HISTORY 47
 
DEFINING POSTMODERNISM
 

*H47. 4/7/98.LAST REVISION 4/7/98
 
NOTES also printed at end.

Introduction: Question: what term best describes the following:
 
ARCHITECTURE
 
Philip Johnson AT &T (Harvey)
Charles Moore , Piazza d'Italia (New Orleans)
Michael Graves, Whitney Museum Additions
Venturi, Robert, Learning from Las Vegas
 
ART
 
Andy Wahrhol, "Marilyn Monroe"
Chicago, Judy, The Dinner Party
Barbara Kruger
Stone Roberts, The Conversation (1985)
 
FOOD
 
Tx/Mex [1]
 
LITERATURE
 
William Burroughs .
Thomas Pyncheon.
Ishmael Reed [2].
Kundera, Milan Unbearable Lightness of Being [3]
 
MOVIES
 
AMERICAN GRAFFITI. Lucas, 1973
BODY HEAT. Kasdan, 1981,
CHINATOWN. Polanski, 1974,
BLADE RUNNER. Scott, 1982,
WINGS OF DESIRE. Wenders, 1988
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. 1974,
ZELIG. Allen, 1983[4]
 
MUSIC
 
Beatles, "Norwegian Wood," Eleanor Rigby"
Philip Glass, Einstein on Beach
Terry Riley .
Punk and New Wave Rock Groups: the Clash,. the Talking Heads, the Gang of Four. [5]
 
SOCIAL/POLITICAL THEORY
 
Critical Literary Studies
 
TELEVISION
 
Soap Operas in which characters alternately play villains and heros [6]
MTV
 
THEATER
 
Alan Ayckborn, The Norman Conquests
Tom Stoppard , The Real Thing
 
*The answer of course is "postmodernism."
 


I. Defining "modernism."
 
*definition: despite principled opposition to binary divisions, postmodernist theorists have produced a number of charts that contrast "modernism" in one form or other with "postmodernism."See H47.Pomo,charts4/8/97[7] as
 
1. as phase of art/architecture, primarily stylistic
 
b. as cultural condition (personal level)
 
c. as socio/economic theory/praactice
 
**in an attempt to make sense of the term, propose to do three things: (1) history [seeing what it is by seeing where it's been] ; (2) how history illuminates problems of definition; and (3) postmodernism versus multiculturalism
 
 
***We began the term with Singal's defintion of "Modernism" as a distinct period from roughly the 1910s through the 1950s (in U.S, for Europe would go back at least to the 1850s). This movement, within but also beyond the arts, was then contrasted with "scientism,' the final attenuation of the spirit of rationalism--Postivism going back to the Enlightenment. Hollinger's "Knower and Artificer" challenged the notion that these cognitive modes were as distinct as sometimes pictured. In this sense can distinguish "modern" (small m), from Singals' "Modernism" (caps), which was really a phase or strategy within the larger movement.
 
A. "modernism" in the"small m" sense refers both to an aesthetic and practical project with roots in the Enlightenment, later the source of "Modernism" (caps) and "Scientism"
 
1.Roots found in Kant's distinct between "practical reason" (a "pure" reason that pentrates the essences behind appearance with its morally invested judgement) and "understanding" ("scientific" understanding). "Aesthetic" sense straddles the two, attempting to translate the insights of "pure" reason into artistic practice ."
 
*see Emerson "Nature" and project of American Renassance through Melville.
 
2. Under impact of industrialization, the "practical" produced unparalleled exploitation of natural materials, rationalization, and wealth.
 
[RCB note: sociologically the consequence was the emergence of the first alienated "intellectuals" in the U.S. the Trannscendetalists ?]
 
3. Also produced the "meta-narratives ," on the one hand of "progress," Comtean Postivism etc., and on the other, of Marx, Freud, and Weber.
 
[RCB: worth noting the the emergence of "Modernism" in the narrower, Singal sense is in part the result of the U.S assimilation of these and other European intellectual current from the 1890s on. Thus e.g. we can speak of Talcott Parsons as "Modernist" in sociology, for the appropriation of Weber, Durkheim, Pareto etc. in The Structure of Social Action (1937).
 
B. in 1910s split more dramatically into two camps, within U.S and Europe?
 
1. Scientism.
 
a. "Modern" in the sense of International architecture, behaviorism etc. E.g parallels between LeCourbusier and Watson. As represented in the later work of Robert Moses (see Berman, All that is Solid) ultimately created the contradictions with which postmodernism emerged).
 
b. in politics, the perversion of Marx's vision by Stalin and the Soviet state apparatus also produced a crisis that led such figures as Cowley to embrace "Modernism" as below.
 
2. Modernism. In Singal's sense the American version of European "Modernism" (still capital M) can be seen in several stages, emerging as a countercurrent against the optimism/rationalism of Progressivism.
 
a. The "cultural radicals" : Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks,) [because of their optimism etc. not really that different from progressives they criticized, but did lead to redefinition of American literary canon, as well as popularization of ideas of Freud, Marx etc.
 
b Henry Adams
 
c. Cowley, New Critics etc.
 
3. During the 1950s this modernism became "orthodoxy," a point made in different ways by the following authors"
 
*Discuss. Trilling, "On Teaching Modern Literature," H&C.
 

II. Postmodernism
 
*Although the problems of agreeing upon a definition of postmodernism are daunting , there is a mounting consensus in the literature concerning its history during the past three decades. The term "postmodern" first appeared in the post-World War II years. Early usages tended, however, to describe things we would now term "ultra modern" (for example the architect Joseph Hudnut in 1945 essay on "postmodern house" in Architecture and Spirit of man [1949] was really talking about excess of "modernization" and parody of functionalism in prefab house)[8] In the late 1950s, the literary critics Irving Howe and Harold Levine used the term pejoratively to characterize tendencies within "modernist" literature itself.[9]
 
A. Stages (overview) "Postmodernism" in its current usage(s) emerged in the early 1960s, and has since developed in several stages. [see H47Pomo.Chronology]
 
(1) Precursors: 1960-68 [10]
 
(a) Pop Art of Robert Rauschenberg,
James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns etc.
 
(b) Dance and Music of
 
Cage, John, Silence
 
(c) Critical work of
 
Sontag, "Notes on Camp"[11] [discuss "Against Interpretation" Hollinger and Capper, II.
 
Leslie Fielder[12]
 
Marshall McLuhan[13]
 
Note: this relatively "innocent" stage, and allied with 1960s counterculture, which it often defended. See e.g. Fiedler,
 
(2) Early Proselytizers
 
(a) Literature:
 
Richard Poirier[14]
 
Ihab Hassan, POSTmodernismISM' (1971) "actually christened the movement[15]
 
(b) Architecture : work of Charles Jencks and Robert Venturi. [16] The reason that architecture played such a role, as Andreas Huyssen has suggested, is because, in the International Style of Mies van de Rohe, LeCorbusier and their followers, architecture more than any other form "succumbed to the alienating effects of modernization." [17] Jencks himself dated the "postmodern age" as beginning in 1972 with the dynamiting of Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis.
 
(3) European Crosscurrents: borrowing from French and German sources 1970s. [18] Result tied postmodernism to the agenda of Deconstructionism and poststructuralism, with its concerns for the "other," "decentered self" and attack on "reason," "metanarratives," and the doctrine of the "individual"
 
Note: (a) Huyssens, "Mapping" notes: this change in the 1970s during which time the optimism of the 60s gave way to disillusionment (Vietnam, Watergate etc) and exploration of the "interface" between French poststructuralism and postmodernism as postmodernism moved to Paris (Kristeva and Lyotard) and Frankfurt (Habermas) A result was a temporary eclipse of postmodernist innovation in the arts by theory.
 
(b) this crossfertilization not only complicates defining "postmodern" (since suddenly almost everything counts), but also opened to attack from the heirs of the "critical theory" of the Frankfurt school, notably in the attack of Jurgen Habermas at the end of the decade. [19]
 
(4) Maturity and Controversy 1980s.
 
(a) a debate among Marxists, neo-Marxists etc., extended the term from being a movement in the arts (characterized primarily by various stylistic innovations) or a cultural condition (as with Deconstruction and poststructuralism) to being a manifestation of socio/economic change--in Frederic Jameson's phrase"the cultural logical of late capitalism" [20]
 
(5) "High Postmodernism", in David Harvey's magisterial , The condition of postmodernity : an enquiry into the origins of cultural change ( Blackwell, 1989); Kenneth Gergen's, The Saturated Self (1988) , and recently anthologies for the college classroom. [21]. This "canonization" has bright the charge that in attempt to characterize thirty years of culture under single term has become a "totalizing" narrative of its own.


III. Social Economic Context
 
* literature contains two different kinds of explanation, sometimes conjoined, sometimes opposed (A) those who stress the impersonal workings of technology/communications revolution; and (B) those who tie to markets/consumerism etc. Although many go back and forth between the two.[22] See appendix for statement by Kalaidjian, Walter B., 1952- , American culture between the wars : revisionary modernism & postmodern critique
 
A. Lyotard, "What is PostModernism"[23] examines altered "structure" knowledge" with cybernetics, computers and all the related fields concerning computer languages etc.
 
1. as language is translated into "quantities" of info, certain things that can't be so communicated are dropped out; no longer count as "knowledge" (p. 140)
 
2. nature and situation of "knower" changes as relation becomes one of "commodity producers and consumers" (p. 140)
 
3.. in future nation states may fight for knowledge and its control just as one for territory
 
4. but also will erode states as they seen as "noise." Multinationals one example.
 
5. learning will circulate not for "educational value," with distinction no linger between "knowledge" and "ignorance" but "payment knowledge" used for practical everyday purposes, and "investment knowledge" (longer term). [RCB note: is this new form of knowledge or simply new way of looking at. Has there not always been a similar distinction. Cf Emerson Intelligence vs. Intellect. ]
 
(B). alternate is to look at destabilizing role of capitalism, consumerism both to community and sensibility.
 
1. sensibility. Lyotard, p. 143 (citing Benjamin) notes how both "realism" and "classicism" fell victim to a capitalism that "inherently possesses the power to derealise familiar objects, social roles, and institutions to such a degree that the so-called realistic representations can no longer evoke reality except as nostalgia or mockery."
 
(i) Publicity in the postwar era, according to Lefebvre, moves from the margin to the center of social representation. It is installed as "the poetry of Modernity, the reason and pretext for all successful displays. It takes possession of art, literature, all available signifiers and vacant signifieds; it is art and literature, it gleans the leavings of the Festival to recondition them for its own ends" (EL, 107).
 
(ii) But capitalism appropriates, creating a situation of ever changing needs within fixed structures.
 
* Lefebvre describes the "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption' it was capital that exploited the powers of textual representation at once to maintain a constant obsolescence of needs as such, paradoxically, within a fixed framework of institutional durability. The task was to balance the necessity for a fast-paced turnover of cultural forms and trends in the consumer market in contradiction with the class strategy of preserving permanence, stability, and hierarchy amidst rapid cultural change. Of this double strategy underwriting Las Vegas strip messages, Robert Venturi has observed that "the most unique, most monumental parts of the Strip, the signs and casino facades, are also the most changeable; it is the neutral, systems-motel structures behind that survive a succession of facelifts and a series of themes up front" (LV, 32).
 
(iv) goes beyond notion of "false consciousness" which critique is still marked by the residue of naturalistic thinking, relying for its explanatory power on some recoverable world, utopian project, or valorized class somehow beyond, or prior to, the misrepresentations. Rather totally collapses disinction between agent/object, model and copy
 
*Postmodernity's regime of simulation is fueled by the Neo-Fordist saturation of the social field by the spreading systems and languages of the so-called "information" economy. Today, the pervasive scene of serial reproduction deauraticizes and flattens cultural meaning, reducing it to a one dimensional surface expressed across a spectrum of postmodern forms ranging from pop art to monumental urban architecture: from Andy Warhol's simulacral silk screens of soup cans, movie stars, politicians, and other cult figures to the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
This new world order collapses any distinction between the social and its serial reproduction so that agent and object, model and copy, the real and its cultural representation implode into a postmodern system of circular causality-a Moebius strip of mutual and endlessly reversible determination. In this postmodern register, the MacLuhanesque slogan that the"medium is the message" reaches an estranging threshold. Here the physical medium of the telecommunication (mass)age infiltrates, mimics,mutates, and finally exterminates the Real like a virus or genetic code, in what Baudrillard describes as a global, "satellization of the real. "Within the horizon of the hyperreal, the instant precession of every conceivable interpretive model and representation around any historical happening or fact leaves in its wake an indeterminate, "magnetic field of events" (S,32). Consequently, the difference between the signified event and its simulacrum implodes now in a global circulation/ventilation of contradictory signals, mutating codes, and mixed messages.
 
(vi) with it the historical role of the proletariet as agent of social change.
 
*With the death of the referent, the social contract and political institutions conceived out of the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment are likewise thrown into crisis. "By treating as a theatrical performance the political scene and its actors," writes Baudrillard, the media reduces politics to the same spectacle staging TV game shows, sporting events, and other forms of popular entertainment. Not coincidentally, the simulacral reproduction of the social erodes the proletariat's traditional class role as the subject of revolutionary liberation. Proletcult tropes and iconography have always betrayed, according to Paula Rabinowitz, a certain sexism in fetishizing the valorized figure of the white male worker while paying scant attention to those who labor in the service sector, in the domestic sphere,and on the subaltern margins of industrial society. But more to the point, the presumption to speak now on behalf of the proletariat in some wholly unmediated fashion seems theoretically naive after the pressing debates of postmodernity.
For example, during the 1985 Institute of Contemporary Arts forum on postmodernism Jean-Franois Lyotard argued cogently against Terry Eagleton's orthodox nostalgia for the proletariat as the privileged agent for social change in the third world. Following Kant, Lyotard pointed out that in contradistinction to designating specific laborers in culturally diverse communities, the term proletariat, naming as it does a more properly universal "subject to be emancipated," is an ahistorical abstraction-a "pure Idea of Reason" having little purchase today on the actual politics of everyday life. Indeed, some of the greatest atrocities, he cautioned, have been perpetuated under this very category error of pursuing a "politics of the sublime." "That is to say, to make the terrible mistake of trying to represent in political practice an Idea of Reason. To be able to say, 'Weare the proletariat' or 'We are the incarnation of free humanity.' "28 The Old Left faith in a global, working-class liberation seems especially dubious today after modernism's failed legacy of proletarian revolution worldwide.
 
(viii) and with it role of the "public" active agent.
 
*Against this outworn orthodoxy, the spectacle of postmodernism, for Baudrillard, positions mass society not so much as a valorized political agent but more as a passive medium or conductor for the cultural simulation of every representable social need, libidinal desire, political interest,or popular opinion. Relentlessly polled, solicited, and instructed by the print, television, and video media-whose corporate advertising budgets dwarf those of public and private education-the masses, in Baudrillard's descriptive account, are absorbed into a wholly commodified habitus. This seamless web of postmodern consumption joins the most intimate spaces of the domestic sphere to the giant, impersonal expanses of the mega mall warehouse. But what is supremely at risk in this scene of simulacral exchange is the social demand for any fixed meaning, value, truth, or political platform that would serve to legitimate a dominant power structure. The revenge of the masses against such ideological, political, and psychosexual manipulation is expressed, for Baudrillard, as the sheer inertia of its silent majority: its tendency to consume in excess any message,code, or sign that is broadcast its way.
No longer constituting the proletarian class, a people, a citizenry, or any stable political constituency, the masses now mark the abysmal site of the radical equivalence of all value. Advanced consumer society, in one of Baudrillard's astrophysical metaphors, simply implodes like a collapsing star, drawing into itself "all radiation from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture, Meaning" (SSM, 2). The postmodern coupure that breaks with the political utopias of modernism is marked precisely by the banal regime of everyday life, the status quo of its "silent" majority. Such apolitical withdrawal from political struggle, Baudrillard notes, is usually read as a symptom of alienation (or worse, fascism). Yet when simulation has overrun the public sphere, then unnatural excess, parodic craving, and outrageous waste become viable tactics for stepping up the exchange and consumption of goods, services, information flows, and new technologies. The whole hyperreal economy of postmodern potlatch, Baudrillard argues, actually exhausts and debunks any vestige of use value, rationality, or authenticity serving to legitimate capital's cultural logic.
However one (dis)credits the paradoxical twists and turns that Baudrillard negotiates in theorizing a "silent" politics of hyperbolic consumption, what remains clear is that a postmodern resistance to the simulacral order of advanced capitalism cannot legitimately fall back on the now old-fashioned struggle for this or that modernist platform or unmediated political agenda, be it, say, Eliot's "idea" of a Christian society, Pound's investment in Italian fascism, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian "Herland," Edwin Rolfe's working-class "credo," or Mike Gold's allegiance to Russian proletcult. On the contrary, political intervention must be lodged from within today's omnipresent spectacle that denies any appeal to some "real" referent before the flow of signification. Indeed, as Henri Lefebvre grasped, in our contemporary moment, society as such can only be engaged through its prior inscription in a discursive field.
 
2. destruction of community
 
* Kalaidjian, American culture (using Berman) notes directions of traditional working communities, in Levittown, Cross Bronx Expressway etc. .[24]
 
As Kalaidijan puts it:
 
In America, labor underwent a similar loss of political agency not through the administered repression of a Soviet-style bureaucracy but by capital's rapid advance beyond its traditional sites of modernist production into postmodern modes of consumption. Throughout the 1950s, as Ernest Mandel and more recently Fredric Jameson have observed, the sudden reserve of technological innovation in electronics, mass communication, and systems analysis and management conceived during the war years and then coupled with accumulated surplus wealth-allowed capital to penetrate new markets through a constant turnover not only of services and commodity forms but of newly fabricated consumer needs and desires. Capital was compelled, in this transition from a pre- to postwar economy, at once to deterritorialize its modern limits in the industrial workplace and to reterritorialize the entire fabric of everyday life for consumption. One symptom of this paradigm shift was the fragmentation of the proletarian community. No longer dwelling in the political and phenomenological spaces of extended social solidarity (the local neighborhood with its union hall, factory tavern, fraternal clubs, and so on) the postwar working class was radically decentered and dispersed along the new superhighways out into the netherworld of suburban America.
In the post-depression era the traditionally urban and ethnic working- class neighborhoods-like those, say, of the South Bronx-fell victim to the new generation of such metropolitan planners as Robert Moses. As New York State and City Parks Commissioner, Moses commandeered a huge "public authority" bureaucracy of federal, state, and private interests that backed the renovation of Central Park, Long Island's Jones Beach,Flushing Meadow fairgrounds-the site of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair-and 1700 recreational facilities. But Moses also oversaw the construction of such mammoth highway, bridge, and parkway systems as the West Side Highway, the Belt Parkway, and the Triborough Project.While labor was recruited to build these giant thoroughfares and spectacular, recreational spaces, it could not contain the momentum of social modernization that burst through the seams of the older metropolitan cityscape. The irresistible drive to accommodate the mounting traffic in consumer goods and services cut through the heart of the traditional,working-class community, leaving behind, in Marshall Berman's telling impressions of the Long Island Expressway, monoliths of steel and cement, devoid of vision or nuance or play, sealed off from the surrounding city by great moats of stark empty space, stamped on the landscape with a ferocious contempt for all natural and human life."
 
Along these clotted arteries and by-passes, working America fled the decaying precincts of the postmodern city, seduced by the new suburban vision whose prototype mushroomed from a 1,500-acre Long Island potato farm bought-out by William J. Levitt in 1949. The first community to apply the logic of Fordism to home construction, Levittown overnight threw up some 17,500 virtually identical prefabricated four-room houses, followed by centrally designed plans for Levittown II, an eight-square-mile suburb on the Delaware River. Ever more cloistered and privatized within such serial neighborhoods of single family track houses, American labor succumbed little by little to the postmodern regime of the commodity form. Madison Avenue's relentless fabrication of needs, desires, and sources of satisfaction, as Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno noted, spilled over into any number of pop culturalforms-Hollywood B films, Tin Pan Alley, and the pulp press market(westerns, romances, detective thrillers, biographies, all manner of trendy do-it-yourself manuals and self-help guides, shopping catalogues, and soon to the point where the entire ensemble of cultural practices meshed with mass commodity consumption.
 
No longer limited to accumulating surplus value from its modern settings of industrial production-the factory, textile mill, powerplant, construction site, or agribusiness combined capital now seized on the frontier markets of the nuclear household, the local neighborhood, and suburban strip with ever new generations of consumer goods, electrical appliances,gadgetry of all kinds, prepackaged foods, gas and restaurant franchises, accelerating rhythms of style, fashion, and popular trends in music, teen culture, and contemporary living. Here, the cement and steel hardscapes of the older urban environment were supplanted by the high-end, chi-chifrou-frou softscapes of such mushrooming "edge cities" as Schaumburg, Illinois; Atlanta's Perimeter Center; California's Silicon Valley and Orange County; Bloomington, Minnesota; and the Washington D.C. beltway.
 
*others discussing include Harvey, Condition[25]
 
[RCB note: problem with so general a cause is one of timing. one can see changes in both sensibility and community as early as 1900s (see e.g. Rosensweig, Eight Hours for what we will on way movies replaced saloons] .
 
(b) (but also into films and popular culture 1970s-1980s
 
Note 2: Hutcheon p. 23 as proponent of postmodernism feels that identifying with socio/economic condition conflates "postmodernism" and "postmodernity" (the "designation of a social and philosophical period or 'condition.'" She traces this confusion to the Habermas-Leotard exchange. Result is that "postmodernity" embraces Foucault et al. in their attack on entire Enlightenment project
 

IV Reflections on this history
 
A. Has taken shape in stages much as earlier "eras" in U.S. History.
 
1. overall pattern
 
2. comparison with "modernism" that preceded it.
 
B. As with earlier eras, reflects fundmental socio/economic change
 
*summary for earlier period.
 
**for postmodernism actally range of explanations from impersonal tecnology of communication to developments under 'late capitalism."
 
 
C. Began and pejorative and has not completely been divested of. Suggest often used in negative as positive.
 
1. sometimes simply to criticize e.g. neo-Conservatives[26]
 
2. more often in ambivalence of those who attempt to defend and reconcile with their own agenda, notably among neo-Marxists
 
a. Jameson, who often taken as "defending" actually ambivalent to the point that one critic charges he really a closet "modernist. " [27](see
 
b. Eagleton
 
*although Eagleton is most critical, common theme including French, is fear of consumerism/capitalism.
Eagleton underlines distinction between "pastiche" and "[parody," the latter requiring some sense of a past against which one is playing. Pastiche is parody robbed of an historical sense. Mere imitation with out any ironic intent.
 
Lyotard in Jencks: "When power is that of capital and not that of party...'postmodern'(in Jencks' sense) solution proves to be better than the anti-modern solution [i.e. direct assault on avant garde]. "Anything goes" is really the reign of money. Sees this "flight of reality" out of metaphysics , religion etc. as "absolutely necessary to the emergence of science and capitalism." (p. 146)
 
 
D. Since thrust is attack on something that preceded it--"modernism"-- there are as many "postmodernisms" as "modernisms. [28], For present purposes one central ambiguity of use of term "modernism" explains similar issue within "postmodern"
 
 
F. Relation to "modernism"
 
a. Jencks want to distinguish "late modern" from post Modern (presumably includes Sontag). Koehler, 1945-70 is "late modern." Jencks also wants to extend and find the best in Modernism, not making "democratic" in way Barth wants (p 21)
 
b. some split difference.[29]
 
c. other argue for complete break
 
1. "Modernist " movement as came to U.S in first two decades of 20th and culminated in "High Modernism" of the 1950s.[30] .
 
2. western tradition since Renaissance, where it is often termed the "Enlightenment project" (reason, science, and control) and by extension to the "efficiency" expert Frederick W. Taylor and "Fordism." [31] (cf. "scientism")
 
*historically can see the two related : Roots in Kant's distinct between "practical reason" (with its morally invested judgement) and "understanding" or "scientific reason. "Aesthetic" sense straddles the two, attempting to translates the insights of "pure" reason into artistic practice
 
**also relate to import of Deconstruction etc.
 
E. The Americanness of postmodernism?
 
1. since the external changes underlying postmodernism found earliest expression in U.S.--whether cybernetics and consumerism on one hand, or suburbs and Cross Bronx expressway on the other, might logically assume it America,
 
*Note: Concerning the first stage noted above , Huyssen, "Mapping" insisted on its "Americanness'," arguing that French and Germans for different reason were in the 60s rediscovering their "modernist" tradition.
2. at same time, struck how much of the discussion is outside U.S.
 
a.Major sources of discussion are aboard
 
(i) English
 
Anderson , Perry ."English historian...long editor of New Left review[32]
 
(ii) continental Habermas wants to keep alive Marx conception of Enlightenment project. Arac %233 "German social philosopher..often treated as the heir of Frankfurt school critical theory" (p. 284)
 
Lyotard, Jean Francois (Tri no dates) in Jencks appears to be defending the avant gardes against all attempts to destroy, whether earlier from "realism" (or in Soviet/Nazi form) or "transavantgardism/postmodern). His sense of Nazi/Soviet comes out in final paragraph and final injunction: "Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name." (p. 149). [33]
 
b. even among those U.S most involved, have been those in closest contact with European literature an thought:
 
Huyssen
 
Jameson, Fredric
 
3. suggest actually two strains This emphasis on the Americanness , and its replacement in the 1970s by a more theoretical postmodern, suggests that there were two strains that can be traced:
 
(1) a populist, equalitarian one, as represented by Fielder (e.g. as in such scholarship as David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, which relates the work of Hawthorne, Melville et al to the popular culture of the day.
 
(2) an increasingly jargon prone, less accessible strain as postmodernism crossed with European theory. The point was explored with reference to "An Interview wit Leslie Fiedler" ", specifically the interviewers assertion that "by the late seventies, postmodernism became just another academic subject full of theories which for the most part were imported from Europe. In fact, by the time Lyotard and Habermas started their debates, postmodernism in the USA ...had become essentially just another form of high modernism (literature had become sur fiction etc.) . In this same interview Fiedler mentioned novelists whose works are cited below, and who together abandoned "plot, character and setting, which is to say all of the elements for which ordinary readers turn to fiction at all." (p..333). Examples include Hawkes, John 1925- e.g., The blood oranges.( [New York] New Directions [1971]1 > S McCabe PS3558.A82 B4x;Barthelme], Donald e.g. Forty stories (New York : Putnam, c1987) McCabe PS3552.A76 A6 1987;Coover, Robert e.g., Pricksongs & descants; fictions. ([1st ed.], New York, Dutton, 1969) [ S McCabe PS3553.O633 P8; and Charlie in the house of rue (Lincoln, Mass. : Penmaen Press, c1980.) [McCabe TreasR Z239.P395 C66x ];; Gass, William 1924-,In the heart of the heart of the country, and other stories ([1st ed.], New York, Harper & Row [1968]) McCabe PS3557.A845 I5 Federman, Raymond Surfiction : fiction now and tomorrow / edited by Raymond Federman (Chicago : Swallow Press, [1975]) [McCabe PN3503 .S85].
 
**This fragmentation of early postmodernism into different strains might parallel (a) what happened in the decades after the Great Awakening of the 1740s. Thus in the wake of the 1960s we might see the following parallels:New Lights--Popular Strain (Fiedler); Edwardsians --Europeanized Theory; Old Lights (Calvinists)--Bell, Bloom, Hilton Kramer; Rationalists-Unitarians--Sociobiologists and other partisans of "science' ; or (b) the Enlightenment, which finally accepted in U.S more easily than naturally because represented the American situation (Bailyn argument).


V. Postmodernism versus Multiculturalism
 
A. The Politics of Postmodernism
 
1. two major "others" have been decidedly cool or hostile
 
a. feminists, although noting convergence with postmodernism, notably cool. but in terms of volume of discussion and undercurrent in few discussions that exist. Main problem, argues , is that feminists primarily concerned with constructing an identity, not explicating its loss. [34]
 
b Blacks. In essays by bell hooks and Cornell West--both insisting that African-Americans not be excused from the postmodernist "discourse--same theme: how be concerned with identity when never had it.
 
+converge in fear that it really an exclusive white male discourse, perhaps reflecting white male fears of loss of "self" in advanced consumer age (fear can be traced from the 1890s onward).
 
2. nor, despite fact that would appear to intersect with "multicultural," those engaged in the two "discourses' almost never refer to the other. One reason possibly is that "multiculturalism " too close to "metanarratives" of historical liberalism than postmodernists like
 
 
*although note irony: fear pomo becoming own totalizing narrative[35]
 
3. Leave as puzzle to be discussed. One possibility is insider/outsider suits who complicit in the system but discontent with it.
 
a. Hutcheon . Politics almost says as much.
 
"In general terms [postmodernism]takes the form of self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining statement. [like saying something with inverted commas] In many ways it is an even-handed process because postmodernism ultimately managed to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and suppositions it appears to challenge. [nonetheless can be said to "denaturalize] "Even nature, some postmpodernists might point out, doesn't grow on trees." pp. 1-2). Restates p. 14 :"a paradoxical installing as well as subverting of conventions of the representations of the subject." And p. 15: "postmodernism paradoxically manages to legitimatize culture (high and mass) even as it subverts it."
 
Subsequently uses terms like ""complicitous critique p. 9 re Zelig;
 
 
Final Reflections on pomo.
 
1. despite widespread uneasiness with term, probably will remain as label, just as other terms (e.g. Baroque , Rococo etc.) or more recently "New Wave"
 
2. In various ways resembled cycles in earlier American history, where tyically have had "radical movement" typcially led by the arts, and final conservatizing. Four such cyles:
 
a. Enlightenment, (see Henry May, Enlightenment in America on stages)W
 
b. Romantic
 
c. antiformalist
 
d. parallel with "modernism"
 
i. early arts: Impressionists, Cubists, Armory show (1913) cf.
 
ii. theoretical imports: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud to Bergson cf.
 
iii. radical stage Innocent rebels and historical avant garde"
 
iv. Marxists and Trotskeyites in the 1930s debated the political implications of Modernism (one result being the split that created the Partisan Review and eventually the "New York Intellectuals). Greenberg/Adorno . Cf. Habermas, Eagleton etc. criticizing.
 
v. emergence of "modernism" as orthodoxy in post WWII. [36]
 
 
* would argue (1) all associated with major econmic chnages: flowering of Atlantic shippedbased comerce 1740-1820s; early industrialism/factory/wage labor; organizational revolution (professions, bureuacracy); and post-indistrial information/media society. and (2) how and why conservatized.
 

Appendix
 
*the following excerpt from Kalaidjian, Walter B., 1952- , American culture between the wars : revisionary modernism & postmodern critique(Columbia University Press, c1993). pp. 116-22 gives a good account of the material changes that underlay postmodernism, as discussed by Jameson, Berman et al. Some incorportaed in outline above.
 
In America, labor underwent a similar loss of political agency not through the administered repression of a Soviet-style bureaucracy but by capital's rapid advance beyond its traditional sites of modernist production into postmodern modes of consumption. Throughout the 1950s, as Ernest Mandel and more recently Fredric Jameson have observed, the sudden reserve of technological innovation in electronics, mass communication, and systems analysis and management conceived during the war years and then coupled with accumulated surplus wealth-allowed capital to penetrate new markets through a constant turnover not only of services and commodity forms but of newly fabricated consumer needs and desires.15 Capital was compelled, in this transition from a pre- to postwar economy, at once to deterritorialize its modern limits in the industrial workplace and to reterritorialize the entire fabric of everyday life for consumption. One symptom of this paradigm shift was the fragmentation of the proletarian community. No longer dwelling in the political and phenomenological spaces of extended social solidarity (the local neighborhood with its union hall, factory tavern, fraternal clubs, and so on) the postwar working class was radically decentered and dispersed along the new superhighways out into the netherworld of suburban America.
In the post-depression era the traditionally urban and ethnic working- class neighborhoods-like those, say, of the South Bronx-fell victim to the new generation of such metropolitan planners as Robert Moses. As New York State and City Parks Commissioner, Moses commandeered a huge "public authority" bureaucracy of federal, state, and private interests that backed the renovation of Central Park, Long Island's Jones Beach,Flushing Meadow fairgrounds-the site of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair-and 1700 recreational facilities. But Moses also oversaw the construction of such mammoth highway, bridge, and parkway systems as the West Side Highway, the Belt Parkway, and the Triborough Project.While labor was recruited to build these giant thoroughfares and spectacular, recreational spaces, it could not contain the momentum of social modernization that burst through the seams of the older metropolitan cityscape. The irresistible drive to accommodate the mounting traffic in consumer goods and services cut through the heart of the traditional,working-class community, leaving behind, in Marshall Berman's telling impressions of the Long Island Expressway, monoliths of steel and cement, devoid of vision or nuance or play, sealed off from the surrounding city by great moats of stark empty space, stamped on the landscape with a ferocious contempt for all natural and human life."16
Along these clotted arteries and by-passes, working America fled the decaying precincts of the postmodern city, seduced by the new suburban vision whose prototype mushroomed from a 1,500-acre Long Island potato farm bought-out by William J. Levitt in 1949. The first community to apply the logic of Fordism to home construction, Levittown overnight threw up some 17,500 virtually identical prefabricated four-room houses,followed by centrally designed plans for Levittown II, an eight-square-milesuburb on the Delaware River. 17 Ever more cloistered and privatized within such serial neighborhoods of single family track houses, American labor succumbed little by little to the postmodern regime of the commodity form. Madison Avenue's relentless fabrication of needs, desires, and sources of satisfaction, as Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno noted, spilled over into any number of pop culturalforms-Hollywood B films, Tin Pan Alley, and the pulp press market(westerns, romances, detective thrillers, biographies, all manner of trendy do-it-yourself manuals and self-help guides, shopping catalogues, and soon to the point where the entire ensemble of cultural practices meshed with mass commodity consumption.18
No longer limited to accumulating surplus value from its modern settings of industrial production-the factory, textile mill, powerplant, construction site, or agribusiness combined capital now seized on the frontier markets of the nuclear household, the local neighborhood, and suburban strip with ever new generations of consumer goods, electrical appliances,gadgetry of all kinds, prepackaged foods, gas and restaurant franchises,accelerating rhythms of style, fashion, and popular trends in music, teen culture, and contemporary living. Here, the cement and steel hardscapes of the older urban environment were supplanted by the high-end, chi-chifrou-frou softscapes of such mushrooming "edge cities" as Schaumburg,Illinois; Atlanta's Perimeter Center; Califomia's Silicon Valley and Orange County; Bloomington, Minnesota; and the Washington D.C. beltway.19
As Henri Lefebre, Guy Debord, and the Situationists had predicted, the ideology of consumerism-reproduced throughout the omnipresent spectacle of modern advertisingame to dominate the total makeup of everyday life. Consumption thus eroded the older working-class values of industrious productivity, active creativity, and proletarian solidarity:replacing them with the ideals of possessive individualism and upward class mobility. Soon every conceivable site of consumption-ranging from one's TV room recliner to the corporate work station, from the hospital bed to the automated bank teller stall, from the supermarket register to the gas pump was patched, faxed, and logged into an increasingly privatized, and centralized, grid of advanced telecommunication, information storage, and digital micro procession.
One symptom of this shift into the postmodern register of spectacular consumerism was what Lefebvre described as "the enormous amount of signifiers liberated or insufficiently connected to their corresponding signifieds (words, gestures, images and signs), and made available to advertising and propaganda.' '20 Thus a cola's promise to deliver, say, "the real thing" or a sneaker's motto to "just do it" could now be evoked by an overdetermined multiplicity of signs and representations ranging from the sensuous caligraphy of a glossy logo to a hot rock-and-roll lick, to any number of more fetishized gestures (the driving NBA slam-dunk, the celebrity head shot, the sweaty "high five"). What desires the proferred "real thing" would actually satisfy were deferred through the linguistic slippage such contrived ensembles of transfers, subliminal messages, and polysemous signs put into play. Suddenly the world's entire semiotic fabric, from the sprawling signage of the suburban strip to a commercial's most intimate proxemic code, was now readable-laid out in textual praxes that framed everyday life through the discourse of mass advertising and the scene of spectacular display.21
Publicity in the postwar era, according to Lefebvre, moves from the margin to the center of social representation. It is installed as "the poetry of Modernity, the reason and pretext for all successful displays. It takes possession of art, literature, all available signifiers and vacant signifieds; it is art and literature, it gleans the leavings of the Festival to recondition them for its own ends" (EL, 107). Yet within what Lefebvre described as the "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption' it was capital that exploited the powers of textual representation at once to maintain a constant obsolescence of needs as such, paradoxically, within a fixed framework of institutional durability. The task was to balance the necessity for a fast-paced turnover of cultural forms and trends in the consumer market in contradiction with the class strategy of preserving permanence, stability, and hierarchy amidst rapid cultural change. Of this double strategy underwriting Las Vegas strip messages, Robert Venturi has observed that "the most unique, most monumental parts of the Strip, the signs and casino facades, are also the most changeable; it is the neutral, systems-motel structures behind that survive a succession of facelifts and a series of themes up front" (LV, 32).
Throughout the 1980s, Jean Baudrillard supplemented this account of capital's relation to the postmodern spectacle. Not insignificantly, Baudrillard deconstructed Marxism's traditional distinction between the economic status of the commodity and the cultural register of the sign-theorizing both as mutually traversed by a "homological structure" of exchange.22 In his reading, all fixed notions, ideas, and essences are no longer posited as prior to the more mundane traffic in material signification. Here, the myths, say, of scientific rationality, historical objectivity,literal reality, transcendent meaning, use value, and so on are actually produced out of the political economy of the sign. Each, in fact, "results from the complex play of interference of networks and codes-just as white light results from the interference of the colors of the spectrum"(PES, 158).
Such a poststructuralist reading of sign exchange moves beyond the Situationalists' theory of capital's manipulation of the social through the theater and circus of spectacular consumption. This somewhat outdated critique is still marked by the residue of naturalistic thinking, relying for its explanatory power on some recoverable world, utopian project, or valorized class somehow beyond, or prior to, the misrepresentations and"false" consciousness perpetuated by the dominant media industry. But in Baudrillard's descriptive account of recent decades, the naturalized and humanizing scene of commodity exchange-so familiar to us all in the conventional representations and cartoon-like stereotypes of consumer society-passes into a more rarefied and estranged dimension of contemporary simulation. Drawing from the Nietzschean critique of foundationalist metaphysics, Baudrillard argues that the cultural regime of the simulacrum emerges in the Renaissance, with the proliferation of bourgeois signs in excess of the feudal order's narrower and fixed system of allegorical signification.23 The age of simulation proper, however, only attains hegemony through capital's "radical law of equivalence and exchange. "24
In the twentieth century, the serial economy of the factory line-geared as it is to the mass reproduction of cultural forms, advertising, popular entertainment, the communications media, and so on-has liquidated traditional reference, signified meaning, and authentic use values. Postmodernity's regime of simulation is fueled by the Neo-Fordist saturation of the social field by the spreading systems and languages of the so-called "information" economy. Today, the pervasive scene of serial reproduction deauraticizes and flattens cultural meaning, reducing it to a one dimensional surface expressed across a spectrum of postmodern forms ranging from pop art to monumental urban architecture: from Andy Warhol's simulacral silk screens of soup cans, movie stars, politicians, and other cult figures to the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
This new world order collapses any distinction between the social and its serial reproduction so that agent and object, model and copy, the real and its cultural representation implode into a postmodern system of circular causality-a Moebius strip of mutual and endlessly reversible determination. In this postmodern register, the MacLuhanesque slogan that the"medium is the message" reaches an estranging threshold. Here the physical medium of the telecommunication (mass)age infiltrates, mimics,mutates, and finally exterminates the Real like a virus or genetic code, in what Baudrillard describes as a global, "satellization of the real. "25 Within the horizon of the hyperreal, the instant precession of every conceivable interpretive model and representation around any historical happening or fact leaves in its wake an indeterminate, "magnetic field of events" (S,32). Consequently, the difference between the signified event and its simulacrum implodes now in a global circulation/ventilation of contradictory signals, mutating codes, and mixed messages.
With the death of the referent, the social contract and political institutions conceived out of the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment are likewise thrown into crisis. "By treating as a theatrical performance the political scene and its actors," writes Baudrillard, the media reduces politics to the same spectacle staging TV game shows, sporting events, and other forms of popular entertainment.26 Not coincidentally, the simulacral reproduction of the social erodes the proletariat's traditional class role as the subject of revolutionary liberation. Proletcult tropes and iconography have always betrayed, according to Paula Rabinowitz, a certain sexism in fetishizing the valorized figure of the white male worker while paying scant attention to those who labor in the service sector, in the domestic sphere,and on the subaltern margins of industrial society.27 But more to the point, the presumption to speak now on behalf of the proletariat in some wholly unmediated fashion seems theoretically naive after the pressing debates of postmodernity.
For example, during the 1985 Institute of Contemporary Arts forum on postmodernism Jean-Franois Lyotard argued cogently against Terry Eagleton's orthodox nostalgia for the proletariat as the privileged agent for social change in the third world. Following Kant, Lyotard pointed out that in contradistinction to designating specific laborers in culturally diverse communities, the term proletariat, naming as it does a more properly universal "subject to be emancipated," is an ahistorical abstraction-a "pure Idea of Reason" having little purchase today on the actual politics of everyday life. Indeed, some of the greatest atrocities, he cautioned, have been perpetuated under this very category error of pursuing a "politics of the sublime." "That is to say, to make the terrible mistake of trying to represent in political practice an Idea of Reason. To be able to say, 'Weare the proletariat' or 'We are the incarnation of free humanity.' "28 The Old Left faith in a global, working-class liberation seems especially dubious today after modernism's failed legacy of proletarian revolution worldwide.29
Against this outworn orthodoxy, the spectacle of postmodernism, for Baudrillard, positions mass society not so much as a valorized political agent but more as a passive medium or conductor for the cultural simulation of every representable social need, libidinal desire, political interest,or popular opinion. Relentlessly polled, solicited, and instructed by the print, television, and video media-whose corporate advertising budgets dwarf those of public and private education-the masses, in Baudrillard's descriptive account, are absorbed into a wholly commodified habitus. This seamless web of postmodern consumption joins the most intimate spaces of the domestic sphere to the giant, impersonal expanses of the mega mall warehouse. But what is supremely at risk in this scene of simulacral exchange is the social demand for any fixed meaning, value, truth, or political platform that would serve to legitimate a dominant power structure. The revenge of the masses against such ideological, political, and psychosexual manipulation is expressed, for Baudrillard, as the sheer inertia of its silent majority: its tendency to consume in excess any message,code, or sign that is broadcast its way.
No longer constituting the proletarian class, a people, a citizenry, or any stable political constituency, the masses now mark the abysmal site of the radical equivalence of all value. Advanced consumer society, in one of Baudrillard's astrophysical metaphors, simply implodes like a collapsing star, drawing into itself "all radiation from the outlying constellations of State, History, Culture, Meaning" (SSM, 2). The postmodern coupure that breaks with the political utopias of modernism is marked precisely by the banal regime of everyday life, the status quo of its "silent" majority.30 Such apolitical withdrawal from political struggle, Baudrillard notes, is usually read as a symptom of alienation (or worse, fascism). Yet when simulation has overrun the public sphere, then unnatural excess, parodic craving, and outrageous waste become viable tactics for stepping up the exchange and consumption of goods, services, information flows, and new technologies. The whole hyperreal economy of postmodern potlatch, Baudrillard argues, actually exhausts and debunks any vestige of use value, rationality, or authenticity serving to legitimate capital's cultural logic.
However one (dis)credits the paradoxical twists and turns that Baudrillard negotiates in theorizing a "silent" politics of hyperbolic consumption, what remains clear is that a postmodern resistance to the simulacral order of advanced capitalism cannot legitimately fall back on the now old-fashioned struggle for this or that modernist platform or unmediated political agenda, be it, say, Eliot's "idea" of a Christian society, Pound's investment in Italian fascism, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian "Herland," Edwin Rolfe's working-class "credo," or Mike Gold's allegiance to Russian proletcult. On the contrary, political intervention must be lodged from within today's omnipresent spectacle that denies any appeal to some "real" referent before the flow of signification. Indeed, as Henri Lefebvre grasped, in our contemporary moment, society as such can only be engaged through its prior inscription in a discursive field.
 
Notes to appendix
 
Notes. pp. 216-22.
14. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), 100.
15. See Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975).
16. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts in Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 308.
17. Levittown Il, in William Manchester's description, comprised "schools, churches, baseball diamonds, a town hall, factory sidings, parking lots, offices fordoctors and dentists, a reservoir, a shopping center, a railroad station, newspaperpresses, garden clubsnough, in short, to support a densely populated city of70,000, the tenth largest in Pennsylvania." William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 432.
18. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 163.
19. "Edge cities," writes Joel Garreau, "represent the third wave of our lives pushing into new frontiers in this half century. First we moved our homes out pastthe traditional idea of what constituted a city. This was the suburbanization ofAmerica, especially after World War Il.
"Then we wearied of returning downtown for the necessities of life, so we moved our marketplaces out to where we lived. This was the malling of America,especially in the 1960s and 197 Os.
"Today, we have moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanismur jobsut to where most of us have lived and shopped for two generations. That has led to the rise of Edge City." Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 4.
20. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, tr. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 56 (hereafter cited in the text as EL).
21. See, for example, Robert Venturi's analysis of the Las Vegas Strip: "The zone of the highway is a shared order. The zone off the highway is an individual
event, as the de-founding (effondement): 'Behind every cave [writes Nietzsche]. . . . there is, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler,stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneathevery foundation.' " Gilles Deleuze, "Plato and the Simulacrum," tr. RosalindKrauss, October 27 (Winter 1983), 53.
24. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman, tr. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 43 (hereafter cited in the text as S).
25. "We must think of the media," he advises, "as if they were, in outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal,just as the other molecular code controls the passage of the signal from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal" (S,55).
26. Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, trs. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 37 (hereaftercited in the text as SSM).
27. See Paula Rabinowitz, 'Women and U.S. Literary Radicalism," in Writing Red, eds. Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 2.
28. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Complexity and the Sublime," tr. G. Bennington, in Postmodernism (London: ICA Documents 4 & 5, 1986), 11 (hereafter cited as ICA). "What kind of thought," Lyotard queries in an echo of Adorno's radicalpessimism, "is able to sublate (Aufheben) Auschwitz in a general (either empirical or speculative) process towards a universal emancipation. Lyotard, 'Defining thePostmodern, etc." in ICA, 6.
29. "Workers' - capacity," writes Andre' Gorz, "to recognise the difference between their objective position as cogs in the productive machine and their latentpotential as an association of sovereign producers is not inherent in the proletariancondition. The question is under what circumstances this capacity is likely toemerge and develop. Up to now, marxist theory has been unable to produce ananswer to this problem. Worse, its predictions have been belied by the facts."Andre' Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, 44.
30. "This can be seen in the shift in value from history to the humdrum, from the public sphere to the private sphere. Up till the 60's history leads on the downbeat: the private, the ordinary is only the dark side of the political sphere. .
Today, there is a reversal of the downbeat and the upbeat: one begins to forsee that ordinary life, men in their banality, could well not be the insignificant side ofhistory-better: that withdrawing into the private could well be a direct defiance of the political, a form of actively resisting political manipulation" (SSM, 38, 39).
31. See Ju"rgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, tr. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 392.
32. Quoted in Peter Clothier, "Sign Language," Art News 88 (Summer 1988), 146.
event, as the de-founding (effondement): 'Behind every cave [writes Nietzsche]. . . . there is, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler,stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneathevery foundation.' " Gilles Deleuze, "Plato and the Simulacrum," tr. RosalindKrauss, October 27 (Winter 1983), 53.
24. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman, tr. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 43 (hereafter cited in the text as S).
25. "We must think of the media," he advises, "as if they were, in outer orbit, a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal,just as the other molecular code controls the passage of the signal from a representative sphere of meaning to the genetic sphere of the programmed signal" (S,55).26. Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, trs. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 37 (hereaftercited in the text as SSM).
27. See Paula Rabinowitz, 'Women and U.S. Literary Radicalism," in Writing Red, eds. Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 2.
28. Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Complexity and the Sublime," tr. G. Bennington, in Postmodernism (London: lCA Documents 4 & 5,1986), 11 (hereafter cited as lCA). "What kind of thought," Lyotard queries in an echo of Adorno's radicalpessimism, "is able to sublate (Aufheben) Auschwitz in a general (either empirical or speculative) process towards a universal emancipation." Lyotard, "Defining thePostmodern, etc." in ICA, 6.
29. "Workers' capacity," writes Andre' Gorz, "to recognise the difference between their objective position as cogs in the productive machine and their latentpotential as an association of sovereign producers is not inherent in the proletariancondition. The question is under what circumstances this capacity is likely toemerge and develop. Up to now, marxist theory has been unable to produce ananswer to this problem. Worse, its predictions have been belied by the facts."Andre' Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Sociaism, 44.
30. "This can be seen in the shift in value from history to the humdrum, from the public sphere to the private sphere. Up till the 60's history leads on the downbeat: the private, the ordinary is only the dark side of the political sphere. . Today, there is a reversal of the downbeat and the upbeat: one begins to forsee that ordinary life, men in their banality, could well not be the insignificant side ofhistory-better: that withdrawing into the private could well be a direct defiance of the political, a form of actively resisting political manipulation" (SSM, 38, 39).
31. See Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, tr. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 392.
32. Quoted in Peter Clothier, "Sign Language, Art News 88 (Summer 1988), 146.
 

NOTES TO OUTLINE
 
1. Gergen, Saturated Self p. 118)
2. All mentioned Jameson, "Postmodernism," p. 111
3. (Gergen, pp. 111, 129 )
4. See Jameson, "Postmodernism," p. 116 on "new nostalgia films" , and Gergen, p. 111.
5. Cited in Gergen, p. 117 and Jameson, p. 111.
6. (Gergen, 132
7. Linda Hutcheon, Hutcheon, Linda, 1947- A Politics of postmodernism : history, theory, fiction (New York : Routledge, 1988.), p. 111, drawing on Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction get at many varieties: Barth (literature of replenishment); Newman (literature of an inflationary economy); Lyotard (condition of knowledge in the contemporary informational regime; Hassan (stage on road to unification of humanity); Jameson (cultural logic); Baudrillard (where "the simulacrum gloats over the body of the deceased referent;" etc.
8. For discussion of these early definitions, see Margaret Rose, "Defining the Postmodern," Jencks, pp. 119ff. Another early use was that of Arnold Toynbee who employed "postmodern" to describe the rise of an industrial, urban working class , and hence demise of an older "middle class. " Rose also cites number of other 1960s uses: Fiedler, C.W. Mills etc
9. Howe, Harry Levin, Harry, 1912-, Contexts of criticism [1957] S McCabePN511 .L36
10. On this early phase see Jencks, "Preface," Jencks, Charles ed. The Post-Modern reader (London : Academy Editions ; New York : St. Martin's Press, 1992.) , pp. 18-21;
11. Sontag, "Notes on Camp,' Against interpretation,c1966). On Sontag's relation to postmodernism see Liam Kennedy,"Precocious archaeology: Susan Sontag and the criticism of culture, Journal of American Studies v. 24 (Apr. '90) p. 23-39. Marx, Leo, 1919-, "Susan Sontag's "New Left" pastoral: notes on revolutionary pastoralism in America, in The pilot and the passenger (Oxford Univ. Press, 1988) pp. 291-314; McRobbie, Angela, "The modernist style of Susan Sontag", Feminist Review v. no38 (Summer '91) p. 1-19 ; and Gergen, Saturated, p. 120 who describes Sontag as a Modernist "peering into the emerging miasma of the postmodern."
12. Fiedler, "Death Avant Garde." On Fiedler's role in the development of postmodernism see Capozzi, Rocco. "An interview with Leslie A. Fiedler: let's revisit postmodernism., University of Toronto Quarterly v. 60 (Spring '91) p. 331-6
13. Jencks notes that McLuhan had tie to origins of pop art in that sometimes joined groups of "English intellectuals and artists" in late 1950s who looked at way new media shaped consciousness (Jencks,. p. 18). Jencks sees as mid-1950s in England, and then developing independently in U.S. in late 1950s (p. 19)
14. See various works on Henry James, e.g;, A world elsewhere; the place of style in American literature. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1966)[ McCabe PS88 .P6
15. Jencks, "Preface,"p. 21. Arac, p. 284 describes with Fiedler, Sontag ,and Poirier as giving "more complex attention to new modes of mass media."
16. For example, Robert Venturi , Learning from Las Vegas; Jencks, See also Raban, Jonathan., Soft city (London, Hamilton, 1974) McCabe HT133 .R3 1974 which Harvey, Condition of Postmodernism p. sees as "suffused' with spirit of postmodernism.
17. Huyssen cited in Jencks, "Preface,"p. 24
18. Arac, Critical genealogies: historical situations for postmodern literary studies ( Columbia Univ. Press, 1987) , p. 281 refers to the "dialogue between postmodern criticism and the Anglo-American revival of Marxism." Also describes the "unsettling confluence" of postmodernism and poststructuralism" in the 1970s. (p. 281). Harvey, Condition notes that the intermingling of post-Marxist and poststructuralist thinking with American pragmatism after 1968 produced (Bernstein, 1985), a "rage against humanism and the Enlightenment legacy."
19. Habermas, Jurgen "Modernity versus Post Modernity," in The Anti-aesthetic : essays on postmodern culture , edited by Hal Foster. (Port Townsend, Wash. : Bay Press, 1983.) . This talk was originally Sept 1980 in Frankfurt for Adorno prize. Repeated NYU in March 1981. Lyotard "What is Postmodernism" in Jencks seems to echo in suggesting that one reading of the Habermas critique of a return to a "sociocultural unity within which all the elements of daily life and of thought would take their places as in an organic whole." (p. 143) [although he seems to concede that this is a demand to combat, not reinforce , postmodernism]
20. Berman, Marshall All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982) ;Baudrillard, Jean. , Simulations ( New York : Semiotext(e), Inc., c1983. Baudrillard, Jean., In the shadow of the silent majorities--or the end of the social, and other essays translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston. ( New York, N.Y. : Semiotext(e), c1983.) ;Anderson, Perry, In the tracks of historical materialism (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1984.) [1 > S McCabe B809.8 .A599 1984; Jameson, Frederic "The Cultural Logic of late Capitalism (1984), reprinted in Postmodernism [1991]); Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism," New Left review 152 (July -August, 1985)
21. Charles Jencks, ed. The Post-Modern reader (1992); A Postmodern reader, edited by Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (1993);Smart, Barry. , Modern conditions : postmodern controversies (London ; New York : Routledge, 1992.
22. This same division can be traced, according to Huyssen, Andreas, After the great divide : modernism, mass culture, postmodernism (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1986) to difference between Adorno/Marcuse, on the one hand, and Walter Benjamin on the other. Huyseens writes: Adorno "Culture Industry reconsidered," New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975)m 12-19, argued that under modern capitalism culture loses its autonomy and critical potential Summed up again in 1963 radio lecture. "CULTURE INDUSTRY IS THE PURPOSEFUL INTEGRATION OF ITS CONSUMERS FROM ABOVE. IT ALSO FORCES A RECONCILIATION OF HIGH AND LOW ART, WHICH HAVE BEEN SEPARATED FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS, A RECONCILIATION WHICH DAMAGES BOTH. HIGH ART IF DEPRIVED IF ITS SERIOUSNESS BECAUSE ITS EFFECT IS PROGRAMMED; LOW ART IS PUT IN CHAINS AND DEPRIVED OF THE UNRULY RESISTANCE INHERENT IN IT WHEN SOCIAL CONTROL WAS NOT YET TOTAL." ; Marcuse "The Affirmative Character Of Culture," origin 1937 but translated and reprinted in Negations; essays in critical theory. With translations from the German by Jeremy J. Shapiro. (Boston, Beacon Press [1968])" believed that the Utopia of a better life expressed in bourgeois art need only be taken at its word. (i.e. art expresses "fantasy" freed on obligation. Cf. argument of One Dimensional Man. Since both suggested that change in superstructure (art) might occur without change in underlying system of production the Left in the 1960s began more interested in the "materialist aesthetics" of of Walter Benjamin below), articulated as early as 1934, when B noted that "the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication is capable of assimilating , indeed of propagating, an astonishing amount of revolutionary themes without ever seriously putting into question its own continued existence or that of the class which owns it." (quoted p. 152). Thus looked to two benjamin essays of the 1930s. See Benjamin, "The Author as Producer" in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London, 1973)and "The work of Art in the age of mechanical Reproduction" Illuminations , edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt ; translated by Harry Zohn. (New York : Schocken Books, [1986?], c1968.)
23. in Charles Jencks, ed. The Post-Modern reader (1992)
24. For summary of this position see following excerpt from Kalaidjian, Walter B., 1952- , American culture between the wars : revisionary modernism & postmodern critique(Columbia University Press, c1993). pp. 116-22.. Appendix III.
 25. Harvey notes that since 1972 there are strong apriori grounds of seeing some connection between "the rise of postmodernist cultural forms, the emergence of more flexible modes of capitalist accumulation, and a new round of "time--space compression" [i.e. new perception of space /time] in the organization of capitalism." However he argues that these are surface changes "when set against the basic rules of capitalist accumulation." (p. vii).
26. Hutcheon,Politics, p. 2 notes that debate carried on largely in "negative terms, citing neo-conservatives Hilton Kramer, "Postmodern Art and Culture in the 1980s," New Criterion 1 (1982), 36-42; and Charles Newman, The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation (1985) .Also neo-Marxists below
27. Commenators differ as to whether Jameson is pro-or con. Hutcheon, Politics sees as one of negative critics. Arac characterizes him as one who "revitalized Marxist cultural studies" in context of debate over deconstruction. Although sees strengths and weaknesses, sees as appropriate term, which to opponents (says Arac, "can seem no more than disguised advocacy." (p. 285)
28. Hutcheon. Politics describes the varieties of postmodernism as :
29. Hutcheon, Politics describes the "complex relation to modernism: "its retention of modernism's initial oppositional impulses, both ideological and aesthetic, and its equally strong rejection of its founding notion of formalist autonomy." (p. 26)
30. This tension between the Enlightenment project sense of "modernism" (modernity, modernization) and the "cultural modernism" may be seen in David Harvey , Condition of Postmodernity , wherein extremes of "productivism" and "modernity" in Bauhaus, and Le Corbusier are "modernist" as well as those that reflect modern ambivalence toward science and progress. Likewise Bradbury and McFarlane (1976)Modernism, 1890-1930 / edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. (Hassocks, Sussex : Harvester Press ; Atlantic Highlands, N.J. Humanities Press, 1978)describe the "extraordinary compound of the futuristic and the nihilistic..." (quoted Harvey p. 24) Examples of what occurred in both directions between 1910 and 1915 include Duchamp et al on the one hand, and Frederick Winslow Taylor on the other. Other works making a similar distinction are: Gaggi, Silvio, Modern/postmodern : a study in twentieth-century arts and ideas (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c1989) who not only distinguishes between "modernism" as 20th c. and as western civilization since Renaissance., but also, within "modernism" of early 20th distinguishes "later romantic" (Cubists, Fauves, Expressionists" from the "classicism" of Corbusier, Mondrian etc.
31. For explicit discussion see Rose, "Defining,"p. 126 who relies on Koehler, "Postmodernisius," in New Literary History vol. 3 no 1. E.g. see Lyotard, "What is Postmodernism" in Jencks, p,.138 who sees the distinguishing characteristic of "modernism" to be the metanarrative," for example the Enlightenment "narrative in which the hero of knowledge works towards a good ethico-political end--universal peace." Jencks, "Preface," ibid distinguished "modernity as a condition" growing from Renaissance from "cultural modernism" that took shape in the 19th c. (p. 6). Harvey Condition, pp 12-13 repeats Habermas on "enlightenment" project as an aspect of the of "modern" and implicitly contrasts it with the 19th century sense from Bauldelaire though Yeats et. al.
32. Arac Critical, p. 284
33. Arac (p. 284) characterizes as "a philosopher and former independent social activist, long involved with the critique of Stalinism."
34. Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others" and Alice Jardine, Gynesis (Cornell Press, 1985) in different ways argue that postmodernism and feminism should ally. Others argue or caution against such an alliance. Linda Hutcheon, Ch. 8 "Postmodernism and Feminism, Politics; notes that the crux of the ferminist objection derives from the fact that women are interested in constructing an "identity" not deconstructing the self. Creed, Barbara "From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism," Screen 28 (1927), 47-67. (also in A Postmodern Reader, arguing against both Owens and Jardine, makes five points: (1) attempts to unite the three had led to confusions of terms, whereby Leotard's "grand narrative" is reduced to "master narrative," obscuring the fact that the "other" (the thing opposed) is "grand narratives (progress etc.) for pomo, and "patriarchy" for feminists) (2) pomo theorists such as Jameson have ignored the gender dimension e.g. in "nostalgia" films, hence providing inadequate analysis; (3) by treating feminism as "guest" coming to host of "postmodernism" Owens and others give feminism a secondary position; (40 not clear whether end of "master narratives" is of benefit to women; and (5) possibility that pomo is more indebted to feminism than realized by those proposing alliance. In fact, historically, periods in which there have been crises in "the West's system of knowledge" have been periods in which women assumed new roles and positions:(a) transition between Middle ages and renaissance (querelle des femmes); (b) French Revolution and St. Simonians; and (c) post-1968 period with events in Paris and rise of women's movement.
35. Warren Montag, "What is at Stake in the debate on Postmodernism,"in Postmodernism and Its Discontents, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London, 1988) argues that for all its attack on "totalizing" theory and "grand narratives," postmodernism is itself a totalizing narrative:"In its totalizing, transcendental pretensions, this concept [of postmodernism] precisely forecloses progress in thought by denying the possibility that fissures, disjunctions, breaks in contemporary social reality are symptoms of an impending crisis. For the signal feature of postmodernism most inimical to historical materialism is its claim to be the end of all crises, the end of all narratives, the end of resistance and revolutionary transformation." (p. 102).
36. This process has various dimensions. See article of Cowley as one example. Arac, Critical Genealogies, p. 310 also suggests that in reaction against Stalin, the "independent group, later NY intellectual conservatives, made a specialty of addressing, not the nitty gritty of politics, but great historical issues.. In the 1950s this made them hot items on the anti-Communist intellectual circuit.
 
 
Written by Robert Bannister, for classroom use in History 47, Swarthmore College 1/98.Revised 4/7/98. May be reproduced in whole or part for educational purposes, but not copied or distributed for profit.