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Modern Polemics Yale University, School of Architecture !"#$%&'(#)*+,'"#-*./0$ 12%3#+!$&4'56-'7#$%*+ 8*9/*:*)':#+;!$&4 <#2+0*4'"*+$=*0%6>'?#-@'AB'!BCDE&>'==@'BEEFBGH "2I-/$3*)'IJ4'The MIT Press'#,'I*36-K'#K'"*+$=*0%6@ <%6I-*'L8M4'http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567086 . 100*$$*)4'NBONHOANBA'BG4EG Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Yale University, School of Architecture and The MIT Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Perspecta. http://www.jstor.org Hal Foster (Post) Modern Polemics In American cultural politics today there are at least two positions on postmodernism in place: one aligned with neoconservativepolitics, the other derived from poststructuralist theory. <Neoconservative> 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). (<Poststructuralist>>postmodernism, on the other hand, assumes <the death of the author? not only as originary creator, but also as privileged subject of representation and history. This postmodernism, as opposed to the neoconservative, is profoundly antihumanist; rather than a return to representation, it launches a critique in which reality is shown to be constituted by our representations of it. (This critique accounts for the poststructuralist connection). And yet, however opposed in style and politics, it is my contention that these two concepts of postmodernism disclose a historical identity. 145 4.A(. 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 <<traditionand the individual talent>; 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 postmodern art and questioned. What, first of all, is this architecture deprives styles not only of <history>>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 \\ 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 <<shock>>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 <<flows>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 ,<Accatone- structural causality between cultural and I978 economic modernity confused, adversary modernism is denounced and a new, affirmative postmodernism proposed.2 This is the classic neoconservative position: there are variants. For example, though Hilton Kramer also views avant- gardism as more or less infantile, he is not so sanguine about postmodern production, most of which he sees as kitsch. This leaves him to uphold modernism as the new/old <<criterion>>- 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 <social development? Here, the preservationist proposed. Robert Stern, for example, planning? and capitalist development.4 aspect of contextualism appears in a new has called for a new <cultural synthesis?- And Robert Venturi has demonstrated light, as both a symptomatic reaction to a recipe of such conservatives as John how such projects were reduced to this chaos and a sympathetic policy that Gardner in fiction, Daniel Bell in social autonomous monuments-to fragments acts as its public (relations) cover or criticism, and Stern in architecture.3In that rent rather than transformedthe compensation.
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