"Postmodernism's real qualities are mean and

difficult, yet also psychedelically positive"

Sam Jacob | 13 August 2015 3 comments
Pomo summer: could there be anything more ridiculous than the idea of a Postmodern revival? It
depends what you mean by Postmodernism, says Sam Jacob, in his column for Dezeen's summer
season on the controversial movement.

A Postmodern revival, huh? Can you imagine a more absurd idea? Or anything that could
characterise the sheer vacuous idiocy of contemporary architecture and design more than this?
Why? Well, because if there ever was such a thing as "Postmodernism" it was already about the pop-
will-eat-itself nature of the modern world, about the emptiness of the stylistic gesture, about the
collapse of history into an endlessly rearrangeable flatness, about the fluidity of meaning. Most of all, it
wasn't a thing but an idea, a concept not a style.
Postmodernism's core was the floating signifier, the notion of the sign detached from the thing it once
referred so that it no longer points to a clear, agreed upon meaning. Isn't reviving the sign of
Postmodernism in such a literal, un-Postmodern way simply recasting its lighter-than-air essence with
all the wit of a lead ballon?
Postmodern revival of this sort is nothing less than a trap set by the past for designers of the future.
And, if Dezeen is to be believed, we are walking into it with cartoon smiles drawn all over our dumb
faces.
It's like Marx in reverse: First as farce, then as tragedy. Why? Because farce is a finely constructed
theatre of the absurd that satirises an era's social mores. And tragedy? Because to reduce
Postmodernism to a style is to fundamentally misunderstand its very essence.
But then, Postmodernism in architecture and design has constantly been misunderstood. Take those
who regard it as an incarnation of Reagan-Thatcher politics. First, historically inaccurate – it was
around much earlier than that. Second, that's just a convenient fit-up job, a circumstantial straw man
built to protect fragile aesthetic sensibilities that masquerade as something more profound. And third,
well it's just plain wrong.
Those who deny Postmodernism's intrinsically political project are those who don't really believe in
architecture and design's inherent political capabilities, who dismiss the discipline to be capable of
political agency in any other form than spelt with a capital P.
There are others who attempt to discredit Postmodernism as "inauthentic", who argue that it "dates"
and that architecture should address a mythological "timelessness" that exists somewhere beyond the
earthly qualities of fashion, culture and taste. But these are exactly the kinds of ideas that
Postmodernism was gunning for, just the kinds of sacred cows that it swung for – and ironically, just
the things that made it so very sincere and authentic. These were just the people that it sought to make
uncomfortable through its disciplinary – rather than professional – idea of architecture. Bear in mind
that these are the people who rely on an aesthetic veneer of serious authenticity to cloak their market-
driven manoeuvres.
The biggest misunderstanding of all is that Postmodernism was an attack on Modernism
Postmodernism's suggestion that authenticity might be a more difficult idea, and that the designed
world itself is an entirely synthetic "unnatural" thing remains a threat to these forms of practice. Its
conceptual depth still provokes a defensive guard decades later – so it must have been doing something
right.
Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding of all is that Postmodernism was an attack on Modernism itself.
Not at all: I'd argue that it was an attempt to understand Modernism in the context of the post-war era,
in an age no longer dominated by the industrial machine but by the post-industrial age of global
information. Postmodernism wasn't against Modernism but rather an attempt to stand Modernism's
ground while new forms of modernity raged around it – a modernity Frederick Jameson called the
"logic of late capitalism".
What Postmodernism did attack was the limp ghost of the International Style which cast Modernism as
watered-down aesthetic, as a kind of neo-ism assuming the clothes of the Modern project while editing
out the difficult parts.
In the 1950s, young architects felt that the original promise of Modernism has essentially been betrayed
by the generation that preceded them. Groups like Team X and the Independent Group were attempts
to re-boot the Modern project, to escape what they saw had become a lifeless doctrine And to do this
they responded to the world as it was then, and to the way they imagined the future could be.
Modernism was deeply strange, often antagonistic, mystic and visionary. New Brutalism in Britain and
Structuralism in the Netherlands both sought new forms of directness that reclaimed Modernism's
rawness on the one hand while connecting it to the complexities of life-as-lived on the other.
Modernism, let me remind you, was a movement that included Dada, Surrealism, Joyce, Freud, and
Futurism amongst much else. It was deeply strange, often antagonistic, mystic and visionary. Its
architecture too should be seen as part of this world, not simply as the rational, logical, sincere and
stylistically abstract, reductive thing that it has come to mean.
If we remember that Modernism itself was a volatile collection of the rational and the subconscious,
that it was not only a social and technical revolution but also psychological and cultural one where
surrealism and social reform went hand in hand. Understood in this way Postmodernism is not
oppositional to the traditions of Modernism. Postmodernism is actually its last surviving relative. Or,
conversely, one could argue that Modernism was all the things we more easily associate with
Postmodernism avant la lettre.
From those post-war stirrings in CIAM and London's ICA came a new idea of what Modernism might
be in a world increasingly dominated by media, popular culture and consumerism – how art,
architecture and design might be relevant to this new world and what new kinds of lives it might be
able to make within it. New Brutalism, Pop Art and Nouveau Futurism were a continuum of
exploration that had begun at the start of the 20th century. And from the Smithsons, James Stirling,
Reyner Banham, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, we could draw a golden thread directly into
the world that later became known as Postmodernism.

You might argue that Postmodernism was just a style, in

which case you never quite understood it in the first
place
Postmodernism was – is – the continuing struggle to
come to terms with and make sense of the modern
world.
You might argue that Postmodernism was just a style, a discreet period in architectural history,
something you can write nerdish listicles about if you can't bring any greater imagination to the project.
In which case you never quite understood it in the first place (caveat: if you are an actual scholar it is,
of course, totally legitimate to study a period – that's your job).
Or you can argue that Postmodernism is a continuing challenge. A challenge of how to conceive of
architecture and design in our contemporary circumstance. In which case it is part of the long tradition
of the avant garde that also includes Modernism.
Those who think Postmodernism means clinging on to things like loving Las Vegas or cartoons as if
this was somehow interesting or anything radical are also, sadly, deluded. If Postmodernism had a
cartoon quality, it was not about simplifying but about complicating, not about easiness but about
difficulty. But then, those who don't know their history are condemned to repeat it as a farcical
incarnation of the original.
Instead, and at its best, Postmodernism's real qualities are mean, sarcastic, blank, difficult, challenging,
yet somehow simultaneously psychedelically positive.
So, to those of you contemplating a Postmodern revival, some advice. First, let's turn to the canon.
What is really part of the Postmodern tradition that I'm advocating? And, more importantly, what isn't?
Postmodernism's pluralism – once radical – has been co-opted as free market choice
First: No historical jokes. Yes to projects about absence, loss, flatness, impossibility. But please, no
bloody jokes for the sake of it. Yes too to pathos, rhetoric and provocation. Yes to reference but no to
overblown self-reference. In other words, weed out all that historically inflected commercial schlock.
Get rid of fun-for-fun's-sake. Bin the pseudo-academic references. But treasure those moments that
make us break our stride, double-take and suddenly think about the nature of the world.
Remember too that Postmodernism's pluralism – once radical – has been co-opted as free market
choice. The effects of fully fledged neoliberal capitalism on our physical, social and economic
landscapes are profound and disorientating. In the wake of such pretzel logics as credit default swaps –
the standard-bearing instrument of deregulated, dematerialised financial product – we might add
confusion to Postmodernism's original complexity and contradiction.
Now, when everything is one click away from everything else, high Postmodernism's critical dialectic
– the rhetoric of "double coding" that allowed Postmodernism to articulate its yes/no position – has
exploded into multiple and provisional relationships. In our era of networked information,
juxtapositions of high culture with popular, the historical with the contemporary or the academy with
the everyday no longer operate in the same way. Rome and Las Vegas, the temple and the shed, the
pediment and the billboard – once potent juxtapositions are now just more flotsam bobbing in the
endlessly wide pool of culture.
And remember what Postmodernism was really about in the first place. It was, I would argue, a deep
and profound investigation into late 20th-century conditions – conditions present in the world, and the
condition of the designer within that world. It was an understanding of the ways in which cultural,
economic and power structures were changing, how old structures were being dismantled and flattened.
If you are saying that we are all Postmodern now whether we accept it or not, I'll be behind you all the
way
It not only told us this would happen (why else would it have been so invested in flatness of two
dimensions?), how it would happen (media, advertising, cars, and other consumerisms) and why it
would happen (the ideology of late capitalism). It also knew that the mechanisms of culture would
transform so radically that its own foundation would collapse, that its own critical position would too
be flattened. Its ostentatious physical gestures were not waving but signalling a desperate truth at the
moment before invisible torrents of neoliberal, free market capitalism washed over everything.
Postmodernism was about this world, about the tendencies that were just then beginning to surface. But
now, well into the 21st century, this stuff is the world. We are now in the belly of the beast, devoured
whole. If you are saying, as you embark on your Postmodern revival that, yes, we are all Postmodern
now whether we accept it or not, and that the only real response is to fight fire with fire, then yes, I'll be
behind you all the way.
In our flatlands of networked culture there is a pop-will-eat-itself perversity to Postmodernism's
reappearance. But could its return, outside of its original historical moment, potentially allow it to
come back steeled for battle and ready for revenge?
Released from the parochial arguments of grey and white, high and low, tradition and modernity that
swirled around it and eventually drove it into the sand, could it not remerge as a truly transformative
form of design practice? Could it help us escape fates of tragedy and farce? Could Postmodernism's
ghost, in other words, fulfil its destiny more fully than it ever could in its original form?

Sam Jacob is principal of Sam Jacob Studio, professor of architecture at University of Illinois at
Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association, and edits Strange Harvest.