The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

32 The passage from modernity to postmodernityPlate 1,5 The myth of the machine dominated modernist as well as realistart in the inter-war years: Th omas Hart Benton's 1929 mural 'Instrumentsof Power' is a typical exemplar,war period took a strongly positivist turn and, through the ntensiveefforts of the Vienna Circle, established a new style of phIlosophywhich was to become central to social thought after World War I.Logical positivism was as compatible with the practices of m?dermstarchitecture as it was with the advance of all forms of SCIence asavatars of technical control. This was the period when houses andcities could be openly conceived of as 'machines for living in', I wasduring these years also that the powerful Congress of ,InternatlonalModern Architects (ClAM) came together to adopt ItS celebratedAthens Charter of 1933, a charter that for the next thirty years or sowas to define broadly what modernist architectural practice was tobe about.Such a limited vision of the essential qualities of modernism wasopen to easy enough perversion and abuse ' , There are stron ,g objectionseven within modernism (think of Chaphn's ,Mod ,ern T! mes) t theidea that the machine, the factory, and the ratlonalIze lty provIde asufficiently rich conception to define th eternal qualt1es . of modernlife, The problem for 'heroic' modermsm was, qUIte sImply, thatonce the machine myth was abandoned, any myth could be l?dgedinto that central position of the 'eternal truth' presupposd m temodernist project, Baudelaire himself, for example, had deIcaed hISessay 'The Salon of 1846' to the bourgeois who sought to realIze theModernity and modernism 33idea of the future in all its diverse forms, political, industrial, andartistic.' An economist like Schumpeter would surely have applaudedthat.The Italian futurists were so fascinated by speed and power thatthey embraced creative destruction and violent militarism to thepoint where Mussolini could become their hero, De Chirico lostinterest in modernist experimentation after World War I andsought a commercialized art with roots in classical beauty mingledt po,:erful horses and narcissistic pictures of himself dressed upIII hIstn costumes (all of which were to earn him the approval ofMussolIm), PO , und t?O" with his thirst for machine efficiency oflanguag an hIS a? IratlOn of he avant-gardist warrior poet capableof dommatmg a WItless multItude,' became deeply attached to apolitical regime (Mussolini's) that could ensure that the trains ran ontime. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, may have actively attackedmodernism's aesthetic principles in his resurrection of classicistthemes, but e ws to take 0:ver many modernist techniques and putthem to natlonalIst ends WIth the same ruthlessness that Hitler'sengineers showed in taking over the practices of Bauhaus design ineir ontruction of the death camps (see, for example, Lane's, 1985,Illummatmg stdy, Architecure and politics in Germany, 1918-1945),I proved possIble to cobme up-to-date scientific engineering practlces,as mcorporated m the most extreme forms of technicalbureaucraticand mach ,ine rationality, with a myth of Aryan superiorityand the ?lood and SOlI of the Fatherland. It was exactly in this waythat a VIrulent form of 'reactionary modernism' came to have thepuchase it di in N azi Germany, suggesting that this whole episode,. whIle modermst m.certain senses, owed more to the weakness ofEnlihtenment thought than it did to any dialectal reversal or progr:eSSlOnto a 'natural' conclusion (Herf, 1984, 233).I This was a period when the always latent tensions between internationalișmand n tionalism, between universalism and class politics,were heIghtened mto absolute and unstable contradiction, i It washard t rmain indifferent ,to the Russian revolution, the rising powerof socIalIst and commumst movements, the collapse of economiesand governments, and the rise of fascism. Politically committed arttook over one wing of the modernist movement, Surrealism, construtivsm,a , nd socialst realism all sought to mythologize the proletantm theIr resI;>ect!ve ways, and the Russians set about inscribingthat m space, as dId a whole succession of socialist governments inEurope, through the creation of buildings like the celebrated KarlMarx-Hof in Vienna (designed not only to house workers but also tobe a bastion of military defence against any rural conservative assault