Postmodernism. Mm, when is it over again?
©
I was a teenager when I fell in love with modern. The 1960s was perhaps the absolute zenith of modernism when Western Enlightenment met Eastern philosophy, mods knocked off rockers, peace and love were effective answers to complicated problems, and music, dance, literature, art, architecture, science and technology were at their elegantly minimalist finest.
And then it was gone, demolished, or perhaps euthanized, first by Manson and Altamont, then Nixon, Watergate, a design sludge of boat-like cars, Brutalist architecture, Exxon-Mobil, blocky Spanish-style decor, Big Tobacco, the quagmire in Vietnam, Proctor and Gamble, and the Rockford Files. Modern was over. It’s hard to describe what replaced it other than “shit”.
Modernism was not only a reductionist language, it was a recombination of seminal inspirations. On the one hand it was a great cleansing, clearing away the rubble of two world wars, the heavy, suffocating Victorian and Viennese cultures of 19th century Europe and its oppressive ornamentation. On the other it was the convergence of new thinking: the efficiency of Bauhaus design, the pragmatism of New Deal social democracy, the refinement instruments and new technologies including the camera and the birth of electronic media. But mostly it was the language of hope, the belief that Utopia was possible. That people—living on a human scale—mattered.
A lot has been written about how the political Left went off the rails in the late 1960s. Conservative thinkers like Hayek, Friedman, Buckley had been working on its dislocation since the 1940s. The arrival of conservative politicians like Goldwater, Nixon and later Reagan and Bush I and II, culminating with Trump today, coincided with the corporate takeover of elections by virtue (irony intended) of unrestricted campaign donations.
During this 40-year period technology grew increasingly more complex—with ever-slicker user interfaces that made the highly complex seem simple. Electronics went from home built Heathkits to handheld supercomputers in two generations. As production became computerized, manual skills were off-shored, disappeared altogether or turned into high-value craftwork.
These four forces: the moralistic reaction to the freedom of modernism, the rise of conservative academics, the corporate takeover of government, and the ever-increasing and evermore expensive proliferation of complicated corporatized technologies, coalesced into a single symbiotic whole that de facto excluded ordinary people from the ability to control their own means of production and influence over their political processes.
No better expression of this can be found than in today’s postmodern architecture. Led by starchitects like Frank Gerhy, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Bjarke Ingels and a handful of others, new strange new buildings have shaped new cities and reshaped the old. Stainless steel walls wave and weave in the sun, entire buildings lean into each other like inebriated sailors, massive top-heavy structures defy gravity, colour, texture and materials fight for our attention.
The fanzines characterize these buildings as ‘contemporary’ rather than postmodern, a term that itself has fallen victim to postmodernism. Not only do these buildings—and their designers—fight for our attention, they fight each other for attention. No longer is the city an integrated space dominated by the Bauhaus principles dictating the most cost-efficient use of rectangular glass and steel. Goodbye Mies, hello Jean Nouvel.
Postmodernism depends on education rather than innovation. At its foundation it is complex and technical, requiring years of indoctrination, dedication and training. In its final expression it is forthrightly and shamelessly narcissistic. At last we get to it: the definition. Postmodernism is the ultimate expression of the idea of the individual—overshadowing the modernist Utopian aims of the collective.
Modernism has defined the vanguard of our thinking since the 1950s. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Kerouac’s On the Road, and later Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance defined the white male-dominated modernist ethic. What they all shared was a paring down of plot, minimizing external activity and the good-evil conflict-driven plot devices to focus on the internal voice of ordinary life, in many ways the universal inner voice—even though it was for the most part a male voice.
Since then storyline plot has made an astonishing comeback. It’s even an important element of memoir, narrative non-fiction and so-called “literary” fiction that combines real and fictional elements, often autobiographical. As I sat wondering about why this should be so, I was caught by the actual question: why plot?
We crave plot because our postmodern lives are devoid of meaning.
Utopia is dead. Or relegated to the hopelessly naïve. In its place is not cynicism, but narcissistic diversion, the endless looking in the mirror and the craving for something more—which is conveniently supplied to us, like narcissistic supply, electronically in the form of the endless plot twists of Netflix series and Hollywood blockbusters. Information, into which we are completely enmeshed, weaves us into its artificial, Matrix-like plots in endless loops that take us back to endlessly looping newsfeeds of artificially induced meaning.
Postmodernism is driven by information. And it’s the lens through which we see. It even applies to our science, cosmology and the quest to understand ultimate meaning—or meaninglessness—of our universe. “Information” is now the first cornerstone of and emerging theory of the reality. Another emerging cornerstone is “consciousness”. As current theory goes, our universe is literally made up of bits of information, is made real by conscious observation—and that all time exists simultaneously. It’s aptly called Emergence Theory. Its surface is slick, but it’s anything but simple, though it may be as simple as a single description of universal reality can be. I suppose.
In the end postmodernism is all about endless distraction without meaning. As the ultimate diversion, it plays into the conservative and neoconservative agenda set out in the early 1970s: to firmly place the control of social, cultural, political and economic forces into the hands of an intelligent, deserving elite. That’s the plot. And so far it’s working. For them, at least.
OK, and to be honest, I'm attracted to a lot of these new buildings. And therein lies the dilemma.
Additional reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_modern_American_conservatism
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/12/the-conservative-1960s/376506/
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-roots-of-american-conservatism/
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/jean-nouvel-architecture
https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/culture/opinion-why-starchitecture-fails-society/8692723.article
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ztlIAYTCU
I was a teenager when I fell in love with modern. The 1960s was perhaps the absolute zenith of modernism when Western Enlightenment met Eastern philosophy, mods knocked off rockers, peace and love were effective answers to complicated problems, and music, dance, literature, art, architecture, science and technology were at their elegantly minimalist finest.
And then it was gone, demolished, or perhaps euthanized, first by Manson and Altamont, then Nixon, Watergate, a design sludge of boat-like cars, Brutalist architecture, Exxon-Mobil, blocky Spanish-style decor, Big Tobacco, the quagmire in Vietnam, Proctor and Gamble, and the Rockford Files. Modern was over. It’s hard to describe what replaced it other than “shit”.
Modernism was not only a reductionist language, it was a recombination of seminal inspirations. On the one hand it was a great cleansing, clearing away the rubble of two world wars, the heavy, suffocating Victorian and Viennese cultures of 19th century Europe and its oppressive ornamentation. On the other it was the convergence of new thinking: the efficiency of Bauhaus design, the pragmatism of New Deal social democracy, the refinement instruments and new technologies including the camera and the birth of electronic media. But mostly it was the language of hope, the belief that Utopia was possible. That people—living on a human scale—mattered.
A lot has been written about how the political Left went off the rails in the late 1960s. Conservative thinkers like Hayek, Friedman, Buckley had been working on its dislocation since the 1940s. The arrival of conservative politicians like Goldwater, Nixon and later Reagan and Bush I and II, culminating with Trump today, coincided with the corporate takeover of elections by virtue (irony intended) of unrestricted campaign donations.
During this 40-year period technology grew increasingly more complex—with ever-slicker user interfaces that made the highly complex seem simple. Electronics went from home built Heathkits to handheld supercomputers in two generations. As production became computerized, manual skills were off-shored, disappeared altogether or turned into high-value craftwork.
These four forces: the moralistic reaction to the freedom of modernism, the rise of conservative academics, the corporate takeover of government, and the ever-increasing and evermore expensive proliferation of complicated corporatized technologies, coalesced into a single symbiotic whole that de facto excluded ordinary people from the ability to control their own means of production and influence over their political processes.
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| Modernism and postmodernism and a space for meaning |
No better expression of this can be found than in today’s postmodern architecture. Led by starchitects like Frank Gerhy, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Bjarke Ingels and a handful of others, new strange new buildings have shaped new cities and reshaped the old. Stainless steel walls wave and weave in the sun, entire buildings lean into each other like inebriated sailors, massive top-heavy structures defy gravity, colour, texture and materials fight for our attention.
The fanzines characterize these buildings as ‘contemporary’ rather than postmodern, a term that itself has fallen victim to postmodernism. Not only do these buildings—and their designers—fight for our attention, they fight each other for attention. No longer is the city an integrated space dominated by the Bauhaus principles dictating the most cost-efficient use of rectangular glass and steel. Goodbye Mies, hello Jean Nouvel.
Postmodernism depends on education rather than innovation. At its foundation it is complex and technical, requiring years of indoctrination, dedication and training. In its final expression it is forthrightly and shamelessly narcissistic. At last we get to it: the definition. Postmodernism is the ultimate expression of the idea of the individual—overshadowing the modernist Utopian aims of the collective.
Modernism has defined the vanguard of our thinking since the 1950s. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Kerouac’s On the Road, and later Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance defined the white male-dominated modernist ethic. What they all shared was a paring down of plot, minimizing external activity and the good-evil conflict-driven plot devices to focus on the internal voice of ordinary life, in many ways the universal inner voice—even though it was for the most part a male voice.
Since then storyline plot has made an astonishing comeback. It’s even an important element of memoir, narrative non-fiction and so-called “literary” fiction that combines real and fictional elements, often autobiographical. As I sat wondering about why this should be so, I was caught by the actual question: why plot?
We crave plot because our postmodern lives are devoid of meaning.
Utopia is dead. Or relegated to the hopelessly naïve. In its place is not cynicism, but narcissistic diversion, the endless looking in the mirror and the craving for something more—which is conveniently supplied to us, like narcissistic supply, electronically in the form of the endless plot twists of Netflix series and Hollywood blockbusters. Information, into which we are completely enmeshed, weaves us into its artificial, Matrix-like plots in endless loops that take us back to endlessly looping newsfeeds of artificially induced meaning.
Postmodernism is driven by information. And it’s the lens through which we see. It even applies to our science, cosmology and the quest to understand ultimate meaning—or meaninglessness—of our universe. “Information” is now the first cornerstone of and emerging theory of the reality. Another emerging cornerstone is “consciousness”. As current theory goes, our universe is literally made up of bits of information, is made real by conscious observation—and that all time exists simultaneously. It’s aptly called Emergence Theory. Its surface is slick, but it’s anything but simple, though it may be as simple as a single description of universal reality can be. I suppose.
In the end postmodernism is all about endless distraction without meaning. As the ultimate diversion, it plays into the conservative and neoconservative agenda set out in the early 1970s: to firmly place the control of social, cultural, political and economic forces into the hands of an intelligent, deserving elite. That’s the plot. And so far it’s working. For them, at least.
OK, and to be honest, I'm attracted to a lot of these new buildings. And therein lies the dilemma.
Additional reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_modern_American_conservatism
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/12/the-conservative-1960s/376506/
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-roots-of-american-conservatism/
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/jean-nouvel-architecture
https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/culture/opinion-why-starchitecture-fails-society/8692723.article
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ztlIAYTCU
Interesting material, as always, Gerald. If we were doing a he-says/she-says, I would add a few words: without arguing with anything you're said, I will say that, for me, the answer to why plot is that we, as a species, have always needed stories. We look at the world through story, we find meaning in our own lives by defining our stories, we are inspired to do better, be better because of story. I don't think that's ever not been the case. As such, I don't see that we crave plot any more now than we ever have. IMHO.
ReplyDeleteNo disagreement, story and plot have always provided essential metaphor for life. When society loses its way, plot becomes even more necessary, as I indicated. I do think we may crave plot at some times more than others. In the same way the trend toward realism in painting ebbs and flows, depending on the times.
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