995).
• Indeed, postmodernists question the tight definitions and categories of
academic disciplines, which they regard simply as the remnants of modernity.

15. Postmodern Classical Music
• The postmodern impulse in classical music arose in the 1960s with the
advent of musical minimalism. Composers such as Terry Riley, Henryk
Górecki, Bradley Joseph, John Adams, George Crumb, Steve Reich,
Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, and Lou Harrison reacted to the
perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism
by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant
harmonies, whilst others, most notably John Cage challenged the
prevailing Narratives of beauty and objectivity common to
Modernism. Some composers have been openly influenced by popular
music and world ethnic musical traditions.
• Postmodern Classical music as well is not a musical style, but rather
refers to music of the postmodern era. It bears the same relationship
to postmodernist music that postmodernity bears to postmodernism.
Postmodern music, on the other hand, shares characteristics with
postmodernist art—that is, art that comes after and reacts against
modernism.
• A clarifying example of this phenomenon would be a rock band that
sells T-shirts, ostensibly an adjunct business to their primary musical
pursuit, yet the T-Shirts become more popular or are deemed "cooler"
than the band's original musical output.

16. Cultural Logic
• Progressive advocates often face a critical but under-appreciated
obstacle: The public simply doesn’t understand a central aspect
of their issue. And when people have no commonsense grasp of
an issue, they tend to be skeptical, to think in counterproductive
ways, or to ignore the topic altogether.
• Cultural Logic delivers explanations that work – those that have
a proven ability to improve understanding, and to become part
of the culture. Explanations that work turn expert knowledge
into new common sense.
• For the last twelve years, Cultural Logic has taken a strategic
approach to producing explanations that work on a wide variety
of public interest issues – as well as innovative approaches to
testing them, drawing on its two principals’ expertise in
cognitive science, anthropology, and linguistics.
• Cultural Logic works independently, and also as a part the Topos
Partnership, a strategic communications consulting company
founded by Axel Aubrun, Meg Bostrom, and Joseph Grady.

17. Late Capitalism
• Capitalism is an economic system in which trade, industry, and the means of production are
controlled by private owners with the goal of making profits in a market economy.
• Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets and
wage labor.
• In a capitalist economy, the parties to a transaction typically determine the prices at which
assets, goods, and services are exchanged.
• "Late capitalism" is a term used by neo-Marxists to refer to capitalism from about 1945
onwards, with the implication that it is a historically limited stage rather than an eternal feature
of all future human society. This period includes the era termed the golden age of capitalism.

18. Background
• Capitalism is perceived to be a flexible and adaptive system, able to
survive terrible catastrophes including two world wars and an
enormous number of smaller wars—suggesting, for many thinkers,
that the end is not yet near. Vladimir Lenin famously declared that
there are no "absolutely hopeless situations" for capitalism.
• This, however, does not deter critics of the system, who point to its
relative newness, the rapid collapse of prior orders of much greater
duration, the effects of modern communications on class
consciousness, and a general perceived inadequacy of its ability to
deal with various crises of its own making and other long term
structural problems.
• Immanuel Wallerstein believes that capitalism may be in the process
of being replaced by another world system.
• Others however see late capitalism in the 21st century as very much in
active development; and characterised by a new mix of high-tech
advances, the concentration of (speculative) financial capital, and
Post-Fordism—all producing a backdrop of increasing differentiation in
wealth/security between the better off and the worse off and in
between.

19. Golden Age of Capitalism
• The post–World War II economic expansion, also known as the postwar
economic boom, the long boom, and the Golden Age of Capitalism, was a
period of economic prosperity in the mid-20th century which occurred,
following the end of World War II in 1945, and lasted until the early 1970s. It
ended with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the 1973 oil
crisis, and the 1973–1974 stock market crash, which led to the 1970s
recession.
• Narrowly defined, the period spanned from 1945 to 1952, with overall
growth lasting well until 1971, though there are some debates on dating the
period, and booms in individual countries differed, some starting as early as
1945, and overlapping the rise of the East Asian economies into the 1980s or
1990s.
• During this time there was high worldwide economic growth; Western
European and East Asian countries in particular experienced unusually high
and sustained growth, together with full employment. Contrary to early
predictions, this high growth also included many countries that had been
devastated by the war, such as Greece (Greek economic miracle), West
Germany (Wirtschaftswunder), France (Trente Glorieuses), Japan (Japanese
post-war economic miracle), and Italy (Italian economic miracle).

20. Jameson
• Jameson uses Mandel's third stage designation as the point of
departure for his widely cited Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism. Jameson argues that this postmodernity involves an
emergence of a cultural dominant, or mode of cultural production,
which differs markedly in its various manifestations (developments in
literature, film, fine art, video, social theory, etc.) from those of its
predecessor, referred to collectively and broadly as Modernism,
particularly in its treatment of "subject position", temporality and
narrative.
• For Jameson, "every position on postmodernism today—whether
apologia or stigmatization—is also...necessarily an implicitly or
explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism
today". A section of Jameson's analysis has been reproduced on the
Marxists Internet Archive.
• Jameson (1996) saw the current, "third" moment of capitalist
evolution as involving a new and previously unparalleled global
reach—whether it was conceptualised as multinational or as
informational capitalism; but expressed doubts as to whether it yet
represented what Marx had originally foreseen as the final stage of
capitalism, with the universal commodification of the world market.

21. The Rise of Aesthetic Populism
• Postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable from
an implacable.
• Critique of architectural high modernism and of the so-called
international style where formal criticism and analysis 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 of its older neighborhood culture while the
prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are
remorselessly denounced in the imperious gesture of the charismatic
Master.

22. Postmodernism as Cultural Dominant
• One of the concerns frequently aroused by per iodizing hypotheses is
that these tend to obliterate difference, and to project an idea of the
historical period as massive homogeneity.
• 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.

23. The Deconstruction of Expression
“Peasant Shoes”
The object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and
rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil.
In other words, the transformation of the hard peasant object world
into a glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as
a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation.

24. The Deconstruction of Expression
“Diamond Dust Shoes”
• Stemming from Heidegger’s analysis the picture recreates the missing object-
world which was once their lived context.
• In other words, by way of mediation the work of art links one form of materiality
the materiality of the oil paint – affirmed and foregrounded in its own right and
for its own visual pleasures; but has nonetheless a satisfying plausibility.
• Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes turns centrally around commodification, it
explicitly foregrounds the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital,
ought to be powerful and critical political statements.
• Warhol’s image is the inversion of Van Gogh’s Utopian gesture: “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.”

25. The Waning of Affect
• 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.
• Munch’s painting The Scream is read not merely as an embodiment 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.
• “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.

26. • But what is today called contemporary theory or better still,
theoretical discourse is also, I would 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 post structuralism
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.”

27. Euphoria and Self-Annihilation
• The great Warhol figures Marilyn and Edie Sedge wick are notorious burn-
out and self-destruction cases of the ending 1960s, and the great dominant
experiences of drugs and schizophrenia.
• Van Gogh-type madness, experiences of radical isolation and solitude,
anomie, private revolt dominated the period of high modernism.
Decentering or fragmentation of the subject suggest two possibilities:
• 1) the historicist, that a once-existing centred subject, in the period of
classical capitalism and the nuclear family, has today in the world of
organizational bureaucracy dissolved.
• 2) The poststructuralist position for which such a subject never existed in
the first place but constituted something like an ideological mirage.
• “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 centred subject”

28. The Postmodern and the Past
Pastiche Eclipses Parody
• “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”.

29. ‘Historicism’ Effaces History’
• 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.
• 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 new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have a
momentous effect on what used to be historical time.
• Guy Debord’s powerful slogan is now even more apt for the ‘prehistory’ of a
society bereft of all historicity, 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.

30. The Nostalgia Mode
• Nostalgia does not strike one as an altogether satisfactory word for such
fascination, 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’.
• Many films have attempted to capture, even aesthetically, the feeling of the ‘good
old times’.
• What is 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. Pseudo-
historical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history.
• The 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.

31. The Fate of ‘Real History’
• A crisis in historicity, however, inscribes itself symptomally 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 theoretical critique and repudiation of interpretation as such is a
fundamental component of poststructuralist theory.

32. Loss of the Radical Past
• 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, therefore, it is a ‘realism’ which 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.

33. III. The Breakdown of the Signifying Chain
• 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.

34. China
• Jameson has had an enormous influence, perhaps greater than that of any other
single figure of any nationality, on the theorization of the postmodern in China.
• In mid-1985, shortly after the beginning of the cultural fever (early 1985 to June
Fourth, 1989) a period in Chinese intellectual history characterized in part by
intense interest in Western critical theory, literary theory, and related disciplines
Jameson introduced the idea of postmodernism to China in lectures at Peking
University and the newly founded Shenzhen University.
• These were minor events amid the larger cultural ferment, yet ended up being
quietly seminal: Jameson's ideas as presented at Peking University had a major
impact on some gifted young students, including Zhang Yiwu and Zhang Xudong,
budding scholars whose work would come to play an important role in the
analysis of postmodernity in China.
• Notwithstanding the impact of these lectures on a few future intellectuals, 1987
was the date of Jameson's truly enormous contribution to postmodern studies in
China

35. Collage and Radical Difference
• 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 purely external separations from one
another.
• The vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new
mode of grasping what used to be called relationship.

36. IV. The Hysterical Sublime
• 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?
• 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.

37. The Apotheosis of Capitalism
• The technology may well serve as adequate shorthand to designate that
enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labour
stored up in our machinery, an alienated power, what Sartre calls the
counter finality of the practicoinert, 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.
• Architecture therefore remains in this sense the privileged aesthetic
language; and the distorting and fragmenting reflexions of one enormous
glass surface to the other can be taken as paradigmatic of the central role
of process and reproduction in postmodernist culture.
• It is therefore 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.

38. V. Post-Modernism and the City
• 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.

39. The Bonaventura Hotel
• The populist aspect of the rhetorical defence 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, that 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, on the contrary, seek to speak that very
language, using its lexicon and syntax as that has been emblematically
‘learned from Las Vegas’

40. The New Machine
• Michael Herr evokes it in his great book on the experience of Vietnam, called
Dispatches.
• 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 break- down of all previous
narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown of any shared language through
which a veteran might convey such experience, among the principal subjects of
the book and may be said to open up the place of a whole new reflexivity.
• 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.

41. VI. The Abolition of Critical Distance
• The conception of postmodernism outlined here is a historical rather than
a merely stylistic one.
• The two approaches in fact generate two very different ways of
conceptualizing the phenomenon as a whole, on the one hand moral
judgments, and on the other a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our
present of time in History of some positive moral evaluation of
postmodernism little needs to be said:
• The complacent camp-following celebration of this aesthetic new world is
surely unacceptable although it may be somewhat less obvious the degree
to which current fantasies about the salvational nature of high technology,
from chips to robots fantasies entertained not only by left as well as right
governments in distress, but also by many intellectuals are essentially of a
piece with more vulgar apologies for postmodernism.

42. • But in that case it is also logical to reject moralizing condemnations of
the postmodern and of its essential triviality, when juxtaposed against
the Utopian ‘high seriousness’ of the great modernisms: these are
also judgments one finds both on the Left and on the radical Right.
• 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.
• The position of the cultural critic and moralist: this last, along with all
the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in postmodernist 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.

43. The Need for Maps
• 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 namely the pedagogical and
the didactic.
• The teaching function of art was always stressed in classical times 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 Lukács and Brecht.
• 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.

44. Social Cartography and Symbol
• 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 to 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 indeed
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.