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Jaime Puente

ENG 3340

Dr. Murray

April 22, 2010

Postmodernism: What's the Point?

To some the word postmodern means nothing more than an idea with no beginning or

end. Since the 1970s the word has been understood as a description of a particular form of

cultural production that is a clear demarcation from the more antiquated modernist movement.
Stressing the plurality of possible experiences, postmodern aesthetics have become an academic

and cultural force bordering on the line of hegemony. David Harvey's The Condition of

Postmodernity (1990) examines the transition from modern to postmodern in Western culture by

looking at their various incarnations such as cities, artistic production, and historical

contextualization. Rather than being a dramatic change from modernism, Harvey asserts that

postmodernism is just a different form of modernism because it relies upon several layers of

facade to mask an underlying meta-narrative. In what becomes a severe critique on the

hegemonic influence of capitalism, the author argues that even though history is discarded as

necessary context, it remains a central factor of cultural development.

A discussion of postmodernism must begin with a firm understanding of modernism.

Harvey acknowledges this in the second chapter of his book, "Modernity and Modernism."

Drawing on Baudelaire, Harvey places the thirst for development at the center of modernism

because it is the process of making something new while at the same time discarding the past as

irrelevant. Modernity "can have no respect even for its own past, let alone that of any premodern

social order" and because of this there is no need to look upon objects or histories with any form

of nostalgia (11). The modern age is characterized by the continuous tearing down and

rebuilding of structures, ways of life, and political networks, so that the "universal, eternal, and

the immutable qualities of humanity [can] be revealed" (12). This statement hearkens back to

Baudelaire and reveals a paradox in this conception of modernism because if one of its major
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tenets is to step away from the confines of tradition, it still seeks to retain certain elements of the

past. Harvey uses this discussion to point out a key problem associated with the so-called

modernist project, and that is the danger of the modernist to develop him/ herself out of

existence.

In the efforts to "make it anew" the high modernists of the early twentieth century took

the formulations pioneered by Baudelaire to new heights. In the constant push for development

there was an attempt by the modernists to divorce themselves from the past, and by doing so

apply a unified theory to the process of cultural production. For most of the modernist period,
artists, theorists, and even scientists, sought to liberate the production of culture from "the chains

of subjective dependence," by asserting "the true nature of a unified, though complex, underlying

reality," (26, 30). Because modernism, for so many of its varied champions, meant a definite

change from the past, from tradition, the potential for the movement to spin wildly out of control

into an infinite number of possible meanings and incarnations was seen more as a threat.

According to Harvey, the problem that cultural anarchism created spurred a reaction in

modernists to seek a single, all encompassing answer to the question of being. The modernist

project, brought to life by individuals and governments, made its point to be completely new,

outside of historical context, and yet a fixed in place and time through "the imposition of rational

order," (31). The reliance on single theory to guide the progress of human endeavors is one of the

many criticisms Harvey levels on the modernists of the early and mid twentieth century. His

definition of modernism as "the belief 'linear progress, absolute truths, and rational planning of

social orders' under standardized conditions of knowledge and production "reflects a process of

culture that in effect, developed itself from existence because it was a rehashing of antiquated

mythology for the specific purpose of unifying a given theory (35). Harvey tells us that the goal

of these particular modernist incarnations reflected more of a return to core Enlightenment ideas

than a radical change in aesthetic. The way of being became the focus of intellectual, artistic, and

political theory, and this allowed the historical context of human lives to be disregarded as

unimportant. In the search for one meaning to define the entirety of cultural production,
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modernists continued the Western adventure of Imperialism by enacting an aesthetic caste

system. Postmodernism, as we will see, is what Harvey calls a response to the negative and

limited tenets of Modernism.

Harvey recognizes the problems inherent in the act of labeling something as abstract as

postmodernism with a particular moment in time, but he does make a distinction between the

modern and postmodern eras. He argues that the passage to a postmodern understanding of

culture began to take definite shape in the early 1970s as a study of the vernacular. Citing the

failure of so many modernist endeavors, Harvey argues that the latest aesthetic movement
diverges from its predecessor by asking "questions s to how radically different realities may

coexist, collide, and interpenetrate," (41). Instead of seeking one theory, one answer, to the

problems and questions of human life, there can now be multiple realities that are equally

important and worthy of study. For the postmodern student, the quest is not to understand how

one is being, but how one is becoming. The structural rigidity of the high modernists is taken

apart to show how interwoven politics, economy, and culture really are. Where the modernists

tried to divorce their productions from the historical and social contexts from which they arose,

the postmodernist takes it all into consideration as a constructive force because the new-new

theorists, such as Michel Foucault and Jean Francois Lyotard, use their work to "castigate the

imperialism of an enlightened modernity that presumed to speak for others . . . with a unified

voice," (47-48). The depression and regression of Western societies, as well as the destruction of

non-Western societies, that accompanied many of the larger modernist projects (public housing

projects, free market ideology, and dogmatic belief in the primacy of democracy) can be

understood a negative implications of the quest for a single explanation, a deus ex machina, that

would solve all problems. Seeking out complexity and appealing to paradox, the postmodern

producer of culture rejected any attempt to define a beginning or end.

Harvey maps out the intentionally complex theoretical positions of what he calls a

reaction to the effects of modernism's failures. Where modernism tried to place a single idea at

the helm of cultural production, the postmodern revels in the stratification of meaning because
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"whatever we write [or produce] conveys meanings we do not or could not possibly intend, and

our words [products] cannot say what we mean," (49). Trying to understand a person's being,

assumed an ability know it in its entirety, and because meaning can be infinitely complex and

layered, complete knowledge is unattainable because our experiences are fragmented and

fleeting. The transience of experience is a condition of postmodern awareness that Harvey says

led to an abandonment of "all sense of historical continuity and memory, white simultaneously

developing an incredible ability to plunder history and absorb whatever it finds there as some

aspect of the present," (54). History is often based on a person's memory of an event, and
because memories are by nature a fallible links to particular moments in space and time, they

cannot be used as a so-called objective reference. For postmodernists, Harvey says, the

subjectivity of history disrupts any attempt at defining continuous patterns or application of

meta-narratives, yet it relies on sporadic elements of the past to define itself in the present. This

poses one of the great risks of postmodernity that Harvey describes, and it becomes central to his

ultimate criticism of the postmodern aesthetic.

The stratification of meaning that marked the drastic change from modernism comes full

circle as producers of culture arose out of every category of 'otherness' to create new forms of

beauty. The dislocation of a definite meaning from experience and cultural production left the

possibility for these 'others' to influence what became known as popular culture. In the United

States especially, the postmodern aesthetic, disassociated from history, is one of facades. Harvey

points to this when he criticizes the influence of television as an "attachment to surfaces rather

than roots, to collage rather than in-depth work, to a collapsed sense of time and space rather

than solidly achieved cultural artifact," (61). The ubiquity of the television in the late twentieth

century must be taken into context when discussing the production of culture because as with

modernism, the continuing development of new technologies allows access to even more diverse

realities. Television as a cultural producer has recreated, in however objectionable form, the past

to fits its own subjective will by accessing and reproducing moments in space and time.
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The presence of television and other media are, according to Harvey are used by the real

creators of culture to produce a hegemonic structure of society that permeates all levels of

experience. Here Harvey's critique of the strict postmodernist is laid out in detail. The

development of postmodern culture in the 1970s and throughout the remainder of the millennium

strove to create beauty on the surface. In the chapter "Postmodernism in the City," Harvey

discusses to affects of this so-called new aesthetic on the architecture of urban centers. He lays

out clearly the postmodern critiques of modern designs, but also is sure to acknowledge "the

deep limitations . . . as well as the superficial advantages of many post-modernist efforts," (75).
To solve the problem of civil unrest that inflamed so many American cities in 1960s, developers

south to harness the diversity and employ postmodern techniques to community building. Where

modernists built drab and depressing box shelters, postmodernist built reproductions of

historically relevant structures but with all the bells and whistles of new technologies. This type

of design process, while seeking to be inclusive, often succumbed to clichd sense of "contrived

depthlessness" that Harvey says dominated much of postmodern creation (88). This is a key

problem for Harvey because it is through the prominence of superficiality that the most harm can

be done in the postmodern age.

Putting on a show is the best form of reality, and for postmodernists the show is the most

important aspect of culture. Rather than promote the access to a singular ability to define the

world, the postmodern mogul is comfortable with his or her position being in a constant state of

flux. Harvey returns to a discussion of modernism because it is useful to refer to Marx when

discussing the facades of postmodernism. Relating the appeals to only that which is on the

surface mirrors Marx's formulation of the fetishized commodity. The commodity having been

imbued with a supernatural power (the labor power of worker from which it was produced) is

analogous to the culture being produced by the postmodernist because it is attempting to stand on

its own without relation to its material context. Harvey confirms this saying that "advertising and

commercialization destroy all traces of production in their imagery, reinforcing the fetishism that

arises automatically in the course of market exchange," (102). Leveling one of the toughest
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criticisms of the postmodern project, Harvey sees the use of the overly important surface in

artistic production as dangerous because it can be used so easily a tool for manipulation. In fact

Harvey's overall theme in this work is a critique of postmodernism's inability to create new ways

of being because of its reliance on the superficial elements of experience.

For Harvey the postmodern attempt to throw away any type of meta-narrative has failed,

and in fact is doing more damage to the production of culture. Rejecting the assertion that there

is no meta-narrative, Harvey outlines the economic basis for what he deems an underlying

connection of modernism and post-modernism more that either schools would like to
acknowledge. Harvey goes so far as to say that the "rhetoric of postmodernism is dangerous for it

avoids confronting the realities of political economy and the circumstances of global power," and

in effect "comes dangerously close to complicity with the aestheticizing of politics upon which it

is based," (117). Together the images and shows that make postmodern culture so inclusive are

used as a mask, or veil, to hide the reality of processes and actions being taken. What Harvey

ultimately describes is the postmodern development of a social hegemony based on the repacked

and reproduced elements of culture. Along with the radical changes in aesthetic definitions of

meaning came new definitions of political identity, and the riots of the many different Civil

Rights movements in the 1960s proved the possibility for further instability of state authority,

which Harvey connects unambiguously to the powers of capitalism. In a damning statement

Harvey concludes that, "whereever capitalism goes, its illusory apparatus, its fetishisms, and its

system of mirrors come not far behind," (344). Postmodernism is so closely linked to capitalism

that Harvey believes they are inseparable, because just as capitalism is a quest for having,

postmodernism is a quest for being. In this world of complex social structure that is dominated

by the hegemonic influence of late-capitalism, being and having are one in the same.

Modernism and postmodernism are abstract ideas that have been used to try to enunciate

the peculiar experiences of people living in the age of technology and capitalism. Both are

referent to particular eras of technological innovation and wealth gain. David Harvey's The

Condition of Postmodernity takes on the monumental task of mapping out the two broad
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concepts in order to pin down an understanding of their role in modern cultural experience.

Describing modernity as the continual destruction and construction of cultural artifacts with a

single driving idea, Harvey lays out the criticisms and basis for the seemingly radical change

called postmodernism. Doing so provides the foundation for a more in-depth review of the

postmodern aesthetic that he determines to be closely dependent upon the functions of

capitalism. Ultimately Harvey argues that the postmodern project is just an extension of

modernism through a more pluralistic lens, and it can be understood through a unifying concept--

capitalism.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Print.