The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

114 The passage from modernity to postmodernity'otherness' prevails in a space of coexistence, bears an uncannyrelationship to the increasing ghettoization, disempowerment, andisolation of poverty and minority populations in the inner cities ofboth Britain and the United States. It is not hard to read a postmodernnovel as a metaphorical transect across the fragmentingsocial landscape, the sub-cultures and local modes of communication,in London, Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles. Since most socialindicators suggest a strong increase in actual ghettoization since1970, it is useful to think of postmodern fiction as perhaps mimeticof that fact.But the increasing affluence, power, and authority emerging at theother end of the social scale produces an entirely different ethos. Forwhile it is hard to see that working in the postmodern AT&Tbuilding by Philip Johnson is any different from working in themodernist Seagram building by Mies van der Rohe, the image projectedto the outside is different. 'AT&T insisted they wanted somethingother than just another glass box,' said the architect. 'We were lookingfor something that projected the company's image of nobility andstrength. No material does that better than granite' (even though itwas double the cost of glass). With luxury housing and corporateheadquarters, aesthetic twists become an expression of class power.Crimp (1987) takes it further:The present condition of architecture is one in which architectsdebate academic, abstract aesthetics while they are in fact in thethrall of the real-estate developers who are ruining our citiesand turning working class people out of their homes . ... PhilipJohnson's new skyscraper . .. is a developer building, with afew applied geegaws, thrust upon a neighborhood that is notparticularly in need of another skyscraper.Invoking the memory of Hitler's architect Albert Speer, Crimp goeson to attack the postmodernist mask of what he sees as a newauthoritarianism in the direction of city forms.I have chosen these two examples to illustrate how important it isto think through exactly what kinds of social practice, what sets ofsocial relations, are being reflected in different aesthetic movements.Yet this account is surely incomplete because we have yet to establish- and this will be the subject of enquiry in Parts II and III of thisstudy - exactly what post modernism might be mimetic of. Furthermore,it is just as surely dangerous to presuppose that postmodernismis solely mimetic rather than an aesthetic intervention in politics,economy, and social life in its own right. The strong injection ofPOSTmodernISM or postMODERNism? 115fiction as well as function into common sensibility, for example, musthave consequences, perhaps unforeseen, for social action. Even Marxinsisted, after all, that what distinguishes the worst of architects fromthe best of bees is that the architect erects stuctures in the imaginationbefore giving them material form. Changes in the way we imagine,think, plan, and rationalize are bound to have material consequences.Only in these very broad terms of the conjoining of mimesis andaesthetic intervention can the broad range of postmodernism makesense.Yet postmodernism sees itself rather more simply: for the mostpart as a wilful and rather chaotic movement to overcome all thesupposed ills of modernism. But in this regard I think postmodernistsexaggerate when they depict the modern as grossly as they do, eithercaricaturing the whole modernist movement to the point where, aseven Jencks admits, 'modern architecture bashing has become a formof sadism that is getting far too easy,' or isolating one wing ofmodernism for criticism (Althusserianism, modern brutalism, orwhatever) as if that was all there was. There were, after all, manycross-currents within modernism, and postmodernists echo some ofthem quite explicitly Gencks, for example, looks back to the period1870-1914, even to the confusions of the 1920s, while including LeCorbusier's monastery at Ronchamp as an important precursor ofone aspect of postmodernism). The meta-narratives that the postmodernistsdecry (Marx, Freud, and even later figures like Althusser)were much more open, nuanced, and sophisticated than the criticsadmit. Marx and many of the Marxists (I think of Benjamin, Thompson,Anderson, as diverse examples) have an eye for detail, fragmentation,and disjunction that is often caricatured out of existencein postmodern polemics. Marx's account of modernization isexceedingly rich in insights into the roots of modernist as well aspostmodernist sensibility.It is equally wrong to write off the material achievements ofmodernist practices so easily. Modernists found a way to control andcontain an explosive capitalist condition. They were effective forexample, in the organization of urban life and the capacity to buildspace in such a way as to contain the intersecting processes that havemade for a rapid urban change in twentieth-century capitalism. Ifthere is a crisis implicit in all of that, it is by no means clear that it isthe modernists, rather than the capitalists, who are to blame. Thereare, indeed, some extraordinary successes in the modernist pantheon(I note the British school building and design programme in the early1960s that solved some of the acute housing problems of educationwithin tight budget constraints). While some housing projects were