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The Rise of
Aesthetic Populism
It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic
production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical
problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed
from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism as
it will be outlined in the following pages initially began to emerge
More decisively than in the other arts or media. postmodernist positions
in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of
architectural high modernism and of the so-called International Style
(Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies), where formal criticism and
analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building into
a virtual sculpture, or monumental 'duck', as Robert Venturi puts it)
are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of the
aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruction
of the fabric of the traditional city and of its older neighbourhood
culture (by way of the radical disiunction of the new Utopian high modernist
building from its surrounding context); while the prophetic elitism
and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly denounced
in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.
Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself
as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi's influential
manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately
wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit of
drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms
enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially
high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or
commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused
with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture Industry
so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from
Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno
[p. 55]
and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have in fact been fascinated
precisely by this whole 'degraded' landscape of schlock and kitsch,
of TV series and Readers' Digest culture, of advertising and motels,
of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature
with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance,
the popular biography, the murder mystery and science- fiction or fantasy
novel: materials they no longer simply 'quote', as a Joyce or a Mahler
might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.
Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural
affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern whether celebratory or couched
in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation bear a strong family
resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations
which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration
of a whole new type of society, most hmously baptized 'post-industrial
society' (Daniel Bell), but often also designated consumer society,
media society, information society, electronic society or 'high tech',
and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of
demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in
question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely the
primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle.
The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with
the signal exception of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late
Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomize the historic originality
of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or moment in the
evolution of capital), but also to demonstrate that it is, if anything,
a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it.
I will return to this argument later; sufffice it for the moment to
emphasize a point I have defended in greater detail elsewhere*, namely
that every position on postmodernism in culture whether apologia or
stigmatization is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an
implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational
capitalism today.
Postmodernism as Cultural Dominant
A last preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as
stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement
among others. I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis,
and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodization
has come to seem most problematical indeed. I have argued elsewhere
that all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried
or repressed theory of historical periodization; in any case, the conception
of the 'genealogy' largely lays to rest traditional theoretical worries
about so-called linear history, theories of 'stages', and teleological
historiography. In the present context, however, lengthier theoretical
discussion of such (very real) issues can perhaps be replaced bv a few
substantive remarks.
One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is
[p. 56]
that these tend
to obliterate difference, and to project an idea of the historical period
as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable 'chronological'
metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why
it seems to me essential to grasp 'postmodernism' not as a style, but
rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence
and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features.
Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmodernism
is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if not,
indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that
all of the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be
detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism (including
such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein, Raymond
Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright postmodernists,
avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account by this view
is, however, the social position of the older modernism, or better still,
its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian
bourgeoisie, for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously
ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive and generally
'anti-social'. It will be argued here that a mutation in the sphere
of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso
and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on the whole, as rather
'realistic'; and this is the result of a canonization and an academic
institutionalization of the modern movement generally, which can be
traced to the late 1950's. This is indeed surely one of the most plausible
explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger
generation of the l960's will now confront the formerly oppositional
modern movement as a set of dead classics, which 'weigh like a nightmare
on the brains of the living', as Marx once said in a different context.
As for the postmodern
revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its
own offensive features from obscurity and sexually explicit material
to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political
deviance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at
the most extreme moments of high modernism - no longer scandalize anyone
and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves
become institutionalized and are at one with the official culture of
Western society. What has happened is that aesthetic production today
has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic
economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming
goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover,
now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position
to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities
then find recognition in the institutional support of all kinds available
for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other
forms of patronage. Architecture is, however, of all the arts that closest
constitutively to the economic with which, in the form of commissions
and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship: it will
therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the
[p. 57]
new postmodern
architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose
expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. That
these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship
than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project
we will try to suggest later on. Yet this is the point at which we must
remind the reader of the obvious, namely that this whole global, yet
American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression
of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout
the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside
of culture is blood, torture, death and horror.
The first point
to be made about the conception of periodization in dominance, therefore,
is that even if all the constitutive features of postmodernism were
identical and continuous with those of an older modernism-a position
I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier
analysis of modernism proper could dispel-the two phenomena would still
remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function, owing
to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system
of late capital, and beyond that, to the transformation of the very
sphere of culture in contemporary society. More on this point at the
conclusion of the present essay. I must now briefly address a different
kind of objection to periodization, a different kind of concern about
its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, which one finds most often
on the Left. And it is certain that there is a strange quasi-Sartrean
irony-a 'winner loses' logic-which tends to surround any effort to describe
a 'system', a totalizing dynamic, as these are detected in the movement
of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the
vision of some increasingly total system or logic-the Foucault of the
prisons book is the obvious example-the more powerless the reader comes
to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an
increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses,
since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the
impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation,
are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model
itself.
I have felt, however,
that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural
logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and
assessed. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today
is 'postmodern' in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term.
The postmodern is however the force held in which very different kinds
of cultural impulses what Raymond Williams has usefully termed 'residual'
and 'emergent' forms of cultural production must make their way. If
we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we
fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random
difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity
is undecidable. This has been at any rate the political spirit in which
the following analysis was devised: to project some conception of a
new systemic cultural norm and its reproduction, in order to reflect
more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural
politics today.
[p. 58]
The exposition
will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern:
a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary
'theory' and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum;
a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public
History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose 'schizophrenic'
structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic
relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional
ground tone-what I will call 'intensities'-which can best be grasped
by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive
relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself
a figure for a whole new economic world system; and, after a brief account
of postmodernist mutations in the lived experience of built space itself,
some reflections on the mission of political art in the bewildering
new world space of late multinational capital.
1. The Deconstruction
of Expression
'Peasant Shoes'
We will begin with one of the canonical works of high modernism in visual
art, Van Gogh's well-known painting of the peasant shoes, an example
which as you can imagine has not been innocently or randomly chosen.
I want to propose two ways of reading this painting, both of which in
some fashion reconstruct the reception of the work in a twostage or
double-level process. I first want to suggest that if this copiously
reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it
requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished
work emerges. Unless that situation which has vanished into the past
is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object,
a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act
in its own right, as praxis and as production.
This last term suggests that one way of reconstructing the initial situation
to which the work is somehow a response is by stressing the raw materials,
the initial content, which it confronts and which reworks, transforms,
and appropriates. In Van Gogh, that content, those initial raw materials,
are, I will suggest, to be grasped simply as the whole object world
of agricultural misery, of stark rural roverty,and the whole rudimentary
human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most
brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state. Fruit trees in
this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil;
the people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures
of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How
is it then that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into
a hallucinatory surface of colour, while his village stereotypes are
suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green? I will briefly
suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent
transformation of a drab peasant object world into
[p. 59]
the most glorious
materialization of pure colour in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian
gesture: as an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new
Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense sight,
the visual, the eye which it now reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous
space in its own right part of some new division of labour in the body
of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates
the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time
that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation
for them.
There is, to be
sure, a second reading of Van Gogh which can hardly be ignored when
we gaze at this particular painting, and that is Heidegger's central
analysis in Der Urspring des Kunstwerks, which is organized around the
idea that the work of art emerges within the gap between Earth and World,
or what I would prefer to translate as the meaningless materiality of
the body and nature and the meaning-endowment of history and of the
social. We will return to that particular gap or rift later on; suffice
it here to recall some of the famous phrases, which model the process
whereby these henceforth illustrious peasant shoes slowly recreate about
themselves the whole missing object-world which was once their lived
context. 'In them,' says Heidegger, 'there vibrates the silent call
of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal
in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.' 'This equipment,' he
goes on, 'belongs to the earth and it is protected in the world of the
peasant woman . . . Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the
equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth . . . This entity
emerges into the unconcealment of its being', by way of the mediation
of the work of art, which draws the whole absent world and earth into
revelation around itself, along with the heavy tread of the peasant
woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing, the
worn and broken instruments of labour in the furrows and at the hearth.
Heidegger's account needs to be completed by insistence on the renewed
materiality of the work, on the transformation of one form of materiality
the earth itself and its paths and physical objects into that other
materiality of oil paint affirmed and foregrounded in its own right
and for its own visual pleasures; but has nonetheless a satisfying plausibility.
'Diamond Dust Shoes'
At any rate, both of these readings may be described as hermeneutical,
in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form, is taken
as a clue or symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its
ultimate truth. Now we need to look at some shoes of a different kind,
and it is pleasant to be able to draw for such an image on the recent
work of the central figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol's
Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the
immediacy of Van Gogh's footgear: indeed, I am tempted to say that it
does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes
even a minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the turning
of a museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some inexplicable
natural object. On the level of the content, we have to do with what
are now far more clearly fetishes, both in the Freudian and in the
[p. 60]
Marxian sense (Derrida
remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian Paar Baurenshuhe, that the
Van Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair, which allows neither for
perversion nor for fetishization). Here, however, we have a random collection
of dead objects, hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips,
as shorn of their earlier life-world as the pile of shoes left over
from Auschwitz, or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible
and tragic fire in a packed dancehall. There is therefore in Warhol
no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture, and to restore to these
oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball,
the world of jetset fashion or of glamour magazines. Yet this is even
more paradoxical in the light of biographical information: Warhol began
his artistic career as a commercial illustrator for shoe fashions and
a designer of display windows in which various pumps and slippers figured
prominently. Indeed, one is tempted to raise here-far too prematurely-one
of the central issues about postmodernism itself and its possible political
dimensions: Andy Warhol's work in fact turns centrally around commodification,
and the great billboard images of the Coca-cola bottle or the Campbell's
Soup Can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition
to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements.
If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one
would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities
of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital.
But there are some other significant differences between the high modernist
and the postmodernist moment, between the shoes of Van Gogh and the
shoes of Andy Warhol, on which we must now very briefly dwell. The first
and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness,
a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense- perhaps the
supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have
occasion to return in a number of other contexts.
Then we must surely
come to terms with the role of photography and the photographic/negative
in contemporary art of this kind: and it is this indeed which confers
its deathly quality on the Warhol image, whose glacéd x-ray elegance
mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to
have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety
on the level of content. It is indeed as though we had here to do with
the inversion of Van Gogh's Utopian gesture: in the earlier work, a
stricken world is by some Nietzschean fiat and act of the will transformed
into the stridency of Utopian colour. Here, on the contrary, it is as
though the external and coloured surface of things debased and contaminated
in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images has heen
stripped away to reveal the deathly black and-white substratum of the
photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death
of the world of appearance becomes thematized in ccrtain of Warhol's
pieces-most notably, the traffic accidents or the electric chair scries-this
is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental
mutation both in the object world itself now hecome a set of texts or
simulacra and in the disposition of the subject.
[p. 61]
The Waning of Affect
All of which brings me to the third feature I had in mind to develop
here briefly, namely what I will call the waning of affect in postmodern
culture. Of course, it would be inaccurate to suggest that all affect,
all feeling or emotion, all subjectivity, has vanished from the newer
image. Indeed, there is a kind of return of the repressed in Diamond
Dust Shoes, a strange compensatory decorative exhilaration, explicitly
designated by the title itself although perhaps more difficult to observe
in the reproduction. This is the glitter of gold dust, the spangling
of gilt sand, which seals the surface of the painting and yet continues
to glint at us. Think, however, of Rimbaud's magical flowers 'that look
back at you', or of the august premonitory eye-flashes of Rilke's archaic
Greek torso which warn the bourgeois subject to change his life: nothing
of that sort here in the gratuitous frivolity of this final decorative
overlay.
The waning of affect is, however, perhaps best initially approached
by wav of the human figure, and it is obvious that what we have said
about the commodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol's
human subjects, stars-like Marilyn Monroe-who are themselves commodified
and transformed into their own images. And here too a certain brutal
return to the older period of high modernism offers a dramatic shorthand
parable of the transformation in question. Edvard Munch's painting The
Scream is of course a canonical expression of the great moderlust thematics
of alienation, anomie, solitude and social fragmentation and isolation,
a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to he called the age of
anxiety. It will here be read not merely as an embodiment of thc expression
of that kind of affect, but even more as a virtual deconstruction of
the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to havc dominated
much of what we call high modernism, but to have vanished away-for both
practical and theoretical reasons-in the world of thc postmodern. The
very concept of expression presupposes indecd some separation within
the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of thc inside and
the outside, of the wordless pain within thc monad and the moment in
which, often cathartically, that 'emotion' is then projected out and
externalized, as gesture or cry, as desperate communication and thc
outward dramatization of inward feeling. And this is perhaps thc moment
to say something about contemporary theory, which has among other things
been committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very
hermeneutic model of the inside and the outsidc and of stigmatizing
such models as ideological and metaphysical. But what is today called
contemporary theory-or better still, theoretical discourse-is also,
I would want to argue, itself very precisely a postmodernist phenomenon.
It would therefore he inconsistent to defend the truth of its theoretical
insights in a situation in which the very concept of 'truth' itself
is part of the metaphysical baggage which poststructuralism seeks to
abandon. What we can at least suggest is that the poststructuralist
critique of the hermeneutic, of what I will shortly call the depth model,
is useful for us as a very significant symptom of the very postmndernist
culture which is our subject here.
Overhastily, we can say that besides the hermeneutic model of inside
[p. 62]
and outside which Munch's painting develops. there are at least four
other fundamental depth models which have generally been repudiated
in contemporary theory: the dialectical one of essence and appearance
(along with a whole range of concepts of ideology or false consciousness
which tend to accompany it); the Freudian model of latent and manifest
or of repression (which is of course the target of Michel Foucault's
programmanc and symptomatic pamphlet La Volonté de savoir); the
existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity, whose heroic or
tragic thematics are closely related to that other great opposition
between alienation and disalienation, itself equally a casualty of the
poststructural or postmodern period; and finally, latest in time, the
great semlonc opposition between signifier and signified, which was
itself rapidly unravelled and deconstructed during its brief heyday
in the 1960's and 70's. What replaces these various depth models is
for the most part a conception of practices, discourses and textual
play, whose new syntagmatic structures we will examine later on: suffice
it merely to observe that here too depth is replaced by surface, or
by multiple surfaces (what is often called intertextuality is in that
sense no longer a matter of depth).
Nor is this depthlessness merely metaphorical: it can be experienced
physically and literally bv anyone who, mounting what used to be Raymond
Chandler's Beacon Hill from the great Chicano markets on Broadway and
4th St. in downtown Los Angeles, suddenly confronts the great free-standing
wall of th Crocker Bank Center (Skidmore Owings and Merrill)-a surface
which seems to be unsupported by any volume, or whose putative volume
(rectangular, trapezoidal?) is ocularly quite undecidahle. This great
sheet of windows, with gravity-defying two-dimensionality, momentarily
transforms the solid ground on which we climh into the contents of a
stereopticon pasteboard shapes profiling themselves here and there around
us. From all sides, the visual effect is the same: as fateful as the
great monolith ir Kubrick's 2001 which confronts its viewers like an
enigmatic destiny, call to evolutionary mutation. If this new multinational
downtown (to which we will return later in another context) effectively
abolished the older ruined city fabric which it violently replaced,
cannot something similar be said about the way in which this strange
new surface in its own peremptory way renders our older systems of perception
of the city somehow archaic and aimless, without offering another in
their place?
Euphoria and Self-Annihilation
Returning now for one last moment to Munch's painting evident that The
Scream subtly but elaborately deconstructs its own aesthetic of expression,
all the while remaining imprisoned within it. Its gestural content already
underscores its own failure, since the realm of the sonorous, the cry,
the raw vibrations of the human throat, are incompatible with its medium
(something underscored within the work by the homunculus' lack of ears).
Yet the absent scream returns more closely towards that even more absent
experience of atrocious solitude and anxiety which the scream was itself
to 'express'. Such loops inscribe themselves on the painted surface
in the form of those great concentric
[p. 63]
circles in which sonorous vibration becomes ultimately visible, as on
the surface of a sheet of water in an inhnite regress which fans out
from the sufferer to become the very geography of a universe in which
pain itself now speaks and vibrates through the material sunset and
the landscape. The visible world now becomes the wall of the monad on
which this 'scream running through nature' (Munch's words) is recorded
and transcribed: one thinks of that character of Lautréamont
who, growing up inside a sealed and silent membrane, on sight of the
monstrousness of the deity, ruptures it with his own scream and thereby
rejoins the world of sound and suffering.
All of which suggests some more general historical hypothesis: namely.
that concepts such as anxiety and alienation (and the experiences to
which they correspond, as in The Scream) are no longer appropriate in
the world of the postmodern. The great Warhol figures-Marilyn herself,
or Edie Sedgewick-the notorious burn-out and self-destruction cases
of the ending 1960's, and the great dominant experiences of drugs and
schizophrenia these would seem to have little enough in common anymore,
either with the hysterics and neurotics of Freud's own day, or with
those canonical experiences of radical isolation and solitude, anomie,
private revolt, Van Gogh-type madness, which dominated the period of
high modernism. This shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology can
be characterized as one in which the alienation of the subject is displaced
by the fragmentation of the subject.
Such terms inevitably recall one of the more fashionable themes in contemporary
theory-that of the 'death' of the subject itself = the end of the autonomous
bourgeois monad or ego or individual-and the accompanying stress, whether
as some new moral ideal or as empirical description, on the deventrinx
of that formerly centred subject or psyche. (Of the two possible formulations
of this notion-the historiclst one, that a once-existing centred subject,
in the period of classical capitalism and the nuclear family, has today
in the world of organizational bureaucracy dissolved; and the more radical
poststructuralist posulon for which such a subject never existed in
the first place but constituted something like an ideological mirage-I
obviously incline towards the former; the latter must in any case take
into account something like a 'reality of the appearance'.)
We must add that the problem of expression is itself closely linked
to some conception of the subject as a monad-like container, within
which things are felt which are then expressed by projection outwards.
What we must now stress, however, is the degree to which the high-modernist
conception of a unique style, along with the accompanying collective
ideals of an artistic or political vanguard or avant-garde, themselves
stand or fall along with that older notion (or experience) of the so-called
centred subject.
Here too Munch's painting stands as a complex reflexion on this complicated
situation: it shows us that expression requires the category of the
individual monad, but it also shows us the heavy price to be paid for
that precondition, dramatizing the unhappy paradox that when you constitute
your individual subjectivity as a self-suffficient field and a
[p. 64]
closed realm in its own right, you thereby also shut yourself off from
everything else and condemn yourself to the windless solitude of the
monad. buried alive and condemned to a prison-cell without egress.
Postmodernism will presumably signal the end of this dilemma, which
it replaces with a new one. The end of the bourgeois ego or monad no
doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego as
well -what I have generally here been calling the waning of affect.
But it means the end of much more; the end for example of style, in
the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive
individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical
reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions the liberation,
in contemporary society, from the older anonrie of the centred subject
may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation
from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a
self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural
products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling but rather
that such feelings which it may be better and more accurate to call
'intensities' are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to be dominated
by a peculiar kind of euphoria to which I will want to retllrn at the
end of this essay.
The waning of affect, however, might also have been characterized, the
narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of the great high-modernist
thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of durée
and of memory (something to be understood fully as a category of literary
criticism associated as much with high modernism as with the works themselves).
We have often been told, however, that we now inhabit the synchtonic
rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable
that our dailv life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages,
are today dominated by categoties of space rather than by categories
of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism proper.
II. The Postmodern and the Past
Pastiche Eclipses Parody
The disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence,
the increasing unavailability of thc personal style, engender the well-nigh
universal practice today of what may be called pastiche. This concept,
which we owe to Thomas Mann (in Doktor Faustus), who owed it in turn
to Adorno's great work on the two paths of advanced musical experimentation
(Schoenberg's innovative planification, Stravinsky's irrational eclecticism),
is to be sharply distinguished from the more readily received idea of
parody.
This last found, to be sure, a fertile area in the idiosyncracies of
the moderns and their 'inimitable' styles: the Faulknerian long sentence
with its breathless gerundives, Lawrentian nature imagery punctuated
by testy colloquialism, Wallace Stevens' inveterate hypostasis of nonsubstantive
parts of speech ('the intricate evasions of as'), the fateful, but finally
predictable, swoops in Mahler from high orchestral pathos into village
accordeon sentiment, Heidegger's meditative-solemn practice of the false
etymology as a mode of 'proof' . . . All these strike one as somehow
'characteristic', insofar as they ostentatiously deviate from a norm
which then reasserts itself, in a not necessarily unfriendly way, by
a systematic mimicry of their deliberate eccentricities.
Yet in the dialectical
leap from quantity to quality, the explosion of modern literature into
a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms has been followed by
a linguistic fragmentation of social life itself to the point where
the norm itself is eclipsed: reduced to a neutral and reified media
speech (far enough from the Utopian aspirations of the inventors of
Esperanto or Basic English), which itself then becomes but one more
idiolect among many. Modernist styles thereby become postmodernist codes:
and that the stupendous proliferation of social codes today into professional
and disciplinary jargons, but also into the badges of a firmation of
ethnic, gender, race, religious, and class-fraction adhesion, is also
a political phenomenon, the problem of micropolitics sufficiently demonstrates.
If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic)
ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today
are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a
norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which
constrain our existences, but no longer need to impose their speech
(or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist
world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project,
but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.
In this situation, parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived,
and that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place.
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in
a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, wlthout
any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse,
devoid of laughtcr and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal
tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality
still exists. I'astiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs:
it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original
modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne
Booth calls the 'stable ironies' of the 18th century.
It would therefore begin to seem that Adorno's prophetic diagnosis has
been realized, albeit in a negative way: not Schoenberg (the sterility
of whose achieved system he already glimpsed) but Stravinsky is the
true precurser of the postmodern cultural production. For with the collapse
of the high-modernist ideology of style what is as unique and unmistakable
as your own fingerprints, as incomparable as your own body (the very
source, for an early Roland Barthes, of stylistic invention and innovation)
the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to tht past: the imitation
of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in
the imaginary museum of a now global culture.
'Historicism'
Effaces History
This situation evidently determines what the architecture historians
call 'hicroricicm' namely the random cannihalization of all the styles
of the past,
[p. 66]
the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre
has called the increasing primacy of the 'neo'. This omnipresence of
pastiche is, however, not incompatible with a certain humour (nor is
it innocent of all passion) or at least with addiction-with a whole
historically original consumers' appetite for a world transformed into
sheer images of itself and for pseudo-events and 'spectacles' (the term
of the Situationists). It is for such objects that we may reserve Plato's
conception of the 'simulacrum' the identical copy for which no original
has ever existed. Appropriately enough, the culture of the simulacrum
comes to life in a society where exchange-value has been generalized
to the point at which the very memory of use-value is effaced, a society
of which Guy Debord has observed, in an extraordinary phrase, that in
it 'the image has become the final form of commodity reification' (The
Society of the Spectacle).
The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have
a momentous eflect on what used tn he historical tlme The past is thereby
itself modified: what was once, in the historical novel as Lukacs defines
it, the organic genealogy of the bourgeois collective project- what
is still, for the redemptive historiography of an E. P. Thompson or
of American 'oral history', for the resurrection of the dead of anonymous
and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable
to any vital reorientation of our collective future- has meanwhile itself
become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum.
Guy Debord's powerful slogan is now even more apt for the 'prehistory'
of a society bereft of all historicity, whose own putative past is little
more than a set of dusty spectacles. In faithful conformity to poststructuralist
linguistic theory the past as 'referent' finds itself gradually bracketed,
and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.
The Nostalgia Mode
Yet it should not be tbought that this process is accompanied by indifference:
on the contrary, the remarkable current intensification of an addiction
to the photographic image is itself a tangible symptom of an omnipresent,
omnivorous and well-nigh libidinal historicism. The architects use this
(exceedingly polysemous) word for the complacent eclecticism of postmodern
architecture, which randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes
all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating
ensembles. Nostalgia does not strike one as an altogether satisfactoly
word for such fascination (particularly when one thinks of the pain
of a properly modernist nostalgia with a past beyond all but aesthetic
retrieval), yet it directs our attention to what is a culturally far
more generalized manifestation of the process in commercial art and
taste, namely the so-called 'nostalgia film' (or what the French call
'la mode rétro).
These restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a
collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate
a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change
and the emergent ideology of the 'generation'. American Grafitti
(1973)
[p. 67]
set out to recapture, as so many films have attempted since, the henceforth
mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era: and one tends to feel
that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged lost object
of desire not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana,
but also the first naive innocence of the countercultural impulses of
early rock-and-roll and youth gangs (Coppola's Rumble Fish will then
be the contemporary dirge that laments their passing, itself, however,
still contradictorily filmed in genuine 'nostalgia film' style). With
this initial breakthrough, other generational periods open up for aesthetic
colonization: as witness the stylistic recuperation of the American
and the Italian 1930s, in Polanski's Chinatown and Bertolluci's Il Conformista
respectively. What is more interesting, and more problematical, are
the ultimate attempts, through this new discourse, to lay siege either
to our own present and immediate past, or to a more distant history
that escapes individual existential memory.
Faced with these ultimate objects our social, historical and existential
prcsenr, and the past as 'referent' --the incompatibility of a postmodernist
'nostalgia' art language with genuine historicity becomes dramatically
appolrcnt. The contraction ptopels this model, however, into complex
and interesting new fotmal inventiveness: it being understood that the
nostalgia film was never a matter of some old-fashioned 'representation'
of historical content, but approached the 'past' through stylistic connotation,
conveying 'pastness' by the glossy qualities of the image, and '1930s-ness'
or '1950s-ness' by the attributes of fashion (therein following the
prescription of the Barthes of Mythologies, who saw connotation as the
purveying of imaginary and stereotypical idealities, 'Sinité',
for example, as some Disney-Epcot 'concept' of China).
The insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode can
be observed in Lawrence Kasdan's elegant film, Body Heat, a distant
'affluent society' remake of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings
Twice, set in a contemporary Florida small town not far from Miami.
The word 'remake' is, however, anachronistic to the degree to which
our awareness of the pre-existence of other versions, previous films
of the novel as well as the novel itself, is now a constitutive and
essential part of the film's structure: we are now, in other words,
in 'intertextuality' as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic
effect, and as the operator of a new connotation of 'pastness' and pseudo-historical
depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces 'real' history.
From the outset, a whole battery of aesthetic signs begin to distance
thc oflicialh contemporary image from us in time: the art deco scripting
of Ihe creclits, pasor example, serves at once to programme the for
the appropriate 'nostalgia' mode of reception (art deco quotation has
much the same function in contemporary architecture, as in Toronto's
remarkable Eaton Centre). Meanwhile, a somewhat different plav of connotations
is activated by complex (but purely formal) allusions to the institutions
of the star system itself. The protagonist, William Hurt, is one of
a new generation of film 'stars' whose status is markedly distinct from
that of the preceding generation of male superstars, such as Steve McQueen
or Jack Nicholson (or even, more distantly, Brando), let alone of earlier
moments in the evolution of the
[p. 68]
institutions of the star. The immediately preceding generation projected
its various roles through, and by way of, well-known 'off-screen' personalities,
who often connoted rebellion and non-conformism. The latest generation
of starring actors continues to assure the conventional functions of
stardom (most notably, sexuality) but in the utter absence of 'personality'
in the older sense, and with something of the anonymity of character
acting (which in actors like Hurt reaches virtuouso proportions, yet
of a very different kind from the virtuosity of the older Brando or
Olivier). This 'death of the subject' in the institution of the star,
however, opens up the possibility of a play of historical allusions
to much older roles in this case to those associated with Clark Gable
so that the very style of the acting can now also serve as a 'connotator'
of the past.
Finally, the setting has been strategically framed, with great ingenuity,
to eschew most of the signals that normally convey the contemporaneity
of the United States in its multinational era: the small-town setting
allows the camera to elude the high-rise landscape of the 1970s and
80s (even though a key episode in the narrative involves the fatal destruction
of older buildings by land speculators); while the object world of the
present-day artifacts and appliances, even automobiles, whose styling
would at once serve to date the image is elaborately edited out. Everything
in the film, therefore, conspires to blur its official contemporaneity
and to make it possible for you to receive the narrative as though it
were set in some eternal Thirties, beyond real historical time. The
approach to the present by way of the art language of the simulacrum,
or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality
and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a
glossy mirage. But this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged
as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived
possibility of experiencing history in some active way: it cannot therefore
be said to produce this strange occultation of the present by its own
formal power, but merely to demonstrate, through these inner contradictions,
the enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable
of fashioning representations of our own current experience.
The Fate of 'Real History'
As for 'real history' itself the traditional object, however it may
be defined, of what used to be the historical novel it will be more
revealing now to turn back to that older furm and medium and to read
its postmodern fate in the work of one of the few serious and innovative
Left novelists at work in the United States today, whose books ate nourished
with history in the more traditional sense, and seem, so far, to stake
out successive generational moments in the 'epic' of American history.
E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime gives itself officially as a panorama of the
first two decades of the century; his most recent novel, Loon Lake,
addresses the Thirties and the Great Depression; while The Book of Daniel
holds up before us, in painful juxtaposition, the two great moments
of the Old Left and the New Left, of Thirties and Forties Communism
and the radicalism of the 1960s (even his early Western may be said
to fit into this scheme and to designate in a less articulated
[p. 69]
and formally self-conscious way the end of the frontier of the late
nineteenth century).
The Book of Daniel is not the only one of these three major historical
novels to establish an explicit narrative link between the reader's
and the writer's present and the older historical reality which is the
subject of the work; the astonishing last page of Loon Lake, which I
will not disclose, also does this in a very different way; while it
is a matter of some interest to note that the first sentence of the
first version of Ragtime positions us explicitly in our own present,
in the novelist's house in New Rochelle, New York, which will then at
once become the scene of its own (imaginary) past in the 1900s. This
detail has been suppressed from the published text, symbolically cutting
its moorings and freeing the novel to float in some new world of past
historical time whose relationship to us is problematical indeed. The
authenticity of the gesture, however, may be measured by the evident
existential fact of life that there no longer does seem to be any organic
relationship between the American history we learn from the schoolbooks
and the lived experience of the current multinational, high-rise, stagflated
city of the newspapers and of our own daily life.
A crisis in historicity, however, inscribes itself symptomally in several
other curious formal features within this text. Its official subject
is the transition from a pre-World-War I radical and working-class politics
(the great strikes) to the technological invention and new commodity
production of the 1920s (the rise of Hollywood and of the image as commodity):
the interpolated version of Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, the strange tragic
episode of the Black protagonist's revolt, may be thought to be a moment
related to this process. My point, however, is not some hypothesis as
to the thematic coherence of this decentred narrative; but rather just
the opposite, namely the way in which the kind of reading this novel
imposes makes it virtually impossible for us to reach and to thematize
those official 'subjects' which float above the text but cannot be integrated
into our reading of the sentences. In that sense, not only does the
novel resist interpretation, it is organized systematically and formally
to short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpretation
which it perpetually holds out and withdraws. When we remember that
the theoretical critique and repudiation of interpretation as such is
a fundamental component of poststructuralist theory, it is difficult
not to conclude that Doctorow has somehow deliberately built this very
tension, this very contradiction, into the flow of his sentences.
As is well known, the book is crowded with real historical figures from
Teddy Roosevelt to Emma Goldman, from Harry K. Thaw and Sandford White
to J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford, not to speak of the more central
role of Houdini-who interact with a fictive family, simply designated
as Father, Mother, Older Brother, and so forth. All historical novels,
beginning with Scott himself, no doubt in one way or another involve
a mobilization of previous historical knowledge, generally aquired through
the schoolbook history manuals devised for whatever legitimizing purpose
by this or that national tradition-thereafter instituting a narrative
dialectic between what we already 'know' about The Pretender, say, and
what he is then seen to be
[p.70]
concretely in the pages of the novel. But Doctorow's procedure seems
much more extreme than this; and I would argue that the designation
of both types of characters-historical names or capitalized family roles-operates
powerfully and systematically to reify all these characters and to make
it impossible for us to receive their representation without the prior
interception of already-acquired knowledge or doxa-something which lends
the text an extraordinary sense of déjà-vu and a peculiar
familiarity one is tempted to associate with Freud's 'return of the
repressed' in 'The Uncanny', rather than with any solid historiographic
formation on the reader's part.
Loss of the Radical Past
Meanwhile, the sentences in which all this is happening have their own
specificity, which will allow us a little more concretely to distinguish
the moderns' elaboration of a personal style from this new kind of linguistic
innovation, which is no longer personal at all but has its family kinship
rather with what Barthes long ago called 'white writing'. In this particular
novel, Doctorow has imposed upon himself a rigorous principle of selection
in which only simple declarative sentences (predominantly mobilized
by the verb 'to be') are received. The effect is, however, not really
one of the condescending simplification and symbolic carefulness of
children's literature, but rather something more disturbing, the sense
of some profound subterranean violence done to American English which
cannot, however, be detected empirically in any of the perfectly grammatical
sentences with which this work is formed. Yet other more visible technical
'innovations' may supply a clue to what is happening in the language
of Ragtime: it is for example well-known that the source of many of
the characteristic effects of Camus' novel 'Etranger can be traced back
to that author's wilful decision to substitute, throughout, the French
tense of the 'passe compose' for the other past tenses more normally
employed in narration in that language. I will suggest that it is as
if something of that sort were at work here (without committing myself
further to what is obviously an outrageous leap): it is, I say, as though
Doctorow had set out systematically to produce the effect or the equivalent,
in his language, of a verbal past tense we do not possess in English,
namely the French preterite (or passé simple), whose 'perfective'
movement, as Emile Benveniste taught us, serves to separate events from
the present of enunciation and to transform the stream of time and action
into so many finished, complete, and isolated punctual event-objects
which find themselves sundered from any present situation (even that
of the act of storytelling or enunciation).
E. L. Doctorow is the epic poet of the disappearance of the American
radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of
the American radical tradition: no one with left sympathies can read
these splendid novels without a poignant distress which is an authentic
way of confronting our own current political dilemmas in the present.
What is culturally interesting, however, is that he has had to convey
this great theme formally (since the waning of the content is very precisely
his subject), and, more than that, has had to elaborate his work by
way of that very cultural logic of the postmodern which is itself the
mark and
[p.71]
symptom of his dilemma. Loon Lake much more obviously deploys the strategies
of the pastiche (most notably in its reinvention of Dos Passos); but
Ragtime remains the most peculiar and stunning monument to the aesthetic
situation engendered by the disappearance of the historical referent.
This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical
past; it can only 'represent' our ideas and stereotypes about that past
(which thereby at once becomes 'pop history'). Cultural production is
thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of
the old monadic subject, but rather that of some degraded collective
'objective spirit': it can no longer gaze directly on some putative
real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once
itself a present; rather, as in Plato's cave, it must trace our mental
images of that past upon its confining walls. If there is any realism
left here, therefore, it is a 'realism' which is meant to derive from
the shock of grasping that confinement, and of slowly becoming aware
of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned
to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history,
which itself remains forever out of reach.
III. The Breakdown of the Signifying Chain
The crisis in historicity now dictates a return, in a new way, to the
question of temporal organization in general in the postmodern force
field and indeed, in the problem of the form that time, temporality
and the syntagmatic will be able to take in a culture increasingly dominated
bs space and spacial logic. If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity
actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal
manifold, and to organize its past and future into coherent experience,
it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such
a subject could result in anything but 'heaps of fragments' and in a
practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory.
These are, howcver, very precisely some of the privileged terms in which
postmodernist cultural production has been analysed (and even defended,
by its own apologists). Yet they are still privative features: the more
substantive formulations bear such names as textuality, écriture,
or schizophrenic writing, and it is to these that we must now briefly
turn.
I have f ound Lacan's account of schizophrenia useful here, not because
I have any way of knowing whether it has clinical accuracy, but chiefly
because--as description rather than diagnosis--it seems to me to offer
a suggestive aesthetic model. (I am obviously very far from thinking
that any of the most significant postmodernist artists-Cage, Ashbery,
Sollers Robert Wilson, Ishmael Reed, Michael Snow, Warhol or even Beckett
himself are schizophrenics in any clinical sense.) Nor is the point
some culture-and-personality diagnosis of our society and its art, as
in culture critiques of the type of Christopher Lasch's influential
The Culture of Narcissism, from which I am concerned radically to distance
the spirit and the methodology of the present remarks: there are, one
would think far more damaging things to be said about our social system
than are available through the use of psychological categories.
Very briefly, Lacan describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the
[p. 72]
signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers
which constitutes an utterance or a meaning. I must omit the familial
or more orthodox psychoanalytic background to this situation, which
Lacan transcodes into language by describing the Oedipal rivalry in
terms, not so much of the biological individual who is your rival for
the mother's attention, but rather of what he calls the Name-of-theFather,
paternal authority now considered as a linguistic function. His conception
of the signifying chain essentially presupposes one of the basic principles
(and one of the great discoveries) of Saussurean structuralism, namely
the proposition that meaning is not a one-to-one relationship between
signifier and signified, between the materiality of language, between
a word or a name, and its referent or concept. Meaning on the new view
is generated by the movement from Signifier to Signifier: what we generally
call the Signified-the meaning or conceptual content of an utterance-is
now rather to be seen as a meaning-effect, as that objective mirage
of signification generated and projected by the relationship of Signifiers
among each other. When that relationship breaks down, when the links
of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form
of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers. The connection between
this kind of linguistic malfunction and the psyche of the schizophrenic
may then be grasped by way of a two-fold proposition: first, that personal
identity is itself the eflect of a certain temporal unification of past
and future with the present before me; and second, that such active
temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still
of the sentence, as it moves along its hermeneutic circle through time.
If we are unable to unify the past, present and future of the sentence,
then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present and future of
our own biographical experience or psychic life.
With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic
is reduced to an experience of pure material Signifiers, or in other
words of a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. We will want
to ask questions about the aesthetic or cultural results of such a situation
in a moment; let us first see what it feels like: 'I remember very well
the day it happened. We were staying in the country and I had gone for
a walk alone as I did now and then. Suddenly, as I was passing the school,
I heard a German song; the children were having a singing lesson. I
stopped to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling came over me,
a feeling hard to analyse but akin to something I was to know too well
later-a disturbing sense of unreality. It seemed to me that I no longer
recognized the school, it had become as large as a barracks; the singing
children were prisoners, compelled to sing. It was as though the school
and the children's song were set apart from the rest of the world. At
the same time my eye encountered a field of wheat whose limits I could
not see. The yellow vastness, dazzling in the sun, bound up with the
song of the children imprisoned in the smooth stone school-barracks,
filled me with such anxiety that I broke into sobs. I ran home to our
garden and began to play "to make things seem as they usually were,"
that is, to return to reality. It was the first appearance of those
elements which were always present in later sensations of
[p. 73]
unreality: illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and
smoothness of material things.'*
In our present context, this experience suggests the following remarks:
first, the breakdown of temporality suddenly releases this present of
time from all the activities and the intentionalities that might focus
it and make it a space of praxis; thereby isolated, that present suddenly
engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception
properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the
material or better still, the literal Signifier in isolation. This present
of the world or material signifier comes before the subject with heightened
intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, here described in
the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could
just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, the high, the
intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity.
'China'
What will happen in textuality or schizophrenic art is strikingly illuminated
by such clinical accounts, although in the cultural text, the isolated
Signifier is no longer an enigmatic state of the world or an incomprehensible
yet mesmerizing fragment of language, but rather something closer to
a sentence in free-standing isolation. Think, for example, of the experience
of John Cage's music, in which a cluster of material sounds (on the
prepared piano for example) is followed by a silence so intolerable
that you cannot imagine another sonorous chord coming into existence,
and cannot imagine remembering the previous one well enough to make
any connection with it if it does. Some of Beckett's narratixes are
also of this order, most notably Watt, where a primacy of the present
sentence in time ruthlessly disintegrates the narratixe fabric that
attempts to reform around it. My example will, however, be a less sombre
one, a text by a younger San Francisco poet whose group or school-so-called
Language Poetr-- or the New Sentence--seems to have adopted schizophrenic
fragmentation as its fundamental aeshtetic.
China
We live on the third world from the sun. Number three. Nobody tells
us what to do.
The people who taught us to count were being very kind.
It's always time to leave.
If it rains, you cither have sour umbrella or you don't.
The wind blows your hat off.
The sun rises also.
I'd rather the stars didn't describe us to each other; I'd rather we
do it for ourselves.
Run in front of your shadow.
A sister vrho points to the sky at least once a decade is a good sister.
The landscape is motorized.
The train takes you where it goes.
Bridges among water.
[p. 74]
Folks straggling
along vast stretches of concrete, heading into the plane.
Don't forget what your hat and shoes will look like when you are nowhere
to be found.
Even the words floating in air make blue shadows.
If it tastes good we eat it.
The leaves are falling. Point things out.
Pick up the right things.
Hey guess what? What? I've learned how to talk. Great.
The person whose head was incomplete burst into tears.
As it fell, what could the doll do? Nothing.
Go to sleep.
You look great in shorts. And the flag looks great too.
Everyone enjoyed the explosions.
Time to wake up.
But better get used to dreams.
Bob Perelman
from Primer, This Press, Berkely
Many things could be said ahout this interesting exercise in discontinuities:
not the least paradoxical is the reemergence here across these disjoined
sentences of some more unified global meaning. Indeed insofar as this
is in some curious and secret way a political poem, it does seem to
capture something of the excitement of the immense unfinished social
experiment of the New China-unparalleled in world history-the unexpected
emergence, between the two super-powers, of 'number three', the freshness
of a whole new object world produced by human beings in some new control
over their collective destiny, the signal event, above all, of a collectivity
which has become a new 'subject of history' and which, after the long
subjection of feudalism and imperialism, again speaks in its own voice,
for itself as though for the first time.
I mainly wanted
to show, however the way in which what I have been calling schizophrenic
disjunction or écriture, when it becomes generalized as a cultural
style, ceases to entertain a necessary relationship to the morbid content
we associate with terms like schizophrenia, and hecomes available for
more joyous intensities, for precisely that euphoria which we saw displacing
the older aflects of anxietv and alienation. Consider, for example,
Jean-Paul Sartre's account of a similar tendency in Flaubert: "His
sentence (Sartre tells us about Flaubert) closes in on the object, seizes
it, immobilizes it, and breaks its back, wraps itself around it, changes
into stone and petrifies its object along with itself. It is blind and
deaf, bloodless, not a breath of life; a deep silence separates it from
the sentence which follows; it falls into the void, eternally, and drags
its prey down into that infinite fall. Any reality, once described,
is struck ofl the inventory." (What is Literature?)
Yet I am tempted
to see this reading as a kind of optical illusion (or photographic enlargment)
of an unwittingly genealogical type: in which certain latent or subordinate,
properly postmodernist features of Flaubert's style are anachronistically
foregrounded. Yet it aflords another interesting lesson in periodization,
and in the dialectical restructuring of cultural dominants and subordinates.
For these features, in Flaubert, were symptoms and strategies in that
whole posthumous life and resentment of praxis which is denounced (with
increasing sympathy) throughout the three thousand pages of Sartre's
Family Idiot. When such features become themselves the cultural norm,
they shed all such forms of negative aflect and become available for
other, more decorative.
But we have thereby
not fully exhausted the structural secrets of Perelman's poem, which
turns out to have little enough to do with that referent called China.
The author has in fact related how, strolling through Chinatown, he
came across a book of photographs whose idiogrammatic captions remained
a dead letter to him (or perhaps one should say, a material signifier).
The sentences of the poem in question are then Perelman's own captions
to those pictures, their referents another image, another absent text;
and the unity of the poem is no longer to be found within its language,
but outside itself, in the bound unity of another, absent book. There
is here a striking parallel to the dvnamics of so-called photorealism,
which looked like a return to representation and figuration after the
long hegemony of the aesthetics of abstraction, until it became clear
that its objects were not to be found in the 'real world' either, but
were themselves photographs of that real world, this last now transformed
into images, of which the 'realism' of the photorealist painting is
now the simulacrum.
Collage and Radical Difference
This account of schizophrenia and temporal organization might, however,
have been formulated in a diflferent way, which brings us back to Heidegger's
notion of a gap or rift, albeit in a fashion that would have horrified
him. I would like, indeed, to characterize the postmodernist experience
of form with what will seem, I hope, a paradoxical slogan: namely the
proposition that 'diflerence relates'. Our own recent criticism, trom
Macherey on, has been concerned to stress the heterogeneity and profound
discontinuities of the work of art, no longer unified or organic, but
now virtual grab-bag or lumber room of disjoined subsystems and random
raw materials and impulses of all kinds. The former work of art, in
other words, has now turned out to be a text, whose reading proceeds
by differentiation rather than by unification. Theories of difference,
however, have tended to stress disjunction to the point at which the
materials of the text, including its words and sentences, tend to fall
apart into random and inert passivity, into a set of elements which
entertain purely external separations from one another.
In the most interesting postmodernist works, however, one can detect
a more positive conception of relationship which restores its proper
tension to the notion of diflerences itself. This new mode of relationship
through difference may sometimes be an achieved new and original way
of thinking and perceiving; more often it takes the form of an impossible
imperative to achieve that new mutation in what can perhaps no longer
be called consciousness. I believe that the most striking emblem of
this new mode of thinking relationships can be found in the
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work of Nam June Paik, whose stacked or scattered television screens,
positioned at intervals within lush vegetation, or winking down at us
from a ceiling of strange new video stars, recapitulate over and over
again prearranged sequences or loops of images which return at dysynchronous
moments on the various screens. The older aesthetic is then practised
by viewers, who, bewildered by this discontinuous variety, decide to
concentrate on a single screen, as though the relatively worthless image
sequence to be followed there had some organic value in its own right.
The postmodernist viewer, however, is called upon to do the impossible,
namely to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference;
such a viewer is asked to follow the evolutionary mutation of David
Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, and to rise somehow to a level at
which the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself
a new mode of grasping what used to be called relationship: something
for which the word collage is still only a very feeble name.
IV. The Hysterical Sublime
Now we need to complete this exploratory account of postmodernist
space and time with a final analysis of that euphoria or those intensities
which seem so often to characterize the newer cultural experience. Let
us stress again the enormity of a transition which leaves behind it
the desolation of Hopper's buildings or the stark Midwest syntax of
Sheeler's forms, replacing them with the extraordinary surfaces of the
photorealist cityscape, where even the automobile wrecks gleam with
some new halluncinatory splendour. The exhilaration of these new surfaces
is all the more paradoxical in that their essential content the city
itself has deteriorated or disintegrated to a degree surely still inconceivable
in the early years of the 20th century, let alone in the previous era.
How urban squalor can be a delight to the eyes, when expressed in commodification,
and how an unparalleled quantum leap in the alienation of daily life
in the city can now be experienced in the form of a strange new hallucinatory
exhilaration-these are some of the questions that confront us in this
moment of our inquiry. Nor should the human figure be exempted from
investigation, although it seems clear that for the newer aesthetic
the representation of space itself has come to be felt as incompatible
with the representation of the body: a kind of aesthetic division of
labour far more pronounced than in any of the earlier generic conceptions
of landscape, and a most ominous symptom indeed. The privileged space
of the newer art is radically anti-anthropomorphic, as in the empty
bathrooms of Doug Bond's work. The ultimate contemporary fetishization
of the human body, however, takes a very different direction in the
statues of Duane Hanson what I have already called the simulacrum, whose
peculiar function lies in what Sartre would have called the derealiwtior
of the whole surrounding world of everyday reality. Your moment of doubt
and hesitation as to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures,
in other words, tends to return upon the real human beings moving about
you in the museum, and to transform them also for the briefest instant
into so many dead and flesh-coloured simulcra in their own right. The
world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a
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glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without
density. But is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?
It has proved fruitful to think such experience in terms of what Susan
Sontag once, in an influential statement, isolated as 'camp'. I propose
a somewhat different cross-light on it, drawing on the equally fashionable
current theme of the 'sublime', as it has been rediscovered in the works
of Edmund Burke and Kant; or perhaps, indeed, one might well want to
yoke the two notions together in the form of something like a camp or
'hysterical' sublime. The sublime was for Burke, as you will recall,
an experience bordering on terror, the fitful glimpse, in astonishment,
stupor and awe, of what was so enormous as to crush human life altogether:
a description then refined by Kant to include the question of representation
itself so that the object of the sublime is now not only a matter of
sheer power and of the physical incommensurability of the human organism
with Nature, but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity
of the human mind to give representation to such enormous forces. Such
forces Burke, in his historical moment at the dawn of the modern bourgeois
state, was only able to conceptualize in terms of the divine; while
even Heidegger continues to entertain a fantasmatic relationship with
some organic precapitalist peasant landscape and village society, which
is the final form of the image of Nature in our own time.
Today, however, it may be possible to thik all this in a different way,
at the moment of a radical eclipse of Nature itself: Heidegger's 'field
path' is after all irredeemably and irrevocably destroyed by late capital,
by the green revolution, by neocolonialism and the megapopolis, which
runs its superhighways over the older fields and vacant lots, and turns
Heidegger's 'house of being' into condominiums, if not the most miserable
unheated rat-infested tenement buildings. The other of our society is
in that sense no longer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist societies
but somethinr else which we must now identify.
The Apotheosis of Capitalism
I am anxious that this other thing should not overhastily be grasped
as technology per se, since I will want to show that technology is here
itself a figure for something else. Yet technology may well serve as
adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural
power of dead human labour stored up in our machinery, .In alienated
power, what Sartre calls the counterfinality of the practico-inert,
which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms and seems
to constitute the massive dystopian horizon of our collective as well
as our individual praxis.
Technology is, however, on the Marxist view the result of the development
of capital, rather than some primal cause in its own right. Itwill therefore
be appropriate to distinguish several generations of machine power,
several stages of technological revolution within capital itself. I
here follow Ernest Mandel who outlines three such fundamental breaks
or quantum leaps in the evolution of machinery under capital: 'The fundamental
revolutions in power technology-the technology of
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the production of motive machines by machines thus appears as the determinant
moment in revolutions of technology as a whole. Machine production of
steam-driven motors since 1848; machine production of electric and combustion
motors since the 90s of the 19th century; machine production of electronic
and nuclear-powered apparatuses since the 40s of the 20th century-these
are the three general revolutions in technology engendered by the capitalist
mode of production since the "original" industrial revolution
of the later 18th century.' (Late Capitalism, p. l 8).
The periodization
underscores the general thesis of Mandel's book Late Capitalism, namely
that there have been three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one
marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage: these are market
capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our
own wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational
capital. I have already pointed out that Mandel's intervention in the
postindustrial involves the proposition that late or multinational or
consumer capitalism, far from being inconsistent with Marx's great 19th-century
analysis, constitutes on the contrary the purest form of capital yet
to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified
areas. This purer capitalism of our own time thus eliminates the enclaves
of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited
in a tributary way: one is tempted to speak in this connection of a
new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature
and the Unconscious: that is, the destruction of precapitalist third
world agriculture by the Green Revolution, and the rise of the media
and the advertising industry. At any rate, it will also have been clear
that my own cultural periodization of the stages of realism, modernism
and postmodernism is both inspired and confirmed by Mandel's tripartite
scheme.
We may speak therefore
of our own age as the Third (or even Fourth) Machine Age; and it is
at this point that we must reintroduce the problem of aesthetic representation
already explicitly developed in Kant's earlier analysis of the sublime
since it would seem only logical that the relationship to, and representation
of, the machine could be expected to shift dialectically with each of
these qualitatively different stages of technological development.
It is appropriate therefore to recall the excitement of machinery in
the preceding moment of capital, the exhilaration of futurism most notably,
and of Marinetti's celebration of the machine gun and the motor car.
These are still visible emblems, sculptural nodes of energy which give
tangibility and figuration to the motive energies of that earlier moment
of modernization. The prestige of these great streamlined shapes can
be measured by their metaphorical presence in Le Corbusier's buildings,
vast Utopian structures which ride like so many gigantic steamshipliners
upon the urban scenery of an older fallen earth. Machinery exerts another
kind of fascination in artists like Picabia and Duchamp, whom we have
no time to consider here; but let me mention, for the sake of completeness,
the ways in which revolutionary or communist artists of the 1930s also
sought to reappropriate this excitement of
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machine energy for a Promethean reconstruction of human society as a
whole, as in Fernand Leger and Diego Rivera.
What must then
immediately be observed is that the technology of our own moment no
longer possesses this same capacity for representation: not the turbine,
nor even Sheeler's grain elevators or smokestacks, not the baroque elaboration
of pipes and conveyor belts nor even the streamlined profile of the
railroad train-all vehicles of speed still concentrated at rest-but
rather the computer, whose outer shell has no emblematic or visual power,
or even the casings of the various media themselves, as with that home
appliance called television which articulates nothing but rather implodes,
carrying its flattened image surface within itself.
Such machines are
indeed machines of reproduction rather than of production, and they
make very different demands on our capacity for aesthetic representation
than did the relatively mimetic idolatry of the older machinery of the
futurist moment, of some older speed-and-energy sculpture. Here we have
less to do with kinetic energy than with all kinds of new reproductive
processes; and in the weaker productions of postmodernism the aesthetic
embodiment of such processes of n tends to slip back more comfortably
into a mere thematic representation of content into narratives which
are about the processes of reproduction, and include movie cameras,
video, tape recorders, the whole technology of the production and repro(luction
of the simulacrum. (The shift from Antonioni's modernist Blowup to DePalma's
postmodernist Blowout is here paradigmatic.) When Japanese architects,
for example, model a building on the decorarive imitation of stacks
of cassettes, then the solution is at best a thematic and allusive,
although often humorous one.
Yet something else
does tend to emerge in the most energetic postmodernist texts, and it
is the sense that beyond all thematics or content the work seems somehow
to tap the networks of reproductive process and thereby to afford us
some glimpse into a post-modern or technological sublime, whose power
or authenticity is documented by the success of such works in evoking
a whole new postmodern space in emergence around us. Architecture therefore
remains in this sense the privileged aesthetic language; and the distorting
and fragmenting reflexions of one enormous glass surface to the other
can he taken as paradigmatic of the central role of process and reproduction
in postmodernist culture.
As I have said,
however, I want to avoid the implication that technology is in any way
the 'ultimately determining instance' either of our present-day social
life or of our cultural production: such a thesis is of course ultimately
at one with the post Marxist notion of a 'postindustrialist' society.
Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense
communicational and computer network are themselves but a historical
figuration of something even deeper, namely the whole world system of
present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary
society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating, not so much in its
own right, but because it seems to offer some privileged representational
shorthand for grasping a network of
(Continued)
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