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Excerpts
“Postmodernism: A Preface
Postmodernism: does it exist at all and, if so, what does it mean? Is it a concept or a practice, a matter of local style or a whole new period or economic phase? What are its forms, effects, place? How are we to mark its advent? Are we truly beyond the modern, truly in (say) a postindustrial age?
The essays in this book take up these questions and many others besides. Some critics, like Rosalind Krauss and Douglas Crimp, define postmodernism as a break with the aesthetic field of modernism. Others, like Gregory Ilmer and Edward Said, engage the “object of post-criticism” and the politics of interpretation today. Some, like Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, detail the postmodern moment as a new, “schizophrenic” mode of space and time. Others, like Craig Owens and Kenneth Frampton, frame its rise in the fall of modern myths of progress and mastery. But all the critics, save Jurgen Habermas, hold this belief in common: that the project of modernity is now deeply problematic.
Assailed though it is by pre-, anti- and postmodernists alike, modernism as a practice has not failed. On the contrary: modernism, at least as a tradition, has “won” - but its victory is a
Phyrric
This state of affairs suggests that if the modern project is to be saved at all, it must be exceeded. This is the imperative of much vital art of the present; it is also one incentive of this book. But how can we exceed the modern? How can we break with a program that makes a value of crisis (modernism), or progress beyond the era of Progress (modernity), or transgress the ideology of the transgressive (avant-gardism)?. One can say, with Paul de Man, that every period suffers a “modern” moment, a moment of crisis or reckoning in which it becomes self-conscious as a period, but this is to view the modern ahistorically, almost as a category. True, the word may have “lost a fixed historical reference” (Habermas=, but the ideology has not: modernism is a cultural construct based on specific conditions; it has a historical limit. And one motive of these essays is to trace this limit, to mark our change.
A first step, then, is to specify what modernity may be. Its project, Habermas writes, is one with that of the Enlightment: to develop the spheres of science, morality and art “according to their inner logic.” This program is still at work, say, in postwar or late modernism, with its stress on the purity of each art and the autonomy of culture as a whole. Rich though this disciplinary project once was - and urgent given the incursions of kitsch on one side and academe on the other - it nevertheless came to rarefy culture, to reify its forms - so much so that it provoked, at least in art, a counter-project in the form of an anarchic avant-garde (one thinks of dadaism and surrealism especially). This is the “modernism” that Habermas opposes to “the project of modernity” and dismisses as a negation of but one sphere: “Nothing remais from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory effect does not follow.”
Although repressed in late modernism, this “surrealist revolt” is returned in postmodernist art (or rather, its critique of representation is reaffirmed), for the mandate of postmodernism is also: “change the object itself.” This, as Krauss wrirtes, postmodernist practice “is not defined in relation to a given medium... but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms.” In this way the very nature of art has changed; so too has the object of criticism: as Ulmer notes, a new “paraliterary” practice has come to the fore which dissolves the line between creative and critical forms. In the same way the old opposition of theory and practice is refused, especially, as Owens notes, by feminist artists for whom critical intervention is a tactical, political necessity. The discourse of knowledge is affected no less: in the midst of the academic disciplines, Jameson writes, extraordinary new projects have emerged. “Is the work of Michel Foucault, for example, to be called philosophy, history, social theory or political science?” (One may ask the same of the “literary criticism” of Jameson or Said.)
As the importance of a Foucault, a Jacques Derrida or a Roland Barthes attests, postmodernism is hard to conceive without continental theory, structuralism and poststructuralism in particular. Both have led us to reflect upon culture as a corpus of codes or myths (Barthes), as a set of imaginary resolutions to real contradictions (Claude Lévi-Strauss). In this light, a poem or picture is not necessarily privileged, and the artifact is likely to be treated less as a work in modernist terms - unique, symbolic, visionary - than as a text in a postmodernist sense - “already wrtitten”, allegorical, contigent. With this textual mode, one postmodernist strategy becomes clear: to deconsturct modernism not in order to seal it in its own image but in order to open it, to rewrite it; to open its closed systems (like the museum) to the “heterogeneity of texts” (Crimp), to rewrite its universal techniques in terms of “synthetic contradictions” (Frampton) - in short, to challenge its master narratives with the “discourse of others” (Owens).
But this very plurality may be problematic: for if modernism consists of so many unique models (D.H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust...), then “there will be as many different forms of postmodernism as there were high modernisms in place, since the former are at least initially specific and local reactions against these models” (Jameson). As a result, these different forms might be reduced to indifference, or postmodernism dismissed as relativism (just as poststructuralism is dismissed as the absurd notion that nothing exists “outside the text”). This conflation, I think, should be guarded against, for postmodernism is not pluralism - the quixotic notion that all postions in culture and politics are now open and equal. This apocalyptic belief that anything goes, that the “end of ideology” is here, is simply the inverse of the fatalistic belief that nothing works, that we live under a “total system” without hope or redress - the very acquiescence that Ernest Mandel calls the “ideology of late capitalism”.
Clearly, each position on or within postmodernism is marked by political “affiliations” (Said) and historical agendas. How we conceive postmodernism, then, is critical to how we represent both present and past - which aspects are stressed, which repressed. For what does it mean to periodize in terms of postmodernism: to argue that ours is an era of the death of the subject (Baudrillard) or of the loss of master narratives (Owens), to assert that we live in a consumer society that renders opposition difficult (Jameson) or amidst a mediocracy in which the humanities are marginal indeed (Said)? Such notions are not apocalyptic: they mark uneven developments, not clean breaks and new days. Perhaps, then, postmodernism is best conceived as a conflict of new and old modes - cultural and economic, the one not entirely autonomous, the other not all determinative - and of the interests vested therein. This at least makes the agenda of this book clear: to disengage the emergent cultural forms and social relations (Jameson) and to argue the import of doing so.
Even now, of course, there are standard positions to take on postmodernism: one may support postmodernism as populist and attack modernism as elitist, or, conversely, support modernism as elitist - as culture proper - and attack postmodernism as mere kitsch. Such views reflect one thing: that postmodernism is publicly regarded (no doubt vis-à-vis postmodern architecture) as a necessary turn toward “tradition”. Briefly, then, I want to sketch an oppositional postmodernism, the one which informs this book,
In cultural politics today, a basic opposition exists between a postmodernism which seeks to deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo and a postmodernism which repudiates the former to celebrate the latter: a postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism of reaction. These essays deal mostly with the former - its desire to change the object and its social context. The postmodernism of reaction is by far better known: though not monolithic, it is singular in its repudiation of modernism. This repudiation, voiced most shrilly perhaps by neoconservatives but echoed everywhere, is strategic: as Habermas cogently argues, the neoconservatives sever the cultural from the social, then blame the practices of the one (modernism) for the ills of the other (modernization). With cause and effect thus confounded, “adversary” culture is denounced even as the economic and political status quo is affirmed - indeed, a new “ affirmative” culture is proposed.
Accordingly, culture remains a force but largely of social control, a gratuitous image drawn over the face of instrumentality (Frampton). Thus is this postmodernism concveived in therapeutc, not to say cosmetic, terms: as a return to the verities of tradition (in art, family, religion...) Modernism is reduced to a stule (e.g., “formalism” or the Internation Stule) and condemned, or excised entirely as a cultural mistake; pre- and postmodern elements are then elided, and the humanist tradition is preserved. But what is this return if not a resurrection of lost traditions set against modernism, a master plan imposed on a heterogeneous present?
A post modernism of resistance, then, arises as a counter-practice not only to the official culture of modernism but also the “false normativity” of a reactionary postmodernism. In opposition (but not only in opposition), a resistant postmodernism is concerned with a critical deconstruction of tradition, not an instrumental pastiche of pop- or pseudo- historical forms, with a critique of origins, not a return to them. In short, it seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations.
The essasy that follow are diverse. Many subjects are discussed (architecture, sculpture, painting, photography, music, film...) but as practices transformed, not as ahistorical categories. So too many methods are engaged (structuralism and poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanal
ysis, feminist criticism, Marxism...) but as models in conflict, not as sundry “approaches”.
Jurgen Habermas poses the basic issues of a culture heir to the Enlightment - of modernism and the avant-garde, of a progressive modernity and a reactonary postmodernity. He affirms the modern refusal of the “normative” but warn against “false negations”; at the same time, he denounces (neoconservative) antimodernism as reactionary. Opposed to both revolt and reaction, he calls for a critical reappropriation of the modern project. [see Jeff Wall or Gursky]
In a sense, however, this critique belies the crisis - a crisis that Kenneth Frampton considers vias-à-vis modern architecture. The utopianism implicit in the Enlightment and programmatic in modernism has led to catastrophe - the fabrics of non-Western cultures rent, the Western city reduced to the megapolis. Postmodern architects tend to respond superficially - with a populist “masking”, a stylistic “avant-gardism” or a withdrawal into hermetic codes. Frampton calls instead for a critical mediation of the forms of modern civilization and of local culture, a mutual deconstruction of universal techniques and regional vernaculars.
The crisis of modernity was felt radically in the late 1950s and ealry 60’s, the moment ofter cited as the postmodernist break and still the site of ideological conflict (mostly disavowel) today, If this crisis was experienced as a revolt of cultures without, it was no less marked by a rupture of culture within - even in its rarer realms, for example, in sculpture. Rosalind Krayss details how the loguc of modern sculpture led in the 60s to its own deconstruction - and to the deconstruction of the modern order of the arts based on the Enlightment order of distinct and autonomous disciplines. Today, she argues, “sculpture” exists as but one term in an “expanded field” of forms, all derived structurally. This, for Krayss, constitutes the postmodernist break: art conceived in terms of structure, not medium, orented to “cultural” terms”.
Douglas Crim also posits the existence of a break with modernism, specifically with its definition of the plane of representation. In the work of Robert Rauschenberg and others, the “natural”, uniform surface of modernist painting is displaced, via the photographic procedures, by the thoroughly cultural, textual site of the postmodernist picture. This aesthetic break, Crimp suggests, may signal an epistemological break with the very “table” or “archive” of modern knowledge. This he then explores vis-à-vis the modern institution of the museum, the authority of which rests n a representation conceit - a “science” of origins that does not hold up to scrutiny. Thus, he asserts, is the homogeneous series of works in the museum threatened, in postmodernism, by the heterogeneity of texts.
Craig Owens also regards postmodernism as a crisis in Western representation, its authority and universal claims - a crisis announced by heretofore marginal or repressed discourses, feminism most significant among them. As a radical critique of the master narratives of modern man, feminism, Owens argues, is a political and an epistemological event - political in that it challenges the order of patriarchal society, epistemological in that it questions the structure of its representations. This critique, he notes, is focused sharply in the contemporary practice of many woman artists, eight of whom he discusses.
The critique of representation is of course associated with poststructuralist theory, addressed by Gregory Ulmer. Ulmer argues that criticism, its conventions of representation, are transformed today as the arts were at the advent of modernism. The transformation he details in terms of collage and montage (associated with various modernisms); deconstruction (specifically the critique of mimesis and the sign, associated with Jacques Derrida); and allegory (a form that attends to the historical materiality of thoght, associated now with Walter Benjamin). These practices, Ulmer argues, have led to new cultural forms, examples of which are the writing of Roland Barthes and the composing of John Cage.
Frederic Jameson is less sanguine about the dissolution of the sign and the loss od representation. He notes, for example, that pastiche has become our ubiquitous mode (in film, especially), which suggests not only that we are awash in a sea of private languages but also that we wish to be recalled to times less problematic than our own. This in turn points to a refusal to engage the present or to think historically - a refusal that Jameson regards as characteristic of the “schizophrenia” of consumer society.
Jean Baudrillard also reflects upon our contemporary of public space and time. In a world of simulation, he writes, causality is lost: the object no longer serves as a mirror of the subject, and there is no longer a “scene”, private or public - only “ob-scene” information. In effect, the self becomes a “schizo”, a “pure screen... for all the networks of influence.”
In a world so described, the very hope of resistance seems absurd: a resignation to which Edward Said objects. The status of information - or, for that matter, criticism - is hardly neutral: who benefits? And with this question he grounds these texts in the present context, “the Age of Reagan”. To Said, the postmodern crossing of lines is mostly apparent: the cult of “the expert”, the authority of “the field” still hold. Indeed, a “doctrine of noninterference” is tacitly assumed whereby “the humanities” and “politics” are held aloof from each other. But this only acts to rarefy the one and free the other, and to conceal the affilliations of both. As a result, the humanities come to serve in two ways: to disguise the unhumanistic operation of information and “to represent human marginality”. Here, then, we have come full circle: the Enlightment, the disciplinary project of modernity, now mystifies: it makes for “religious constituencies”, not “secular communities”, and this abets state power. For Said (as for the italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci) such power resides as much in civil institutions as in political and military ones. Thus, like Jameson, Said urges an awareness of the “hegemonic” aspects of cultural texts and proposes a counter-practice of interference. Here (in solidarity with Frampton, Owens, Ulmer...), he cites these strategies: a critique of official representations, alternative uses of informational modes (like photography), and a recovery of (the history of) others.
Though diverse, these essays share many concerns: a critique of Western representation(s) and modern “supreme fictions”; a desire to think in terms sensitive to difference (of others without opposition, of heterogeneity without hierarchy); a skepticism regarding autonomous “spheres” of culture or separate “fields” of experts; an imperative to go beyond formal filliations (of text to text) to trace social affiliations (the institutional “density” of the text in the world); in short, a will to grasp the present nexus of culture and politics and to affirm a practice resistant both to academic modernism and political reaction.
These concerns are signalled here by the rubric “anti-aesthetic”, which is not intended as one more assertion of the negation of art or of representation as such. It was modernism that was marked by such “negations”, espoused in the anarchic hope of an “emancipatory effect” or in the utopian dream of a time of pure presence, a space beyond representation. This is not the case here: all these critics take for granted that we are never outside representation - or rather, never outside its politics. Here then, “anti-aesthetic” is the sign not of a modern nihilism - which so ofter transgressed the law only to confirm it - but rather of a critique which destructures the order of representations in order to reinscribe them.
“Anti-aesthetic” also signals that the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question here: the idea that aesthetic experience exists apart, withou “purpose”, all but beyond history, or that art can now efffect a world at once (inter)subjective, concrete and universal - a symbolic totality. Like “postmodernism”, then, “anti-aesthetic” marks a cultural position on the present: are categories afforded by the aesthetic still valid? (For example, is the model of subjective taste not threatened by a mass mediation, or that of universal vision by the rise of other cultures?) More locally, “anti-aesthetic” also signals a practice, cross-disciplinary in nature, that is sensistive to cultural form engaged in a politic (e.g, feminist art) or rooted in a vernacular - that is, to forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm.
The adventures of the aesthetic make up one of the great narratives of modernity: from the time of its autonomy through art-for-art’s-sake to it status as a necessary negative category, a critique of the world as it is. It is this last moment (figured brilliantly in the writings of Theodor Adorno) that is hard to relinquish: the notion of the aesthetic as subversive, a critical interstice in an otherwise instrumental world. Now, however, we have to consider that this aesthetic space too is eclipsed - or rather, that its criticality is now largely illusory (and so instrumental). In such an event, the strategy of an Adorno, of “negative commitment”, might have to be revised or rejected. This, at least, is the thrust of the essays in this book. Such a strategy, of course, remains romantic if it is not aware of its own limits, which in the present world are strict indeed. And yet this much is clear: in the face of a culture of reaction of all sides, a practice of resistance is needed.”
Hal Foster
Contents
Hal Foster - “Postmodernism: A Preface”
Jurgen Habermas - “Modernity - An Incomplete Project”
Kenneth Frampton - “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”
Rosalind Krauss - “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”
Douglas Crimp - “On the Musuem’s Ruins”
Craig Owens - “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and
Postmodernism”
Gregory L. Ulmer - “The Object of Post-Criticism”
Frederic Jameson - “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”
Jean Baudrillard - “The Ecstasy of Communication”
Edward W. Said - “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community”