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Modern Polemics

Modern Polemics

Yale University, School of Architecture

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http://www.jstor.org Hal Foster

(Post) Modern Polemics

In American cultural politics today there are at least two positions on in place: one aligned with neoconservativepolitics, the other derived from poststructuralist theory.

postmodernism is the more familiar of the two: defined mostly in terms of style, it depends on modernism which, reduced to its own worst formalist image, is countered with a return to narrative, ornament, and the figure. This position is often one of reaction, but in more ways than the stylistic-for also proclaimed is the return of history (the humanist tradition) and the return of the subject (the artist/architect as auteur).

(>postmodernism, on the other hand, assumes

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C ,O r- I " r 0 5 C . V -.1 In art and architecture neoconservative Of course this postmodern return is postmodernism is marked by an eclectic conceived otherwise-as a redemption historicism in which older and newer of history. Yet, I would argue, it is modes and styles (used goods, as it only in certain works of modernism, so were) are retooled and recycled. In commonly seen as antihistorical, that architecture this practice tends to the such redemption is glimpsed-and use of a campy classical order to through critique, not pastiche. What decorate the usual shed (for example, I have in mind are works that recall a Charles Moore, Robert Stern) and in art repressed or marginal source in such to the use of pop-historicist referencesto a way as to disturb or displace the commodify the usual painting given institutional history of an art or (Julian Schnabel is the inflated signifier discipline. This critical strategy goes here). But in what way is such work back at least to David; certainly it is postmodernist?It does not argue with strong in art from Manet to Frank Stella modernism in any serious way; indeed, and in criticism from T. S. Eliot to to a great degree its postmodernism Greenberg. Such displacement-an seems a front for a rapprochement illumination of a demoted past-has a with the market and the public-a political, even utopian edge (as is clear rapprochement that, far from populist from the writings of Walter Benjamin (as is so commonly claimed) is and Ernst Bloch). And yet, in Anglo- alternately elitist in its allusions and American culture, this critical enterprise manipulative in its cliches. is often reduced to an abstract, ahistorical opposition between The postmodernist status of such art and <; its architecture is unsure on other grounds redemptive quality meets its parodistic too, for reactions against the modern inversion in such a work as Philip were common enough within its own Johnson's Glass House, in which the period: for example, the retoura l'ordre, reinscription of historical forms the traditionalist turn of art in the becomes a matter of mostly dandyish late I 9 os and '20S. As with that connoisseurship. antimodern return, so with this postmodern one: it comes in the guise If history is not returned, let alone of a new humanism and traditionalism. redeemed in this postmodernism, how is it treated? For one thing, the use But this return to history must be of pastiche in and questioned. What, first of all, is this architecture deprives styles not only of >but a reduction of historical specific context, but also of historical periods to ruling-class styles that are sense: husked down to so many then appropriated freely? A history, in emblems, they are reproduced in the short, of victors. And what, secondly, form of partial simulacra. In this sense does this return imply if not a flight ,history>>appears reified, fragmented, from the present? Clearly this was the fabricated. It is also highly edited-not thrust of eclectic historicism in only a history of victors, but a history nineteenth-century art and architecture- without modernism (which appears, if a flight from the modern, from the at all, in bowdlerized form). Finally industrial present into a preindustrial then, such postmodernism seems less a past. But then, at least, such flight dialectical supercession of modernism expressed a social protest, however than its old ideological opponent, which dreamy; now it seems simply then and now assumes the form of a symptomatic of post-histoireescapism. popular front of premodernist and antimodernist elements.

Hal Foster

146 Robert Stern Forum Design Pavilion Linz, Austria ..-- 1980

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This popular front is more than a It is in regard to this return to tradition stylistic program; it representsa cultural (in art, family, religion) that the politics, the strategy of which is connection to neoconservatism proper basically to reduce modernism to an must be made. For in our time it has abstraction (in architecture the emerged as the new political form of international style and in art formalist antimodernism; such neoconservativesas painting) and then to condemn it as a the social critic Daniel Bell charge historical mistake. In this way the modern (or adversary)culture with the adversarial, even negational aspects of ills of society and seek redressin a return modernism are suppressed: apparently, to the verities. In this sense they oddly in the neoconservative scheme of things, overrate the effectivity of culture; culture after modernism is to be for, according to them, it is largely affirmative-which means, if postmodern modernism-its transgressions, shocks, architecture is any indication, a more or intensities-that has eroded our less gratuitous veil drawn over the face traditional social bonds. Now such of social instrumentality.' erosion cannot be denied (nor should it be, at least on the left, for it is as Such a reading may seem shrill, but liberative as it is destructive); but what consider the implications of a program is its real, salient cause? Is it the that elides premodern and postmodern <>of a Duchamp urinal, long since elements. Not only are the signs of gone soft (say, with Oldenburg), or does modernism excised, but lost traditions it lie in the decoded <of capital? are imposed on a present which, in its Certainly it is capital that destructures contradictions, is far beyond such social forms-the avant-garde only humanist pieties. Such a program of fenced with a few old artistic reference to quasi-cultic traditions, conventions. moreover, is not a historical novelty; it is often used to beautify reactionary Yet here the neoconservativesconfound politics. matters-and to advantage. First, cultural modernism is severed from its base in economic modernization and then blamed for its negative social Julian Schnabel effects (such as privativism). With the ,>- but it is a modernism long ago purged of its subversive elements and set up as official culture in the museums, the music halls, the magazines. Meanwhile the politics of this program remain much the same-mainstream neocon.

Hal Foster

147 If culture from the neoconservative Surely no one can deny that, when We must ask what contextualism, posed position is a cause of social anomie, it executed, the great modern utopian against such utopianism, intends. Is it can also be a cure. And so, in the old projects were changed utterly. Manfredo not, in part, a policy that would American tradition of therapy over Tafuri has argued that these utopias in reconcile us to our Las Vegases-to analysis, tendentious diagnoses are effect produced tabulaerasae, which the chaos of contemporary urban offered and proscriptive prognoses actually served the ends of both 5 modernism: its ruptures were posed against historicism, not history-in order to transform the past in the present, not to foreclose it. But the disruptions of James Stirling William Bailey the modern are real enough, and indeed Derby Town Centre ,

Hal Foster

148 On one side, then, there is a delight in ~~~ ~ the contemporary cityscape of capital (Las Vegas Venturi); on another a nostalgia for the <-and the very typology-of the historical city (the Paris Krier brothers);and mixed in with both, the fabrication of more or less false (inorganic, commercial) regionalisms. Here the contradictions of 1 neoconservative postmodernism begin to cry out, and in relation to history they t^1 ~ fully erupt.

.- C^... This postmodernism privileges style-in the sense both of the signature of the artist/architect and of the modernism, further proclaims a return to history. Thus the postmodern ------_ tr zeitgeist. Yet nearly every postmodern - artist and architect has resorted, in the _ ;, -, - T 1.- , , k--.E__ _ name of style and history, to pastiche; indeed, it is fair to say that pastiche is the official style of this postmodernist But does not the eclecticism of ' camp. i,- . - ? pastiche threaten the very concept of at least as the expression ' style, singular T/ 5 of an individual or a period? And does ;J ( - not the relativism of pastiche erode the very ability to place historical /J,; .- references-indeed, to think historically ' /./ .at' all? To put it crudely, this postmodern 7 q;:( / style of history may, in fact, signal the disintegration of style and the collapse ^ ,i^j 1.of history.7

;/Xi, My point is a basic one: dialectically- .( c which is to say, necessarilyand in spite i/,-- of itself-neoconservative postmodernism is revealed by the very cultural moment it would otherwise flee. In turn, this Venturi and Rauch moment is revealed to be marked not Leon Krier a renascenceof but its A Bill-Ding Board for by style, by School at St. Quentin in not a return of the National Football implosion pastiche; by en Yvelines, project a sense of but its and Hall of Fame, project history, by erosion; 1979 1967 not by a rebirth of the artist/architectas auteur, but by the death of the author as origin and center of meaning. Such is the postmodern present of <

Hal Foster 149 But lest this criticism seem too tilted, It is on the question of representation, This theoretical redefinition of the much the same can be argued about then, that the two artifact can also be seen as a historical ?poststructuralist? postmodernism, differ most clearly. Neoconservative passage from modernist ? I use these terms fragmentation of history and the representation; it takes the to suggest an are different. representation; it seeks

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Hal Foster A I50 After the failure of utopian, But of course, postmodernism also protopolitical modernism (for example, derives from this modernism, and in Constructivism and the Bauhaus) on nowhere is this more apparent than in the one hand, and the recuperationof its discursive orientation. What self- the transgressive avant-garde (as in Dada criticism is to modernist practice, or )on the other, a new deconstruction is to postmodernist model of modernism was needed. There practice: if the of modernism were other pressures as well: the is to use the methods of a discipline diaspora of the moderns under fascism in order >then the culture far beyond the blandishments >of postmodernism is to do the of kitsch. The response (at least in same but in order, precisely, to subvert the ) was an apolitical, the discipline. Postmodernist art adamantly high-cultural paradigm of its given medium art, which shifted the discursive not only as an autonomous activity, >of modernism from utopianism but also as a model of representation and transgression to self-criticism and with assured referential value and/or aesthetic purity. Clement Greenberg wrote in I965, >-theinterconnections area of competence.>>12 of power and knowledge in social representations. It is in these terms, Here, in brief, is the model that came then, that the art object-indeed, the to dominate American art and criticism art field-has changed. The old at mid-century-a self-critical program Enlightenment <of distinct (Greenberg refers specifically to the forms of expression (visual versus Enlightenment) pledged to maintain literary, temporal versus spatial) the high quality of past art in current grounded in separateareas of production; to stem the reduction of art competence, is no longer obeyed. in general to entertainment; to ensure And with this destructuring of the the aesthetic as a value in its own object and its field has come a right; and to ground art-the medium, decentering of the human subject, both the discipline-ontologically and artist and audience. epistemologically. On the Greenbergian account, modernism turned within to resist on the one hand the Alexandrianism of the a b academy and on the other the debasement Bernard Tschumi Rem Koolhaus of kitsch. 13 But in time this critical Joyce's Garden, project Irish Prime Minister's turn atrophied into withdrawal pure 198() Residence, project and simple. Postmodernist art is 1979 posed, at least initially, against this c modernism become monolithic in its Zaha Hadid self-referentiality (and ?official? in its Irish Prime Minister's autonomy). Residence, project 1979

Hal Foster

I51 As paradigms, then, the postmodernist The practices of Eisenman and Anderson text and the modernist work are are articulated quite differently. Unlike distinct. But what of (poststructuralist) Graves, Eisenman reflects on architecture textuality and (neoconservative) not as a repository of stylistic attributes pastiche? Stylistically and politically the to be glued together in collage, but deconstruction of an art or discipline as a discipline to be deconstructed is quite other than its instrumental precisely with its own methods. In pastiche, and a critique of representation effect, he uses the very modes of is wholly different from a recycling of architectural representation (primarily pop-or pseudohistorical images-but as the axonometric) to generate the actual forms of knowledge how distinct are they? structure-which is thus both object and representation. And unlike Schnabel, As examples of opposed postmodernist Anderson uses the art-historical or pop- practices one can take the

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Hal Foster

152 Do these opposed practices of Notes textuality and pastiche differ in any deep epistemic way? Whatever else is claimed for them, is not the subject decentered, representation ?disentrenched,? and the sense of history eroded in both? Granted, 5 9 one may explore the traditional See , language of art or architecture critically; ,Towards a Critical unpublished paper on ,,Representation, the other may exploit it instrumentally; Regionalism: Six Points postmodern architecture Appropriation & Power, but both practicesreflect its breakdown.If for an Architecture of and architectural theory. ,Art in America, this is the case, then the neoconservative Resistance> in -The Jameson concludes, ,On May 1982 p2I to the subject, to representation, Anti-Aesthetic: Essays any dialectical reading, to history may be revealed-historically, on Postmodern Culture> these two seemingly so 10 dialectically-to be one with the ed. by Hal Foster distinct positions are Jameson poststructuralist ?critique? of the same. Port Townsend, Wash really one and the same, ,Fables of Aggression: In short, pastiche and textuality may be Bay Press 1983 and Tafuri's rigorous Wyndham Lewis, the symptoms of the same ?schizophrenic> pathos is at one with Modernist as Fascists collapse of the subject and historical 2 the celebrations Berkeley, University of narrativity-signs of the same process of This diagnosis of of postmodernism. California Press reification and fragmentation under late neoconservative Perhaps, in that case, 1979 p20 . 14 postmodernism owes something is to be said much to Jurgen for the search-beyond II And if these two models of Habermas the closure of this Roland Barthes postmodernism, so opposed in style and ,Modernity-An particular double bind- -The Death of the politics, are indeed aspects of one Incomplete Projects in for a properly Authors in .lmagel historical process, we need to consider -The Anti-Aesthetic> Gramscean architecture MusiclText> more deeply what (post) modernism after all. trans. by Stephen Heath might be. That is beyond the scope of 3 New York, Hill & Wang the present essay, but the questions that See Robert Stern 6 1977 arise in the (post) modern problem are ,The Doubles of Post- Tafuri now clear: the status of the subject and Moderns in ,Harvard 12 its language, of history and its Architectural Review> 7 Clement Greenberg representation. 1980 On the implications of ,Modernist Paintings pastiche so pervasive in ,Art and Literatures 4 cultural production Spring I965 See Manfredo Tafuri today see Jameson, sArchitecture and Utopia: ,Postmodernism and I3 Design and Capitalist Consumer Society>. in Greenberg Developments ,The Anti- ,Avant-Garde and Cambridge, Mass Kitsch> in MIT Press I976 8 ..Art and Cultures For more on this Boston, Beacon Press retrospection> see Jean 1961 Baudrillard I4 New York See Jameson

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