or, The cultural logic of Late Capitalism这本书的前半部分

Fredric JamesonPostmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of

Late CapitalismThe last few years have been marked by an inverted millennarianism, in

which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been

replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or

social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state,

etc., etc.): taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly

called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis

of some radical break or coupure,generally traced back to the end of the 1950s

or the early 1960s. As the word itself suggests, this break is most often

related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old

modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus,

abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final

forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs,or the

modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works

of Wallace Stevens): all these are now seen as the final, extraordinary

flowering of a high modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with53

them. The enumeration of what follows then at once becomes empirical,

chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also

photorealism, and beyond it, the ‘new expressionism’; the moment, in

music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and ‘popular’

styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also

punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as

the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving

tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard and experimental cinema and

video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more

below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and

the French nouveau roman and its succession on the other, along with

alarming new kinds of literary criticism, based on some new aesthetic of

textuality or éThe list might be extended indefinitely; but

does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic

style- and fashion-changes determined by an older high-modernist

imperative of stylistic innovation?*.The Rise of Aesthetic PopulismIt 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 destruc-tion of the fabric of the traditional city and of its older neighbourhood

culture (by way of the radical disjunction 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 dernism 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 ulti-mately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit of

drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmod-ernisms 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*The present essay draws on lectures and on material previously published in The Anti-Aesthetic,edited by Hal Foster, (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press 1983) and in Amerika Studien/American

Studies 29/1(1984).54

and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have in fact been

fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and

kitsch, of

TVseries 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

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 famously

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, apurer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that

preceded it. I will return to this argument later; suffice 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 dernism as Cultural DominantA 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 by a few substantive of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is*In ‘The Politics of Theory’, New German Critique,32, Spring/Summer 1984.55

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 er, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmod-ernism 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 post-modernists, 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 1950s. This is indeed surely one of the most plausible

explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the

younger generation of the 1960s 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 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 defiance, 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 complac-ency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with

the official culture of Western 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 the56

new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multina-tional business, whose expansion and development is strictly contem-poraneous 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 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 postmodern-ism in the economic system of late capital, and beyond that, to the

transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary 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 field in

which very different kinds of cultural impulses—what Raymond Wil-liams 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.57

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 theoriesof 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

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 two-stage 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 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 it

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 poverty, and

the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a

world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and margin-alized 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 into58

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 divi-sions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such

fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for 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 Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,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 Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure

of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, 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 a 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 inexplic-able 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 the59

Marxian sense (Derrida remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian

Paar Bauernschuhe,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 commer-cial 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 transi-tion 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

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 postmodern-isms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of other

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 been 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 certain of Warhol’s pieces—most notably, the

traffic accidents or the electric chair series—this is not, I think, a matter

of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in

the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in

the disposition of the subject.60

The Waning of AffectAll 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 waning of affect is, however, perhaps best initially approached by

way 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 isof course a canonical expression of the

great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude and social

fragmentation and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what

used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read not merely as an

embodiment of the expression of that kind of affect, but even more as

a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which

seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism, but to

have vanished away—for both practical and theoretical reasons—in the

world of the postmodern. The very concept of expression presupposes

indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole

metaphysics of the inside and the outside, of the wordless pain within

the monad and the moment in which, often cathartically, that ‘emotion’

is then projected out and externalized, as gesture or cry, as desperate

communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling. And

this is perhaps the 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 outside 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 be incon-sistent 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 postmodernist culture which is our

subject stily, we can say that besides the hermeneutic model of inside

61

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

programmatic 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 semiotic opposition between signifier and signified, which was

itself rapidly unravelled and deconstructed during its brief heyday in

the 1960s and 70s. 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 by 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 the 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 undecidable. This great sheet of windows, with its

gravity-defying two-dimensionality, momentarily transforms the solid

ground on which we climb 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 in

Kubrick’s 2001which confronts its viewers like an enigmatic destiny, a

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-AnnihilationReturning now for one last moment to Munch’s painting, it seems

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 concentric62

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 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 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-destruc-tion cases of the ending 1960s, 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 terms inevitably recall one of the more fashionable themes in

contemporary theory—that of the ‘death’ of the subject itself ϭ 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 decentring of that formerly centred subject or psyche.

(Of the two possible formulations of this notion—the historicist 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 position

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 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-sufficient field and a63

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 dernism 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 anomie 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 accurateto 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

return at the end of this waning of affect, however, might also have been characterized, in

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 synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at

least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our

cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather

than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism

. The Postmodern and the PastPastiche Eclipses ParodyThe disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal

consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style,engender

the well-nigh universal practice today of what maybe 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, Stra-vinsky’s irrational eclecticism), is to be sharply distinguished from the

more readily received idea of 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 non-substantive parts of speech (‘the intricate evasions of as’), the fateful,64

but finally predictable, swoops in Mahler from high orchestral pathos

into village accordeon sentiment, Heidegger’s meditative-solemn prac-tice 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 , 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

affirmation 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 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, without any of

parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of

laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you

have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still

exists. Pastiche 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 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

precursor 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

the 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 HistoryThis situation evidently determines what the architecture historians call

‘historicism’, namely the random cannibalization of all the styles of the65

past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri

Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the ‘neo’. This omnipres-ence 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 extraordi-nary 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 effect on what used to be historical past is thereby itself modified: what was once, in the historical

novel as Lukács 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 slo-gan 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 Nostalgia ModeYet it should not be thought 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 satisfactory 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 Graffiti (1973)66

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 privilegedlost 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 problem-atical, 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 with these ultimate objects—our social, historical and existential

present, and the past as ‘referent’—the incompatibility of a postmodern-ist ‘nostalgia’ art language with genuine historicity becomes dramatically

apparent. The contraction propels this model, however, into complex

and interesting new formal 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 con-notation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image, and

‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ by the attributes of fashion (therein follow-ing 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 Kazdan’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 ‘intertex-tuality’ 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’ from the outset a whole battery of aesthetic signs begin to distance

the officially contemporary image from us in time: the art deco scriptingof the credits, for example, serves at once to programme the spectator

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

play 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 the67

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 y, 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 destructionof 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 contem-poraneity 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 increas-ingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current

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 form 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 are

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 articulated68

and formally self-conscious way the end of the frontier of the late

nineteenth century).The Book of Daniel isnot 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 interpret-ation which it perpetually holds out and withdraws. When we rememberthat 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 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 acquired 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 be69

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 charac-ters 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 historio-graphic formation on the reader’s of the Radical PastMeanwhile, 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 ‘passé

composé’ 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

Émile 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 and70

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 Breakdown of the Signifying ChainThe 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, to the problem of the form that time, temporality and

the syntagmatic will be able to take in a culture increasingly dominated

by space and spatial 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, however, 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 textual-ity, écriture,or schizophrenic writing, and it is to these that we must

now briefly turn.I have found 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 briefly, Lacan describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the71

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-the-Father, 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 effect 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 the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizo-phrenic 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 of72

unreality: illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smooth-ness 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 narratives are also of this order, most notably Watt,where a

primacy of the present sentence in time ruthlessly disintegrates the

narrative 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 Poetry or the New

Sentence—seems to have adopted schizophrenic fragmentation as its

fundamental e live on the third world from the sun. Number three. Nobody tells

us what to people who taught us to count were being very kind.

It’s always time to it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don’t.

The wind blows your hat sun rises also.I’d rather the stars didn’t describe us to each other; I’d rather we do it

for in front of your shadow.A sister who points to the sky at least once a decade is a good sister.

The landscape is train takes you where it s among water.*Marguerite Séchehaye, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl,trans. by G. Rubin-Rabson, New York

1968, p.19.73

Folks straggling along vast stretches of concrete, heading into the

’t forget what your hat and shoes will look like when you are

nowhere to be the words floating in air make blue shadows.

If it tastes good we eat leaves are falling. Point things out.

Pick up the right guess what? What? I’ve learned how to person whose head was incomplete burst into tears.

As it fell, what could the doll do? Nothing.

Go to look great in shorts. And the flag looks great too.

Everyone enjoyed the explosions.

Time to wake better get used to Perelman from Primer,This Press, BerkeleyMany things could be said about this interesting exercise in discontin-uities: 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 general-ized as a cultural style, ceases to entertain a necessary relationship to the

morbid content we associate with terms like schizophrenia, and becomes

available for more joyous intensities, for precisely that euphoria which

we saw displacing the older affects of anxiety and er, 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 off 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 Flaub-ert’s style are anachronistically foregrounded. Yet it affords another74

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

such features become themselves the cultural norm, they shed all such

forms of negative affect and become available for other, more decorative

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

dynamics 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 e and Radical DifferenceThis account of schizophrenia and temporal organization might, how-ever, have been formulated in a different 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 ‘difference relates’. Our own recent criti-cism, from 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 sub-systems 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 the most interesting postmodernist works, however, one can detect

a more positive conception of relationship which restores its proper

tension to the notion of differences 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 the75

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 isstill only a very

feeble Hysterical SublimeNow 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 derealization 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 a76

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 land-scape and village society, which is the final form of the image of Nature

in our own , 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 something else which we must now Apotheosis of CapitalismI 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,

an 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 logy is, however, on the Marxist view the result of the

development of capital, rather than some primal cause in its own right.

It will 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 of77

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.18.)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 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 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 machine78

energy for a Promethean reconstruction of human society as a whole, as

in Fernand Leger and Diego 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 articu-lates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface

within 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 often

tends to slip back more comfortably into a mere thematic representation

of content—into narratives which are about the processes of reproduc-tion, and include movie cameras, video, tape recorders, the whole

technology of the production and reproduction of the simulacrum.

(The shift from Antonioni’s modernist Blowup to DePalma’s postmod-ernist Blowout is here paradigmatic.) When Japanese architects, for

example, model a building on the decorative imitation of stacks of

cassettes, then the solution is at best a thematic and allusive, although

often humorous, something else does tend to emerge in the most energetic postmod-ernist 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 be taken as paradigmatic of the

central role of process and reproduction in postmodernist I have said, however, I want to avoid the implication that technologyis 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 ‘post-industrialist’ society. Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty represen-tations of some immense communicational and computer network are

themselves but a distorted 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 of79

power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations

to grasp—namely the whole new decentred global network of the third

stage of capital itself. This is a figural process presently best observed in

a whole mode of contemporary entertainment literature, which one is

tempted to characterize as ‘high tech paranoia’, in which the circuits

and networks of some putative global computer hook-up are narratively

mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous but deadly

interlocking and competing information agencies in a complexity often

beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind. Yet conspiracy theory

(and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded

attempt—through the figuration of advanced technology—to think the

impossible totality of the contemporary world system. It is therefore in

terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable,

other reality of economic and social institutions that in my opinion the

postmodern sublime can alone be adequately -Modernism and the CityNow, before I try to offer a somewhat more positive conclusion, I want

to sketch the analysis of a full-blown postmodern building—a work

which is in many ways uncharacteristic of that postmodern architecture

whose principal names 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 motion 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, as yet unimagin-able, perhaps ultimately impossible, Bonaventura HotelThe building whose features I will very rapidly enumerate in the next

few moments is the Bonaventura Hotel, built in the new Los Angeles

downtown by the architect and developer John Portman, whose other

works include the various Hyatt Regencies, the Peachtree Center in

Atlanta, and the Renaissance Center in Detroit. I have mentioned the

populist aspect of the rhetorical defence of postmodernism against the

elite (and Utopian) austerities of the great architectural modernisms: it

is generally affirmed, in other words, that these newer buildings are

popular works on the one hand; and that they respect the vernacular of

the American city fabric on the other, that is to say, that they no longer

attempt, as did the masterworks and monuments of high modernism, to

insert a different, a distinct, an elevated, a new Utopian language into80

the tawdry and commercial sign-system of the surrounding city, but

rather, on the contrary, seek to speak that very language, using its

lexicon and syntax as that has been emblematically ‘learned from Las

Vegas’.On the first of these counts, Portman’s Bonaventura fully confirms the

claim: it is a popular building, visited with enthusiasm by locals and

tourists alike (although Portman’s other buildings are even more

successful in this respect). The populist insertion into the city fabric is,

however, another matter, and it is with this that we will begin. There

are three entrances to the Bonaventura,one from Figueroa, and the other

two by way of elevated gardens on the other side of the hotel, which is

built into the remaining slope of the former Beacon Hill. None of these

is anything like the old hotel marquee, or the monumental porte-cochère with which the sumptuous buildings of yesteryear were wont

to stage your passage from city street to the older interior. The entry-ways of the Bonaventura are as it were lateral and rather backdoor affairs:

the gardens in the back admit you to the sixth floor of the towers, and

even there you must walk down one flight to find the elevator by which

you gain access to the lobby. Meanwhile, what one is still tempted to

think of as the front entry, on Figueroa, admits you, baggage and all,

onto the second-storey shopping balcony, from which you must take an

escalator down to the main registration desk. More about these elevators

and escalators in a moment. What I first want to suggest about these

curiously unmarked ways-in is that they seem to have been imposed by

some new category of closure governing the inner space of the hotel

itself (and this over and above the material constraints under which

Portman had to work). I believe that, with a certain number of other

characteristic postmodern buildings, such as the Beaubourg in Paris, or

the Eaton Centre in Toronto, the Bonaventura aspires to being a total

space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city (and I would want to

add that to this new total space corresponds a new collective practice,

a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like

the practice of a new and historically original kind of hyper-crowd). In

this sense, then, ideally the mini-city of Portman’s Bonaventura ought

not to have entrances at all, since the entryway is always the seam that

links the building to the rest of the city that surrounds it: for it does not

wish to be a part of the city, but rather its equivalent and its replacement

or substitute. That is, however, obviously not possible or practical,

whence the deliberate downplaying and reduction of the entrance

function to its bare minimum. But this disjunction from the surroundingcity is very different from that of the great monuments of the

International Style: there, the act of disjunction was violent, visible,

and had a very real symbolic significance—as in Le Corbusier’s great

pilotis whose gesture radically separates the new Utopian space of the

modern from the degraded and fallen city fabric which it thereby

explicitly repudiates (although the gamble of the modern was that this

new Utopian space, in the virulence of its Novum, would fan out and

transform that eventually by the very power of its new spatial language).

The Bonaventura, however, is content to ‘let the fallen city fabric

continue to be in its being’ (to parody Heidegger); no further effects, no

larger protopolitical Utopian transformation, is either expected or

desired.81

This diagnosis is to my mind confirmed by the great reflective glass

skin of the Bonaventura,whose function I will now interpret rather

differently than I did a moment ago when I saw the phenomenon of

reflexion generally as developing a thematics of reproductive technology

(the two readings are however not incompatible). Now one would want

rather to stress the way in which the glass skin repels the city outside;

a repulsion for which we have analogies in those reflector sunglasses

which make it impossible for your interlocutor to see your own eyes

and thereby achieve a certain aggressivity towards and power over the

Other. In a similar way, the glass skin achieves a peculiar and placeless

dissociation of the Bonaventura from its neighbourhood: it is not even an

exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel’s outer walls

you cannot see the hotel itself, but only the distorted images of

everything that surrounds I want to say a few words about escalators and elevators: given

their veryreal pleasures in Portman, particularly these last, which the

artist has termed ‘gigantic kinetic sculptures’ and which certainly

account for much of the spectacle and the excitement of the hotel

interior, particularly in the Hyatts, where like great Japanese lanterns or

gondolas they ceaselessly rise and fall—given such a deliberate marking

and foregrounding in their own right, I believe one has to see such

‘people movers’ (Portman’s own term, adapted from Disney) as some-thing a little more than mere functions and engineering components.

We know in any case that recent architectural theory has begun to

borrow from narrative analysis in other fields, and to attempt to see our

physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives or

stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors

are asked to fulfil and to complete with our own bodies and movements.

In the Bonaventura,however, we find a dialectical heightening of this

process: it seems to me that the escalators and elevators here henceforth

replace movement but also and above all designate themselves as new

reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper (something which

will become evident when we come to the whole question of what

remains of older forms of movement in this building, most notably

walking itself). Here the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbol-ized, reified and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes

the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer

allowed to conduct on our own: and this is a dialectical intensification

of the autoreferentiality of all modern culture, which tends to turn upon

itself and designate its own cultural production as its content.I am more at a loss when it comes to conveying the thing itself, the

experience of space you undergo when you step off such allegorical

devices into the lobby or atrium, with its great central column,

surrounded by a miniature lake, the whole positioned between the four

symmetrical residential towers with their elevators, and surrounded by

rising balconies capped by a kind of greenhouse roof at the sixth level.

I am tempted to say that such space makes it impossible for us to use

the language of volume or volumes any longer, since these last are

impossible to seize. Hanging streamers indeed suffuse this empty space

in such a way as to distract systematically and deliberately from

whatever form it might be supposed to have; while a constant busyness82

gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely packed, that it is an

element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that

distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume.

You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your body; and if it

seemed to you before that that suppression of depth I spoke of in

postmodern painting or literature would necessarily be difficult to

achieve in architecture itself, perhaps you may now be willing to see

this bewildering immersion as the formal equivalent in the new escalator and elevator are also in this context dialectical opposites;

and we may suggest that the glorious movement of the elevator

gondolas is also a dialectical compensation for this filled space of the

atrium—it gives us the chance at a radically different, but complemen-tary, spatial experience, that of rapidly shooting up through the ceiling

and outside, along one of the four symmetrical towers, with the

referent, Los Angeles itself, spread out breathtakingly and even alarm-ingly before us. But even this vertical movement is contained: the

elevator lifts you to one of those revolving cocktail lounges, in which

you, seated, are again passively rotated about and offered a contempla-tive spectacle of the city itself, now transformed into its own images by

the glass windows through which you view me quickly conclude all this by returning to the central space of the

lobby itself (with the passing observation that the hotel rooms are

visibly marginalized: the corridors in the residential sections are low-ceilinged and dark, most depressingly functional indeed; while one

understands that the rooms are in the worst of taste). The descent is

dramatic enough, plummeting back down through the roof to splash

down in the lake; what happens when you get there is something else,

which I can only try to characterize as milling confusion, something

like the vengeance this space takes on those who still seek to walk

through it. Given the absolute symmetry of the four towers, it is quite

impossible to get your bearings in this lobby; recently, colour coding

and directional signals have been added in a pitiful and revealing, rather

desperate attempt to restore the coordinates of an older space. I will

take as the most dramatic practical result of this spatial mutation the

notorious dilemma of the shopkeepers on the various balconies: it has

been obvious, since the very opening of the hotel in 1977, that nobody

could ever find any of these stores, and even if you located the

appropriate boutique, you would be most unlikely to be as fortunate a

second time; as a consequence, the commercial tenants are in despair

and all the merchandise is marked down to bargain prices. When you

recall that Postman is a businessman as well as an architect, and a

millionaire developer, an artist who is at one and the same time a

capitalist in his own right, one cannot but feel that here too something

of a ‘return of the repressed’ is I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in

space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending

the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize

its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its

position in a mappable external world. And I have already suggested

that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built83

environment—which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modern-ism as the velocities of space craft are to those of the automobile—can

itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma

which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the

great global multinational and decentred communicational network in

which we find ourselves caught as individual New MachineBut as I am anxious that Portman’s space not be perceived as something

either exceptional or seemingly marginalized and leisure-specialized on

the order of Disneyland, I would like in passing to juxtapose this

complacent and entertaining (although bewildering) leisure-time space

with its analogue in a very different area, namely the space of

postmodern warfare, in particular as Michael Herr evokes it in his great

book on the experience of Vietnam, called extraordinary

linguistic innovations of this work may still be considered postmodern,

in the eclectic way in which its language impersonally fuses a whole

range of contemporary collective idiolects, most notably rock language

and Black language: but the fusion is dictated by problems of content.

This first terrible postmodernist war cannot be told in any of the

traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie—indeed that break-down of all previous narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown

of any shared language through which a veteran might convey such

experience, among the principal subjects of the book and may be said to

open up the place of a whole new reflexivity. Benjamin’s account of

Baudelaire, and of the emergence of modernism from a new experience

of citytechnology which transcends all the older habits of bodily

perception, is both singularly relevant here, and singularly antiquated,

in the light of this new and virtually unimaginable quantum leap in

technological alienation: ‘He was a moving-target-survivor subscriber,

a true child of the war, because except for the rare times when you were

pinned or stranded the system was geared to keep you mobile, if that

was what you thought you wanted. As a technique for staying alive it

seemed to make as much sense as anything, given naturally that you

were there to begin with and wanted to see it close; it started out sound

and straight but it formed a cone as it progressed, because the more you

moved the more you saw, the more you saw the more besides death and

mutilation you risked, and the more you risked of that the more you

would have to let go of one day as a “survivor”. Some of us moved

around the war like crazy people until we couldn’t see which way the

run was taking us anymore, only the war all over its surface with

occasional, unexpected penetration. As long as we could have choppers

like taxis it took real exhaustion or depression near shock or a dozen

pipes of opium to keep us even apparently quiet, we’d still be running

around inside our skins like something was after us, ha ha, La Vida

Loca. In the months after I got back the hundreds of helicopters I’d

flown in began to draw together until they’d formed a collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer,

provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human;

hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and

warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire84

in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an

intruder.’*In this new machine, which does not, like the older modernist machinery

of the locomotive or the airplane, represent motion, but which can only

be represented in motion,something of the mystery of the new postmod-ernist space is Abolition of Critical DistanceThe conception of postmodernism outlined here is a historical rather

than a merely stylistic one. I cannot stress too greatly the radical

distinction between a view for which the postmodern is one (optional)

style among many others available, and one which seeks to grasp it as

the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism: the two approaches

in fact generate two very different ways of conceptualizing the pheno-menon as a whole, on the one hand moral judgements (about which it

is indifferent whether they are positive or negative), and on the other a

genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in some positive moral evaluation of postmodernism little needs to be

said: the complacent (yet delirious) camp-following celebration of this

aesthetic new world (including its social and economic dimension,

greeted with equal enthusiasm under the slogan of ‘post-industrial

society’) is surely unacceptable—although it may be somewhat less

obvious the degree to which current fantasies about the salvational

nature of high technology, from chips to robots—fantasies entertained

not only by left as well as right governments in distress, but also by

many intellectuals—are essentially of a piece with more vulgar apologies

for in that case it is also logical to reject moralizing condemnations of

the postmodern and of its essential triviality, when juxtaposed against

the Utopian ‘high seriousness’ of the great modernisms: these are also

judgements 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 towards

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 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 cata-clysm—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

judgements must finally be identified as a category-mistake. All of

which becomes more obvious when we interrogate the position of the*Michael Herr, Dispatches,New York 1978, pp. 8–9.85

cultural critic and moralist: this last, 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 distinction I am proposing here knows one canonical form in

Hegel’s differentiation of the thinking of individual morality or moral-izing (Moralita´´t)from that whole very different realm of collective social

values and practices (Sittlichkeit).But it finds its definitive form in

Marx’s demonstration of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those

classic pages of the Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of some more

genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and change.

The topic of the lesson is, of course, the historical development of

capitalism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In

a well-known passage, Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible,

namely to think this development positively and negatively all at once;

to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of

grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its

extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously, within a single

thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgement.

We are, somehow, to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to

understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing

that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse

from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance

of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still,

the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to

think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe

and progress all an effort suggests two immediate questions, with which we will

conclude these reflexions. Can we in fact identify some ‘moment of

truth’ within the more evident ‘moments of falsehood’ of postmodern

culture? And, even if we can do so, is there not something ultimately

paralysing in the dialectical view of historical development proposed

above; does it not tend to demobilize us and to surrender us to passivityand helplessness, by systematically obliterating possibilities of action

under the impenetrable fog of historical inevitability? It will be

appropriate to discuss these two (related) issues in terms of current

possibilities for some effective contemporary cultural politics and for

the construction of a genuine political focus the problem in this way is of course immediately to raise the

more genuine issue of the fate of culture generally, and of the function

of culture specifically, as one social level or instance, in the postmodern

era. Everything in the previous discussion suggests that what we have

been calling postmodernism is inseparable from, and unthinkable

without the hypothesis of, some fundamental mutation of the sphere of

culture in the world of late capitalism, which includes a momentous

modification of its social function. Older discussions of the space,

function or sphere of culture (most notably Herbert Marcuse’s classic

essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’) have insisted on what

a different language would call the ‘semi-autonomy’ of the cultural86

realm: its ghostly, yet Utopian, existence, for good or ill, above the

practical world of the existent, whose mirror image it throws back in

forms which vary from the legitimations of flattering resemblance to

the contestatory indictments of critical satire or Utopian we must now ask ourselves is whether it is not precisely this

‘semi-autonomy’ of the cultural sphere which has been destroyed by the

logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is today no longer

endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level among

others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in pre-capitalist

societies), is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. On

the contrary: we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an

autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an

explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social

realm, to the point at which everything in our social life—from

economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure

of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some

original and as yet untheorized sense. This perhaps startling proposition

is, however, substantively quite consistent with the previous diagnosis

of a society of the image or the simulacrum, and a transformation of the

‘real’ into so many also suggests that some of our most cherished and time-honoured

radical conceptions about the nature of cultural politics may thereby

find themselves outmoded. However distinct those conceptions may

have been—which range from slogans of negativity, opposition, and

subversion to critique and reflexivity—they all shared a single, funda-mentally spatial, presupposition, which may be resumed in the equally

time-honoured formula of ‘critical distance’. No theory of cultural

politics current on the Left today has been able to do without one

notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the

possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive

Being of capital, which then serves as an Archimedean point from

which to assault this last. What the burden of our preceding demon-stration suggests, however, is that distance in general (including ‘criticaldistance’ in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new

space of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and

suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are

bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically)

incapable of distantiation; meanwhile, it has already been observed how

the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrat-ing and colonizing those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the

Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds

for critical effectivity. The short-hand language of ‘cooptation’ is for

this reason omnipresent on the Left; but offers a most inadequte

theoretical basis for understanding a situation in which we all, in one

way or another, dimly feel that not only punctual and local countercul-tural forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare, but also even

overtly political interventions like those of The Clash,are all somehow

secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves

might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance

from it.87

What we must now affirm is that it is precisely this whole extraordinarily

demoralizing and depressing original new global space which is the

‘moment of truth’ of postmodernism. What has been called the

postmodernist ‘sublime’ is only the moment in which this content has

become most explicit, has moved the closest to the surface of conscious-ness, as a coherent new type of space in its own right—even though a

certain figural concealment or disguise is still at work here, most

notably in the high-technological thematics in which the new spatial

content is still dramatized and articulated. Yet the earlier features of the

postmodern which were enumerated above can all now be seen as

themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial

argument for a certain authenticity in these otherwise patently

ideological productions depends on the prior proposition that what we

have now been calling postmodern (or multinational) space is not

merely a cultural ideology or fantasy, but has genuine historical (and

socio-economic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism

around the globe (after the earlier expansions of the national market

and the older imperialist system, which each had their own cultural

specificity and generated new types of space appropriate to their

dynamics). The distorted and unreflexive attempts of newer cultural

production to explore and to express this new space must then also, in

their own fashion, be considered as so many approaches to the

representation of (a new) reality (to use a more antiquated language).

As paradoxical as the terms may seem, they may thus, following a

classic interpretive option, be read as peculiar new forms of realism (or

at least of the mimesis of reality), at the same time that they can equally

well be analysed as so many attempts to distract and to divert us from

that reality or to disguise its contradictions and resolve them in the

guise of various formal for that reality itself, however—the as yet untheorized original space

of some new ‘world system’ of multinational or late capitalism (a space

whose negative or baleful aspects are only too obvious), the dialectic

requires us to hold equally to a positive or ‘progressive’ evaluation of

its emergence, as Marx did for the newly unified space of the national

markets, or as Lenin did for the older imperialist global network. For

neither Marx nor Lenin was socialism a matter of returning to small

(and thereby less repressive and comprehensive) systems of social

organization; rather, the dimensions attained by capital in their own

times were grasped as the promise, the framework, and the precondition

for the achievement of some new and more comprehensive socialism.

How much the more is this not the case with the even more global and

totalizing space of the new world system, which demands the invention

and elaboration of an internationalism of a radically new type? The

disastrous realignment of socialist revolution with the older nationalisms

(not only in Southeast Asia), whose results have necessarily aroused

much serious recent Left reflexion, can be adduced in support of this

position.88

The Need for MapsBut if all this is so, then at least one possible form of a new radical

cultural politics becomes evident: with a final aesthetic proviso that

must quickly be noted. Left cultural producers and theorists—particu-larly those formed by bourgeois cultural traditions issuing from

romanticism and valorizing spontaneous, instinctive or unconscious

forms of ‘genius’—but also for very obvious historical reasons such as

Zhdanovism and the sorry consequences of political and party interven-tions in the arts—have often by reaction allowed themselves to be

unduly intimidated by the repudiation, in bourgeois aesthetics and most

notably in high modernism, of one of the age-old functions of art—namely the pedagogical and the didactic. The teaching function of art

was, however, always stressed in classical times (even though it there

mainly took the form of moral lessons); while the prodigious and still

imperfectly understood work of Brecht reaffirms, in a new and formally

innovative and original way, for the moment of modernism proper, a

complex new conception of the relationship between culture and

pedagogy. The cultural model I will propose similarly foregrounds the

cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of political art and culture,

dimensions stressed in very different ways byboth Lukács and Brecht

(for the distinct moments of realism and modernism, respectively).We cannot, however, return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the

basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours.

Meanwhile, the conception of space that has been developed here

suggests that a model of political culture appropriate to our own

situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental

organizing concern. I will therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of

such new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive

a classic work, The Image of the City,Kevin Lynch taught us that the

alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in

their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which

they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none

of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built

perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples. Disalienation in

the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of

place, and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble

which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can

map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories.

Lynch’s own work is limited by the deliberate restriction of his topic to

the problems of the city form as such; yet it becomes extraordinarily

suggestive when projected outwards onto some of the larger national

and global spaces we have touched on here. Nor should it be too hastily

assumed that his model—while it clearly raises very central issues of

representation as such—is in any way easily vitiated by the conventional

poststructuralist critiques of the ‘ideology of representation’ or mimesis.

The cognitive map is not exactly mimetic, in that older sense; indeed

the theoretical issues it poses allow us to renew the analysis of

representation on a higher and much more complex level.89

There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the

empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the

great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as ‘the

representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real

conditions of existence’. Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is

called upon to do, in the narrower framework of daily life in the

physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the

individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality

which is the ensemble of the city’s structure as a Lynch’s work also suggests a further line of development insofar as

cartography itself constitutes its key mediatory instance. A return to the

history of this science (which is also an art) shows us that Lynch’s

model does not yet in fact really correspond to what will become map-making. Rather, Lynch’s subjects are clearly involved in pre-carto-graphic operations whose results traditionally are described as itineraries

rather than as maps; diagrams organized around the still subject-centred

or existential journey of the traveller, along which various significant

key features are marked—oases, mountain ranges, rivers, monuments

and the like. The most highly developed form of such diagrams is the

nautical itinerary, the sea chart or portulans,where coastal features are

noted for the use of Mediterranean navigators who rarely venture out

into the open the compass at once introduces a new dimension into sea charts, a

dimension that will utterly transform the problematic of the itinerary

and allow us to pose the problem of a genuine cognitive mapping in a

far more complex way. For the new instruments—compass, sextant and

theodolite—do not merely correspond to new geographic and naviga-tional problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude, particu-larly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler

matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically

determine by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce

a whole new coordinate—that of relationship to the totality, particuarly

as it is mediated by the stars and by new operations like that of

triangulation. At this point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense

comes to require the coordination of existential data (the empirical

position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the

geographic y, with the first globe (1490) and the invention of the Mercator

projection around the same period, yet a third dimension of cartography

emerges, which at once involves what we would today call the nature

of representational codes, the intrinsic structures of the various media,

the intervention, into more naive mimetic conceptions of mapping, of

the whole new fundamental question of the languages of representation

itself: and in particular the unresolvable (well-nigh Heisenbergian)

dilemma of the transfer of curved space to flat charts; at which point it

becomes clear that there can be no true maps (at the same time in which

it also becomes clear that there can be scientific progress, or better still,

a dialectical advance, in the various historical moments of map-making).90

Social Cartography and SymbolTranscoding all this now into the very different problematic of the

Althusserian definition of ideology, one would want to make two

points. The first is that the Althusserian concept now allows us to

rethink these specialized geographical and cartographic issues in terms

of social space, in terms, for example, of social class and national or

international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily

also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national

and international class realities. Yet to reformulate the problem in this

way is also to come starkly up against those very difficulties in mapping

which are posed in heightened and original ways by that very global

space of the postmodernist or multinational moment which has been

under discussion here. These are not merely theoretical issues, but have

urgent practical political consequences: as is evident from the conven-tional feelings of First World subjects that existentially (or ‘empirically’)

they really do inhabit a ‘postindustrial society’, from which traditional

production has disappeared and in which social classes of the classical

type no longer exist—a conviction which has immediate effects on

political second observation to be proposed is that a return to the Lacanian

underpinnings of Althusser’s theory can afford some useful and sugges-tive methodological enrichments. Althusser’s formulation remobilizes

an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between science

and ideology, which is still not without value for us. The existential—the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of daily life, the

monadic ‘point of view’ on the world to which we are necessarily, as

biological subjects, restricted—is in Althusser’s formula implicitly

opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which as Lacan

reminds us is never positioned in or actualized by any concrete subject

but rather by that structural void called ‘le sujet supposé savoir’, ‘the

subject supposed to know’, a subject-place of knowledge: what is

affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some

abstract or ‘scientific’ way—Marxian ‘science’ provides just such a way

of knowing and conceptualizing the world abstractly, in the sense in

which, e.g. Mandel’s great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge

of that global world system, of which it has never been said here that it

was unknowable, but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a

very different matter. The Althusserian formula in other words desig-nates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowl-edge: ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of

articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. What a

historicist view of this ‘definition’ would want to add is that such

coordination, the production of functioning and living ideologies, is

distinct in different historical situations, but above all, that there may be

historical situations in which it is not possible at all—and this would

seem to be our situation in the current the Lacanian system is three-fold and not dualistic. To the

Marxian-Althusserian opposition of ideology and science correspond

only two of Lacan’s tripartite functions, the Imaginary and the Real,

respectively. Our digression on cartography, however, with its final91

revelation of a properly representational dialectic of the codes and

capacities of individual languages or media, reminds us that what has

until now been omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic

aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical political culture

which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened

sense of its place in the global system—will necessarily have to respect

this now enormously complex representational dialectic and to invent

radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not, then, clearly a

call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more

transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring

perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art—if it is indeed

possible at all—will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is,

to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational

capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some

as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we

may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective

subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present

neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political

form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation

the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social

as well as a spatial scale.92