The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

26 The passage from modernity to postmodernityform fin de siecle Vienna), Le Cobusier (The city of tomorrow ạndthe Plan Voisin proposal for Pans of 1924), Frank Lloyd W nght(the Broadacre proj ect of 1935) to the larg-scale ura? rene:valefforts undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s m the spmt of hIghmodernism. The city, remarks de Certeau (1984, 95) 'is simultaneouslythe machinery and the hero of modernity.'. . .Georg Simmel put a rather specil gloss on the o nectlo .n m h .Isextraordinary essay 'The metropolIs and ment .al lIfe, publIshed m1911. Simmel there contemplated how we mIght respond to andinternalize, psychologically and intellectually, the incrdible diversity .·of experiences and stimuli to which modern urban hfe exposẹd s.We were on the one hand, liberated from the chains of subJectlvedependece and thereby allowed a much greater degree .of individuạlliberty. But this was achieved at the expense of .treatmg others illobjective and instrumental terms. We had no chOICe except to relate . 'to faceless 'others' via the cold and heartless calculus of the necessary ',money exchanges which could o-ordiate a pr?lier .atng . social ·'division of labour. We also submit to a ngorous discIplmmg m oursense of space and time, and surrender ourselve to . the hegemony of •calculating economic rationality. apid ,urblllzatlon, furthermre,produced what he called a 'blase attItude, for It was only by screelllg .out the complex stimuli that stemmed from the rush of modern hfethat we could tolerate its extremes. Our only outlet, he seems to say,is to cultivate a sham individualism through pursuit of signs ofstatus fashion or marks of individual eccentricity. Fashion, forexam;le, combines 'the attraction of differentiation and change wi:hthat of similarity and conformity'; the 'more nervous an epoch IS,the more rapidly. will its fashions change, becuse the need for .theattraction of differentiation, one of the essentIal agents of fashIon,goes hand in hand with the languishing of nervous energies' (quotedin Frisby, 1985, 98)." . .My purpose here is not to judge Simmel s VISIon (though t?eparallels and contrasts with Raban's more recent postm?derlllstessay are most instructive) but to see .it as one represetatlon of aconnection between the urban expenence and moderlllst thoughtand practice. The qualities of modernism seem to have varied, aḷbitin an interactive way, across the spectrum of the large polyglot cltlesthat emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed,certain kinds of modernism achieved a particular trajectory throughthe capitals of the world, each flourishing as a culturl arena o aparticular sort. The geographical trajectory from Pans to Berllll,Vienna, London, Moscow, Chicago, and New York could e reversẹdas well as short-cut depending upon which sort of moderlllst practlceone has in mind.Modernity and modernism 27If, for example, we were to look solely at the diffusion of thosematerial practices from which intellectual and aesthetic modernismdrew so uh of its stimulus - the machines, the new transport andcommurncatlọn systems, skyscra ers, bridges, and engineering wondersof all kms, as ell .as the ncredible instability and insecuritythat accompallled raId m?ovatl?n and social change - then theUnited States (and ChIcag m partIcular) should probably be regardedas the catalyst of moderlllsm after 1870 or so. Yet, in this case thevery lack of 'traditionalist' (feudal and aristocratic) resistance: andthe parallel poulr acceptance of broadly modernist sentiments (ofthe sort that TIChi documents), made the works of artists and intellectualsrather less important as the avant-garde cutting edge of socialchane. Edward Bellay's populist novel of a modernist utopia,Lookmg backwards, gamed rapid acceptance and even spawned apolitical movement in the 1890s. Edgar Allan Poe's work on theother hand, achieved very little initial honour in its Own land even ifhe was regarded as ọne of the. great modernist writers by Baudelaire(whose Poe translatIons, to thIS day ṿery popular, were illustrated byane: as early as the 1860s) . .LOIS Sullivan's architectural geniuslIk wIse , remamed . lar .gely bured m the extraordinary ferment ofChIago s mo .derlllzatIon. Danel Burnham's highly modernist conceptIOnof ratInal urba panlllng tended to get lost in his penchantfor .0rnamentatIon of burldmgs d classicsm of individual buildingdes gn. _ fiec; . lass. , traditIonalreSIstances to capitalist modern!?:':ltlQI),lI1 Europe, DlJ r1ie: Qfher hand, made the ,intellectual andesthetic movemnts of modernism much more important as a cuttl1.__ t;Qg.QLSOClaLchnge, givi to the vantgarde a political andSOCIal role r.?qJy. clellled them m the United States until after 1945!fardry'suprisingly, the history of intellectual and aesthetic modernisIS , UC? more Euro:-centered, with some of the less progressive or,.clasș-dlVl ded urban centres (such as Paris and Vienna) generatingsome of !he greatest ferments.. his'i nvidious, bt nev:rtheless sefl, t? impose upon this complexhIstory some elatlvely simple , renodlZatIons, if only to help understadwhat kmḍ of moderlll m the postmodernists are reactingagamst. The Enlightenment project, for example, took it as axiomaticthat there was orily oiie'pos'sible answer to any question. From this itfollowed that th world could be controlled and rationally ordered ifwe coul only plture and represent it rightly. But this presumed thatthere eXIsted a .mgle correct mode of representation which if wecould uncover it -' faiicCinis-was"wnat ·i11.tl:fi·c arid mathe:naticalendeavours wee all about), would provide the means to Enlightenment.ends. ThIS was a way of thinking that writers as diverse asVoltaIre, d'Alembert, Diderot, Condorcet, Hume, Adam Smith,' .