The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

8 The passage from modernity to postmodernityPlate 1.2 Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1983 and Untitled #92, 1981.Postmodernism and the mask: Cindy Sherman's photographic art uses herselfas a subject in multiple disguises, many of which make overt reference to filmor media images.all metaphysical solemnities, sometimes by a brutal aesthetics ofsqualor and shock.Introduction 9to the 'monotomy' of universal modernism's VISIOn of the world.'Generally perceived as positivistic, technocentric, and rationalistic,universal modernism has been identified with the belief in linearprogress, absolute truths, the rational planning of ideal social orders,and the standardization of knowledge and production.' Postmodernism,by way of contrast, privileges 'heterogeneity and differenceas liberative forces in the redefinition of cultural discourse.'Fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or'totalizing' discourses (to use the favoured phrase) are the hallmarkof postmodernist thought. The rediscovery of pragmatism in philosophy(e. g. Rorty, 1979), the shift of ideas about the philosophyof science wrought by Kuhn (1962) and Feyerabend (1975), Foucault'semphasis upon discontinuity and difference in history and his privilegingof 'polymorphous correlations in place of simple or complexcasuality,' new developments in mathematics emphasizing indeterminacy(catastrophe and chaos theory, fractal geometry), the reemergenceof concern in ethics, politics, and anthropology for thevalidity and dignity of 'the other,' all indicate a widespread andprofound shift in 'the structure of feeling.' What all these exampleshave in common is a rejection of 'meta-narratives' (large-scale theoreticalinterpretations purportedly of universal application), whichleads Eagleton to complete his description of postmodernism thus:Post-modernism signals the death of such 'metanarratives'whose secretly terroristic function was to ground and legitimatethe illusion of a 'universal' human history. We are now in theprocess of wakening from the nightmare of modernity, with itsmanipulative reason and fetish of the totality, into the laid-backpluralism of the post-modern, that heterogeneous range of lifestylesand language games which has renounced the nostalgicurge to totalize and legitimate itself . ... Science and philosophymust jettison their grandiose metaphysical claims and view themselvesmore modestly as just another set of narratives.If these depictions are correct, then it would certainly seem as ifRaban's Soft city is suffused with postmodernist sentiment. But thereal import of that has still to be established. Since the only agreedpoint of departure for understanding the postmodern is in its purportedrelation to the modern, it is to the meaning of the latter termthat I shall first attend.In more positive vein, the editors of the architectural journalPRECIS 6 (1987, 7-24) see postmodernism as a legitimate reaction