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Polemics
(Post)Modern
by Hal Foster
67
68 Polemics
(Post)Modern
1. For the historical sources cited in the Glass House, see PhilipJohnson, Writings
(New York:Oxford, 1979), pp. 212-226. Among these sources are projects by Le Cor-
busier, Mies van der Rohe, Ledoux and paintings by Malevich and van Doesburg: in
other words, the utopian, the visionary, the socialist returned to the private estate.
2. In "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," Theo-
dor Adorno writes: "The promise of happiness, once the definition of art, can no long-
er be found except where the mask has been torn from the countenance of false
happiness." TheEssentialFrankfurt SchoolReader,Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds.
(New York:Urizen Books, 1978), p. 274. This essay is a critique from a modernist posi-
tion of"negative commitment" of many of the processes of fragmentation and fetish-
ization that the present essay seeks to address, as it were, from the other side.
70 Polemics
(Post)Modern
a program which elides pre- and postmodern elements. Not only are
the signs of modernism excised, but lost traditions are imposed on a
present which, in its contradictions, is far beyond such humanist
pieties. (Thus we have today the manufacture of "master" artists and
works in which irrelevance - a lack of historical grounding - is mis-
taken for transcendence, and in which the corrosive effects of con-
sciousness and time are denied by allusion to canonical and clich6d
narratives and works.)3 Such a program of reference to quasi-cultic
traditions, moreover, is not a historical novelty: it is often used to
beautify reactionary politics.
It is in regard to this return to tradition (in art, family, religion...)
that the connection to neoconservatism proper must be made. For in
our time it has emerged as a new political form of antimodernism:
neoconservatives like Daniel Bell charge modern (or adversary) cul-
ture with the ills of society and seek redress in a return to the verities. In
this sense, they oddly overrate the effectivity of culture; for, according
to them, it is largely modernism - its transgressions, scandals, inten-
sities - that has eroded our traditional social bonds. Now such ero-
sion cannot be denied (nor should it be, at least on the Left, for it is as
liberative as it is destructive), but what is its real, salient cause? The
"shock" of a Duchamp urinal, long since gone soft (say, with Olden-
burg), or the decoded "flows" of capital? Certainly, it is capital that de-
structures social forms - the avantgarde only fenced with a few old
artistic conventions.
Yet, here, the neoconservatives confound matters - and to advan-
tage. First, cultural modernism is severed from its base in economic
modernization, and then blamed for its negative social effects (such as
privativism). With the structural causality of cultural and economic
modernity confused, adversary modernism is denounced and a new,
affirmative postmodernism proposed.4 This is, if you like, the classic
neoconservative position: there are variants. For example, though
Hilton Kramer also views avantgardism as more or less infantile, he is
not so sanguine about postmodern production, most of which he sees
as kitsch. This leaves him to uphold modernism as the new/old
"criterion" - but a modernism long ago purged of its subversive
elements and set up as official culture in the museums, the music halls,
the magazines. Meanwhile, the politics of this program remain much
the same - mainstream neoconservative.
3. See Craig Owens, "Honor, Power and the Love of Women," Art in America,
January 1983.
4. This diagnosis ofneoconservative postmodernism owes much toJiirgen Haber-
mas, "Modernity - An Incomplete Project," in TheAnti-Aesthetic,ed. by Hal Foster
(Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983); (originally published in NGC, 22).
Hal Foster 71
But then we must ask what contextualism, posed against such utopi-
anism, intends. Is it not, in part, a policy that would reconcile us to our
Las Vegases - to the chaos of contemporary urban development?
Here, the preservationist aspect of contextualism appears in a new
light, as both a symptomatic reaction to this chaos and a sympathetic
policy that acts as its public (relations) cover or compensation. Thus, as
landmarks play the part of "history," postmodern fagades assume the
role of"art." And the city, as Tafuri writes, is "considered in terms of a
superstructure," with its contradictions resolved - that is to say, dis-
simulated - "in multivalent images."8 In this way, such architectural
postmodernism exploits the fragmentary nature of late-capitalist
urban life; we are conditioned to its delirium, even as its causes are con-
cealed from us.
So: on one side, a delight in the contemporary cityscape of capital
(e.g., LasVegas Venturi);on another, a nostalgia for the imageability -
and the very typology - of the historical city (e.g., Paris Leon Krier);
and mixed in with both, the fabrication of more or less false (i.e.,
inorganic, commercial) regionalisms. Here, the contradictions ofneo-
conservative postmodernism begin to cry out, and in relation to his-
tory they fully erupt.
We have noted that this postmodernism privileges style - in the
sense both of the signature style of the artist/architect and of the
"spirit" of an age. This style, articulated against "less is a bore" mod-
ernism, further proclaims a return to history.Thus the postmodern
Zeitgeist.Yet nearly every postmodern artistand architect has resorted,
in the name of style and history, to pastiche; indeed, it is fair to say that
pastiche is the official style of this postmodernist camp. But does not
the eclecticism of pastiche (its mix of codes) threaten the very concept
of style, at least as the singular expression of an individual or a period?
And does not the relativism of pastiche (its implosion of period signs)
erode the very ability to place historical references - indeed, to think
historically at all? To put it crudely, this Postmodern Style of History
may in fact signal the disintegration of style and the collapse of his-
tory.9
My point is a basic one: dialectically - which is to say, necessarily
and in spite of itself - neoconservative postmodernism is revealed by
the very cultural moment it would otherwise flee. And it in turn reveals
this moment as marked not by a renascence of style but by its implo-
for the search - beyond the closure of this particular double bind - for a properly
Gramscean architecture after all."
8. Tafuri, Architecture
and Utopia.
9. On the implications of pastiche, so pervasive in cultural production today, see
Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in TheAnti-Aesthetic.
Hal Foster 73
status of the subject and its language, of history and its representation.
To end here, however, is too neat, for this formulation is flawed. To
speak of a fragmented subject is to presuppose a prior moment or
model in which the subject is whole and complete, not split in relation
to desire or decentered in relation to language; such a concept, wheth-
er heuristic or historical, is problematic. On the Right this tendency is
manifest in a nostalgic insistence on the good strong self, pragmatic,
patriarchal,and ideological in the extreme. Yet the left positions on the
subject are only somewhat less troublesome. Diagnoses of our culture
as regressive, one-dimensional, schizophrenic.., often preserve this
bourgeois subject, if only in opposition, if only by default. (Even for
Adorno, the most dialectical of the FrankfurtSchool, this subject often
seems the counterterm of the decay of the ego in the culture industry,
of the psyche penetrated by capital. On the other hand, celebrations of
this dispersal, the radical position of various French critics, may only
collude with its agents; indeed, the result may be a position-paper of
such fragmentation, not its counter-discourse. Meanwhile, American
left artists and theorists are so split, so ambivalent about this issue that
they tend to exhibit the very "schizophrenia" that is in question here
- an inability to mediate subject and other, to resolve them dialec-
tically, symbolically.
For some, however, this double-bind does not exist, and so we must
ask: what is this subject that is supposedly dispersed? By way of an
answer I want to refer briefly to a few symptomatic works of art. Brother
Animal(1983) is a typical painting by David Salle, a formulaic display of
dead, dispersed images with charge enough only to damp out any con-
nection or criticality. Like many others, Salle parades this schizo dis-
persal of the subject as a theme, exhibits it as a form of fetishistic
fascination - but from a position so alienated as to be beyond despair.
This is resignation to fragmentation at its most entropic, most cool, its
zero degree. And indeed the title narrates a regression to a pre-
symbolic or schizophrenic state. In our culture this state is usually the
preserve of woman - as nature, as other, as object - and the opacity
of representations of woman by Salle and others suggests this is the
case.
TheExile (1980) is a representative work by Julian Schnabel. Here,
regression is disguised in the usual romantic form of artist as outsider.
In fact, Schnabel has often painted martyr-figures. Such art revives the
mythology of mastery - the master work, the master artist;it requires
such rhetoric as its supplement, its support. Yet, I would submit, this
rhetoric is exposed here and elsewhere; it is self-deconstructive. Re-
ification and fragmentation are revealed even as they are disavowed.
This disavowal comes in many forms: in the unity of the titular theme,
78 Polemics
(Post)Modern
the device of the frame, the person of the artist. But not the fetishistic
nature of this painting, the antlers in particular. (Schnabel also often
paints on velvet and furs, fetishistic materials par excellence.) What is a
fetish? Simply, to Freud, it is an object that serves as a substitute for the
penis thought to be castrated. In other words, a substitute that covers
up alack - alack, ifyou like, ofmastery. But more, it is a substitute that
denies sexual difference.
Here, then, we begin to see what is at stake in this so-called dispersal
of the subject. For what is this subject that, threatened by loss, is so
bemoaned? Bourgeois perhaps, patriarchal certainly - it is the phal-
locentric order of subjectivity. For some, for many, this is indeed a
great loss - and may lead to narcissistic laments about the end of art,
of culture, of the West. But for others, precisely for Others, this is no
great loss at all.
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