POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism is often understood in opposition to modernism, as a corrective
movement that comes after—‘post’—modernism. As Derrida notes, ‘If modernism
distinguishes itself by striving for absolute domination, then postmodernism might be the
realisation or the experience of its end, the end of the plan of domination.’^1 Not all,
however, would accept this temporal distinction between modernism and postmodernism.
Jürgen Habermas, for example, criticizes the prefix ‘post’ as being not only misguided in
its ‘rejection’ of the past, but also weak in its failure to give the present a name.
Meanwhile, for Jean-François Lyotard, whose Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge remains a seminal work of postmodernist theory, the postmodern is precisely
part of the modern. It amounts to a moment of recuperation within a cyclical process
which leads to ever new modernisms.
Postmodernism takes a variety of manifestations in its varying cultural contexts.
Critics such as Hal Foster have detected two seemingly contradictory strains in
postmodernism, a postmodernism of reaction which repudiates modernism and celebrates
the status quo, and a postmodernism of resistance that attempts to continue the project of
modernism while subjecting it to critical re-evaluation. Clearly postmodernism, no less
than modernism, is a term that defies any easy definition. We may start, however, by
challenging Charles Jencks’s limited appropriation of the term to refer to an architectural
style popular in commercial developments in the 1980s, which relies heavily on
historicist motifs. Rather we may wish to focus on the very processes of commodification
which underpinned such commercial architecture, and subscribe instead to Fredric
Jameson’s more sophisticated understanding of the term as necessarily linked to the
cultural conditions of late capitalist society.
Jameson is indebted here, as is Jean Baudrillard, to the insights of thinkers such as
Guy Debord. Although Jameson and Baudrillard diverge in their theoretical positions, as
is evident in their respective critiques of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, they
share a common inheritance in Debord’s analysis of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. It is
hardly surprising that the privileging of the commodified image observed by Debord
should find its logical conclusion in the commercial office block championed by Jencks,
and in the advertising hoardings of a gambling town such as Las Vegas celebrated
equally uncritically by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown.
With the exception of the article by Lyotard, ‘Domus and the Megalopolis’, which is
largely a critique of phenomenology and the politics implicit in the work of Martin
Heidegger, many of the essays in this section are directed against postmodernism. Yet
even this opposition is by no means straightforward. Much of the writing, not least that of
Jameson and Baudrillard, comes across as somewhat ambivalent. Their critiques appear
to falter under the obvious fascination that postmodernism holds over them. Therein
perhaps lies the strength of postmodernism.
NOTE
1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Architecture Where The Desire May Live’, pp. 320–1.Rethinking Architecture 198