View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
"Late capitalism" still does some of that, but with a difference: its qualifier in particular rarely means anything so silly as the ultimate senescence, breakdown, and death of the system as such (a temporal vision that would rather seem to belong to modernism than Postmodernism). What "late" generally conveys is rather the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.
[...] The Postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole "degraded" landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's 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 the 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.
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 varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the 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 new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project. Yet this is the point at which I 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 terror.
Returning now for one last moment to Munch's painting, it seems evident that The Scream subtly but elaborately disconnects 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's lack of ears). Yet the absent scream returns, as it were, in a dialectic of loops and spirals, circling ever more closely toward 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 circles in which sonorous vibration becomes ultimately visible, as on the surface of a sheet of water, in an infinite 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 landscape.
lmao i genuinely did not think of that until now. good shit
Now, before concluding, I want to sketch an analysis of a full-blown postmodern building -- a work which is in many ways uncharacteristic of that postmodern architecture whose principal proponents are Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Michael Graves, and, more recently, Frank Gehry, but which to my mind offers some very striking lessons about the originality of postmodernist space. Let me amplify the figure which has run through the preceding remarks and make it even more explicit: I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore -- like many of the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding remarks -- stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions.
this passage makes me think of cronenberg lol
But in that case it is only consequent to reject moralizing condemnations of the postmodern and of its essential triviality when juxtaposed against the Utopian "high seriousness" of the great modernisms: judgments one finds both on the Left and on the radical Right. And no doubt the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it. Meanwhile, for political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to modify its otherwise passive momentum (whether with a view toward channeling it into a socialist transformation of society or diverting it into the regressive reestablishment of some simpler fantasy past), there cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from visions of "terrorism" on the social level to those of cancer on the personal. Yet if Postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualize it in terms of moral or moralizing judgments must finally be identified as a category mistake. All of which becomes more obvious when we interrogate the position of the cultural critic and moralist; the latter, along with all the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in postmodernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.
[...] What must first be observed, however, is that most of the political positions which we have found to inform what is most often conducted as an aesthetic debate are in reality moralizing ones that seek to develop final judgments on the phenomenon of Postmodernism, whether the latter is stigmatized as corrupt or, on the other hand, saluted as a culturally and aesthetically healthy and positive form of innovation. But a genuinely historical and dialectical analysis of such phenomena -- particularly when it is a matter of a present of time and of history in which we ourselves exist and struggle -cannot afford the impoverished luxury of such absolute moralizing judgments: the dialectic is "beyond good and evil" in the sense of some easy taking of sides, whence the glacial and inhuman spirit of its historical vision (something that already disturbed contemporaries about Hegel's original system). The point is that we are within the culture of Postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt. Ideological judgment on Postmodernism today necessarily implies, one would think, a judgment on ourselves as well as on the artifacts in question; nor can an entire historical period, such as our own, be grasped in any adequate way by means of global moral judgments or their somewhat degraded equivalent, pop psychological diagnoses. On the classical Marxian view, the seeds of the future already exist within the present and must be conceptually disengaged from it, both through analysis and through political praxis (the workers of the Paris Commune, Marx once remarked in a striking phrase, "have no ideals to realize"; they merely sought to disengage emergent forms of new social relations from the older capitalist social relations in which the former had already begun to stir). In place of the temptation either to denounce the complacencies of Postmodernism as some final symptom of decadence or to salute the new forms as the harbingers of a new technological and technocratic Utopia, it seems more appropriate to assess the new cultural production within the working hypothesis of a general modification of culture itself with the social restructuring of late capitalism as a system.
god i love his brain
Postmodernism raises questions about the appetite for architecture which it then virtually at once redirects. Along with food, architecture may be thought to be a relatively late taste among North Americans, who know all about music and story telling, have been less interested in eloquence, and have sometimes painted small, dark, secret pictures for suspicious purposes, redolent of superstition or the occult. But until very recently they have not wanted -- for good reason! -- to think much about what they were eating; and as for built space, there too a protective narcosis has long reigned, a don'twant-to-see-it, don't-want-to-know-about-it attitude that may, on the whole, have been the most sensible relationship to develop with the older American city. (Postmodernism would then be the date on which all that changed.) The immediate postwar heritage of this virtually natural or biological species protection has been the diversion of such aesthetic instincts (a very doubtful thing to call them) into instant commodification -- fast foods, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the kitch interior decoration and furniture for which the United States is famous and which has been explained as a kind of security blanket -- chintz of the first postwar domestic production -- designed to ward off memories of the depression and its stark physical deprivations. But you can't start again from scratch; and everything after that -- in the so-called Postmodernism, long after the depression has been forgotten save as the pretext for Reagan's comparison of himself with FDR -- has had to build on those unpromising commercial beginnings. As though it had studied under Hegel, therefore, the postmodern lifts up, and cancels, all that junk (Aufhebung), including the hamburger within the diremption of its gourmet meals and Las Vegas within the rainbow-flavor landscape of its psychedelic corporate monuments.
jesus
At this point, however, interpretation has turned around in production, and reception has begun to be recycled as use. This particular dialectical reversal -- which might also be taken as the very opposite of Luhmann's processes of infinite fission and differentiation, in which all of those new microscopic subsystems are now powerfully reassembled into a unified form of praxis -- is perhaps the most interesting the nouveau roman has to offer, and the most historically original feature of its innovations (about which it seems less significant that they may themselves already have passed into history as so many false starts or unsuccessful patents). I want to argue, in particular, that it is the linguistic focus of Simon's "new novels" that uniquely -- and for one long moment, the one in which we read these texts -- renders reception (or consumption) indistinguishable from production. We have to read these sentences word by word, and that is something already fairly unusual (and painfully unfamiliar) in an information society in which a premium is placed on briefing and instant recognition, so that sentences are either skimmed or preprepared for rapid assimilation as so many signs. The discipline of the word by word (Simon's own expression, by the way) is enforced by the practice of cross-cutting, the possibility that the subject may change without warning at any minute. There is, in any case, no point whatsoever to speed-reading books of this kind; they have no supplemental content or information to offer us, nothing to store up and carry away, not even anything to find out (as at the end of a mystery story), unless it is the one simple tragic discovery that there is nothing to find out in the first place.
cool
Now the polemic is given another, supplementary turn: for it follows, according to Michaels, that since Dreiser's is a work of absolute immanence to the market, Dreiser criticism can only dishonestly exhibit these texts as the market's critique. Suddenly, therefore, we are confronted with the unexpected reemergence of one of the central problematics of all radical or Marxist literary or cultural criticism: namely, how the negative is to be conceived in practice and, in particular, how one can impute critical value to works that are ideologically or representationally complicitous with the "system." What is at first blush politically shocking in Michaels, then, is not the evaluation of Dreiser himself (despite the writer's conscious ideological positions). It is what was shocking in a classic version of this debate which turned on a writer fully as ambiguous as Dreiser, namely, Balzac, in whose works commodity lust is also very much an issue, along with Tory fantasies of landed squireship and overt monarchist positions (of a very different complexion from Dreiser's). One is, I think, permitted to disagree with Marx and Engels and to judge Balzac to be far more deeply corrupt and irrecuperable than they thought (although in that case their position -- that Balzac was able to register contradictory social forces more acutely than merely "liberal" writers -- is the more complicated and interesting one). What is probably more shocking about such discussions in The Gold Standard is the very presence of this problematic itself, which has never interested formalist or aestheticist criticism and which we thought belonged to us: that the "other side" should now draw up its battle lines on our own terrain -- and offer to fight it out on matters of literary and cultural "subversion" or negative, critical value -- is now even more alarming that the appropriation of those economic materials and topics mentioned earlier and hitherto associated with the Left. Doubts about the viability of critical and mostly dialectical models of the negative function of culture have, of course, come to be widespread in the poststructural period: but they have mostly been expressed by writers who remained political and "hommes de gauche," and whose "methods," like deconstruction, promised to be more subversive and more "revolutionary" than the traditional ones. But Michaels no longer raises, I think, any more than the New Historicism in general, any claim of "revolutionary" or subversive value for his own work.
cool