The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

64 The passage from modernity to postmodernityPostmodernism 65change. But I think I have said enough as to what constitutes thegeneral frame of that 'profound shift in the structure of feeling' thatseparates modernity from postmodernity to begin upon the task ofunravelling its origins and speculatively constructing an interpretationof what it might betoken for our future. Nevertheless, I think ithelpful to round out this portrait with a more detailed look at howpostmodernism is manifest in contemporary urban design, because acloser focus helps reveal the fine-grained textures rather than thebroad brush strokes of which the postmodernist condition is constructedin daily life. This is, then, the task I shall take up in the nextchapter.NoteOCITIZENThe illustrations used in this chapter have been criticized by some feminists ofa postmodern persuasion. They were deliberately chosen because they allowedcomparison across the supposed pre-modern, modern and postmodern divides.The classical Titian nude is actively reworked in Manet's modernist Olympia.Rauschenberg simply reproduces through post modern collage, David Salle superimposesdifferent worlds, and the Citizen's Watch advertisement (the mostoutrageous of the lot but which appeared in the weekend magazine supplementsof several quality newspapers in Britain for an extended period) is a slick useof the same postmodern technique for purely commercial purposes. All theillustrations make use of a woman's body to inscribe their particular message.The additional point I sought to make is that the subordination of women, oneof the many 'troublesome contradictions' in bourgeois Enlightenment practices(see p. 14 above and p. 252 below), can expect no particular relief by appealto postmodernism. I thought the illustrations made the point so well that nofurther elaboration was necessary. But, in some circles at least, these particularpictures were not worth their usual thousand words. Nor, it seems, should Ihave relied upon post modernists appreciating their own technique of tellingeven a slightly different story by way of the illustrations as compared tothe text. (J line, 1991.)Plate 1.10 An advertisement for Citizen Watches engages directly with thepostmodemist techniques of superimposition of ontologically different worldsthat bear no necessary relation to each other (compare the David Sallepainting of plate 1.6). The watch being advertised is almost invisible.help of Hassan's schema, is certainly incomplete. It is equally certainlyrendered fragmentary and ephemeral by the sheer plurality and elusivenessof cultural forms wrapped in the mysteries of rapid flux and