ass_02A 120 word summary

I have a 120 summary

Fredric Jameson

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millennarianism, in
which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been
replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or
social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state,
etc., etc.): taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly
called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis
of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s
or the early 19

s. As the word itself suggests, this break is most often
related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old
modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus,
abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final
forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the
modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works
of Wallace Stevens): all these are now seen as the final, extraordinary
flowering of a high modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with

Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism

them. The enumeration of what follows then at once becomes empirical,
chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also
photorealism, and beyond it, the ‘new expressionism’; the moment, in
music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and ‘popular’
styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also
punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as
the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving
tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard and experimental cinema and
video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more
below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and
the French nouveau roman and its succession on the other, along with
alarming new kinds of literary criticism, based on some new aesthetic of
textuality or écriture . . . The list might be extended indefinitely; but
does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic
style- and fashion-changes determined by an older high-modernist
imperative of stylistic innovation?*.

The Rise of Aesthetic Populism

It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic
production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical
problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed
from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism—
as it will be outlined in the following pages—initially began to emerge.
More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist positions
in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of
architectural high modernism and of the so-called International Style
(Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies), where formal criticism and
analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building into a
virtual sculpture, or monumental ‘duck’, as Robert Venturi puts it) are
at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of the
aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruc-
tion of the fabric of the traditional city and of its older neighbourhood
culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-
modernist building from its surrounding context); while the prophetic
elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly
denounced in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.

Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself as
a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi’s influential
manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ulti-
mately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit of
drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmod-
ernisms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older
(essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called
mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts
infused with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture
Industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern,
from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno

* The present essay draws on lectures and on material previously published in The Anti-Aesthetic,
edited by Hal Foster, (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press 19

) and in Amerika Studien/American
Studies 29/1 (19

and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have in fact been
fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and
kitsch, of TV series and Readers’ Digest culture, of advertising and
motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called
paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and
the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and science-
fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply ‘quote’, as a
Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very
substance.

Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural
affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern—whether celebratory or
couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation—bear a
strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological
generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the
arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously
baptized ‘post-industrial society’ (Daniel Bell), but often also designated
consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society
or ‘high tech’, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological
mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social
formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism,
namely the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of
class struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with
vehemence, with the signal exception of the economist Ernest Mandel,
whose book Late Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomize the
historic originality of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or
moment in the evolution of capital), but also to demonstrate that it is,
if anything, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that
preceded it. I will return to this argument later; suffice it for the
moment to emphasize a point I have defended in greater detail
elsewhere*, namely that every position on postmodernism in culture—
whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time,
and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of
multinational capitalism today.

Postmodernism as Cultural Dominant

A last preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as
stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement
among others. I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis,
and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical
periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed. I have
argued elsewhere that all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always
involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodization; in any
case, the conception of the ‘genealogy’ largely lays to rest traditional
theoretical worries about so-called linear history, theories of ‘stages’,
and teleological historiography. In the present context, however,
lengthier theoretical discussion of such (very real) issues can perhaps be
replaced by a few substantive remarks.

One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is

* In ‘The Politics of Theory’, New German Critique, 32, Spring/Summer 1984.

that these tend to obliterate difference, and to project an idea of the
historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by
inexplicable ‘chronological’ metamorphoses and punctuation marks).
This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp
‘postmodernism’ not as a style, but rather as a cultural dominant: a
conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of
very different, yet subordinate features.

Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmod-
ernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if
not, indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded
that all of the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can
be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism (including
such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein, Raymond
Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright post-
modernists, avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account by this
view is, however, the social position of the older modernism, or better
still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian
bourgeoisie, for whom its forms and ethos are received as being
variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive and
generally ‘anti-social’. It will be argued here that a mutation in the
sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are
Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on the whole, as
rather ‘realistic’; and this is the result of a canonization and an academic
institutionalization of the modern movement generally, which can be
traced to the late 1950s. This is indeed surely one of the most plausible
explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the
younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly
oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which ‘weigh
like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, as Marx once said in a
different context.

As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally
be stressed that its own offensive features—from obscurity and sexually
explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social
and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been
imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer
scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complac-
ency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with
the official culture of Western society.

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become
integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic
urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods
(from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now
assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to
aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities
then find recognition in the institutional support of all kinds available
for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other
forms of patronage. Architecture is, however, of all the arts that closest
constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions
and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship: it will
therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the

new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multina-
tional business, whose expansion and development is strictly contem-
poraneous with it. That these two new phenomena have an even deeper
dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this
or that individual project we will try to suggest later on. Yet this is the
point at which we must remind the reader of the obvious, namely that
this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and
superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military
and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as
throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture,
death and horror.

The first point to be made about the conception of periodization in
dominance, therefore, is that even if all the constitutive features of
postmodernism were identical and continuous with those of an older
modernism—a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which
only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel—the
two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning and
social function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodern-
ism in the economic system of late capital, and beyond that, to the
transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society.

More on this point at the conclusion of the present essay. I must now
briefly address a different kind of objection to periodization, a different
kind of concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, which
one finds most often on the Left. And it is certain that there is a strange
quasi-Sartrean irony a ‘winner loses’ logic—which tends to surround
any effort to describe—a ‘system’, a totalizing dynamic, as these are
detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is
that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or
logic—the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example—the
more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins,
therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine,
to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is
thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak
of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and
trivial in the face of the model itself.

I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of
a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference
could be measured and assessed. I am very far from feeling that all
cultural production today is ‘postmodern’ in the broad sense I will be
conferring on this term. The postmodern is however the force field in
which very different kinds of cultural impulses—what Raymond Wil-
liams has usefully termed ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ forms of cultural
production—must make their way. If we do not achieve some general
sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present
history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a
host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. This has been at
any rate the political spirit in which the following analysis was devised:
to project some conception of a new systemic cultural norm and its
reproduction, in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective
forms of any radical cultural politics today.

The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features
of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation
both in contemporary ‘theory’ and in a whole new culture of the image
or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our
relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private
temporality, whose ‘schizophrenic’ structure (following Lacan) will
determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more
temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what I will
call ‘intensities’—which can best be grasped by a return to older theories
of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole
new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic
world system; and, after a brief account of postmodernist mutations in
the lived experience of built space itself, some reflections on the mission
of political art in the bewildering new world space of late multinational
capital.

I. The Deconstruction of Expression

‘Peasant Shoes’

We will begin with one of the canonical works of high modernism in
visual art, Van Gogh’s well-known painting of the peasant shoes, an
example which as you can imagine has not been innocently or randomly
chosen. I want to propose two ways of reading this painting, both of
which in some fashion reconstruct the reception of the work in a two-
stage or double-level process.

I first want to suggest that if this copiously reproduced image is not to
sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some
initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that
situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally
restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end-product,
and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis
and as production.

This last term suggests that one way of reconstructing the initial
situation to which the work is somehow a response is by stressing the
raw materials, the initial content, which it confronts and which it
reworks, transforms, and appropriates. In Van Gogh, that content,
those initial raw materials, are, I will suggest, to be grasped simply as
the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and
the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a
world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and margin-
alized state.

Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of
poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls,
caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature
types. How is it then that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees
explode into a hallucinatory surface of colour, while his village
stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and
green? I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the
willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into

the most glorious materialization of pure colour in oil paint is to be
seen as a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation which ends up
producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that
supreme sense—sight, the visual, the eye—which it now reconstitutes
for us as a semi-autonomous space in its own right—part of some new
division of labour in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of
the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divi-
sions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such
fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them.

There is, to be sure, a second reading of Van Gogh which can hardly be
ignored when we gaze at this particular painting, and that is Heidegger’s
central analysis in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, which is organized
around the idea that the work of art emerges within the gap between
Earth and World, or what I would prefer to translate as the meaningless
materiality of the body and nature and the meaning-endowment of
history and of the social. We will return to that particular gap or rift
later on; suffice it here to recall some of the famous phrases, which
model the process whereby these henceforth illustrious peasant shoes
slowly recreate about themselves the whole missing object-world which
was once their lived context. ‘In them,’ says Heidegger, ‘there vibrates
the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn and its
enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.’ ‘This
equipment,’ he goes on, ‘belongs to the earth and it is protected in the
world of the peasant woman . . . Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure
of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth . . . This
entity emerges into the unconcealment of its being’, by way of the
mediation of the work of art, which draws the whole absent world and
earth into revelation around itself, along with the heavy tread of the
peasant woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing,
the worn and broken instruments of labour in the furrows and at the
hearth. Heidegger’s account needs to be completed by insistence on the
renewed materiality of the work, on the transformation of one form of
materiality—the earth itself and its paths and physical objects—into that
other materiality of oil paint affirmed and foregrounded in its own right
and for its own visual pleasures; but has nonetheless a satisfying
plausibility.

‘Diamond Dust Shoes’

At any rate, both of these readings may be described as hermeneutical, in
the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form, is taken as a clue
or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate
truth. Now we need to look at some shoes of a different kind, and it is
pleasant to be able to draw for such an image on the recent work of the
central figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust
Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of
Van Gogh’s footgear: indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not
really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes even a
minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a
museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some inexplic-
able natural object. On the level of the content, we have to do with
what are now far more clearly fetishes, both in the Freudian and in the

Marxian sense (Derrida remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian
Paar Bauernschuhe, that the Van Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair,
which allows neither for perversion nor for fetishization). Here,
however, we have a random collection of dead objects, hanging
together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier
life-world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz, or the
remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a
packed dancehall. There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the
hermeneutic gesture, and to restore to these oddments that whole larger
lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or
of glamour magazines. Yet this is even more paradoxical in the light of
biographical information: Warhol began his artistic career as a commer-
cial illustrator for shoe fashions and a designer of display windows in
which various pumps and slippers figured prominently. Indeed, one is
tempted to raise here—far too prematurely—one of the central issues
about postmodernism itself and its possible political dimensions: Andy
Warhol’s work in fact turns centrally around commodification, and the
great billboard images of the Coca-cola bottle or the Campbell’s Soup
Can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transi-
tion to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements.
If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one
would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the
possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late
capital.

But there are some other significant differences between the high
modernist and the postmodernist moment, between the shoes of Van
Gogh and the shoes of Andy Warhol, on which we must now very
briefly dwell. The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind
of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most
literal sense—perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodern-
isms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of other
contexts.

Then we must surely come to terms with the role of photography and
the photographic/negative in contemporary art of this kind: and it is
this indeed which confers its deathly quality on the Warhol image,
whose glacéd x-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a
way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death
obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content. It is indeed as
though we had here to do with the inversion of Van Gogh’s Utopian
gesture: in the earlier work, a stricken world is by some Nietzschean
fiat and act of the will transformed into the stridency of Utopian colour.
Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and coloured surface
of things—debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation
to glossy advertising images—has been stripped away to reveal the
deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which
subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance
becomes thematized in certain of Warhol’s pieces—most notably, the
traffic accidents or the electric chair series—this is not, I think, a matter
of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in
the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in
the disposition of the subject.

The Waning of Affect

All of which brings me to the third feature I had in mind to develop
here briefly, namely what I will call the waning of affect in postmodern
culture. Of course, it would be inaccurate to suggest that all affect, all
feeling or emotion, all subjectivity, has vanished from the newer image.
Indeed, there is a kind of return of the repressed in Diamond Dust Shoes,
a strange compensatory decorative exhilaration, explicitly designated by
the title itself although perhaps more difficult to observe in the
reproduction. This is the glitter of gold dust, the spangling of gilt sand,
which seals the surface of the painting and yet continues to glint at us.
Think, however, of Rimbaud’s magical flowers ‘that look back at you’,
or of the august premonitory eye-flashes of Rilke’s archaic Greek torso
which warn the bourgeois subject to change his life: nothing of that
sort here, in the gratuitous frivolity of this final decorative overlay.

The waning of affect is, however, perhaps best initially approached by
way of the human figure, and it is obvious that what we have said
about the commodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol’s
human subjects, stars—like Marilyn Monroe—who are themselves
commodified and transformed into their own images. And here too a
certain brutal return to the older period of high modernism offers a
dramatic shorthand parable of the transformation in question. Edvard
Munch’s painting The Scream is of course a canonical expression of the
great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude and social
fragmentation and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what
used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read not merely as an
embodiment of the expression of that kind of affect, but even more as
a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which
seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism, but to
have vanished away—for both practical and theoretical reasons—in the
world of the postmodern. The very concept of expression presupposes
indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole
metaphysics of the inside and the outside, of the wordless pain within
the monad and the moment in which, often cathartically, that ‘emotion’
is then projected out and externalized, as gesture or cry, as desperate
communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling. And
this is perhaps the moment to say something about contemporary
theory, which has among other things been committed to the mission
of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside
and the outside and of stigmatizing such models as ideological and
metaphysical. But what is today called contemporary theory—or better
still, theoretical discourse—is also, I would want to argue, itself very
precisely a postmodernist phenomenon. It would therefore be incon-
sistent to defend the truth of its theoretical insights in a situation in
which the very concept of ‘truth’ itself is part of the metaphysical
baggage which poststructuralism seeks to abandon. What we can at
least suggest is that the poststructuralist critique of the hermeneutic, of
what I will shortly call the depth model, is useful for us as a very
significant symptom of the very postmodernist culture which is our
subject here.

Overhastily, we can say that besides the hermeneutic model of inside

and outside which Munch’s painting develops, there are at least four
other fundamental depth models which have generally been repudiated
in contemporary theory: the dialectical one of essence and appearance
(along with a whole range of concepts of ideology or false consciousness
which tend to accompany it); the Freudian model of latent and manifest,
or of repression (which is of course the target of Michel Foucault’s
programmatic and symptomatic pamphlet La Volonté de savoir); the
existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity, whose heroic or
tragic thematics are closely related to that other great opposition
between alienation and disalienation, itself equally a casualty of the
poststructural or postmodern period; and finally, latest in time, the
great semiotic opposition between signifier and signified, which was
itself rapidly unravelled and deconstructed during its brief heyday in
the 1960s and

s. What replaces these various depth models is for the
most part a conception of practices, discourses and textual play, whose
new syntagmatic structures we will examine later on: suffice it merely to
observe that here too depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple
surfaces (what is often called intertextuality is in that sense no longer a
matter of depth).

Nor is this depthlessness merely metaphorical: it can be experienced
physically and literally by anyone who, mounting what used to be
Raymond Chandler’s Beacon Hill from the great Chicano markets on
Broadway and 4th St. in downtown Los Angeles, suddenly confronts
the great free-standing wall of the Crocker Bank Center (Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill)—a surface which seems to be unsupported by any
volume, or whose putative volume (rectangular, trapezoidal?) is
ocularly quite undecidable. This great sheet of windows, with its
gravity-defying two-dimensionality, momentarily transforms the solid
ground on which we climb into the contents of a stereopticon,
pasteboard shapes profiling themselves here and there around us. From
all sides, the visual effect is the same: as fateful as the great monolith in
Kubrick’s 2001 which confronts its viewers like an enigmatic destiny, a
call to evolutionary mutation. If this new multinational downtown (to
which we will return later in another context) effectively abolished the
older ruined city fabric which it violently replaced, cannot something
similar be said about the way in which this strange new surface in its
own peremptory way renders our older systems of perception of the
city somehow archaic and aimless, without offering another in their
place?

Euphoria and Self-Annihilation

Returning now for one last moment to Munch’s painting, it seems
evident that The Scream subtly but elaborately deconstructs its own
aesthetic of expression, all the while remaining imprisoned within it. Its
gestural content already underscores its own failure, since the realm of
the sonorous, the cry, the raw vibrations of the human throat, are
incompatible with its medium (something underscored within the work
by the homunculus’ lack of ears). Yet the absent scream returns more
closely towards that even more absent experience of atrocious solitude
and anxiety which the scream was itself to ‘express’. Such loops inscribe
themselves on the painted surface in the form of those great concentric

circles in which sonorous vibration becomes ultimately visible, as on
the surface of a sheet of water—in an infinite regress which fans out
from the sufferer to become the very geography of a universe in which
pain itself now speaks and vibrates through the material sunset and the
landscape. The visible world now becomes the wall of the monad on
which this ‘scream running through nature’ (Munch’s words) is
recorded and transcribed: one thinks of that character of Lautréamont
who, growing up inside a sealed and silent membrane, on sight of the
monstrousness of the deity, ruptures it with his own scream and thereby
rejoins the world of sound and suffering.

All of which suggests some more general historical hypothesis: namely,
that concepts such as anxiety and alienation (and the experiences to
which they correspond, as in The Scream) are no longer appropriate in
the world of the postmodern. The great Warhol figures—Marilyn
herself, or Edie Sedgewick—the notorious burn-out and self-destruc-
tion cases of the ending 1960s, and the great dominant experiences of
drugs and schizophrenia—these would seem to have little enough in
common anymore, either with the hysterics and neurotics of Freud’s
own day, or with those canonical experiences of radical isolation and
solitude, anomie, private revolt, Van Gogh-type madness, which
dominated the period of high modernism. This shift in the dynamics of
cultural pathology can be characterized as one in which the alienation
of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject.

Such terms inevitably recall one of the more fashionable themes in
contemporary theory—that of the ‘death’ of the subject itself � the
end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual—and the
accompanying stress, whether as some new moral ideal or as empirical
description, on the decentring of that formerly centred subject or psyche.
(Of the two possible formulations of this notion—the historicist one,
that a once-existing centred subject, in the period of classical capitalism
and the nuclear family, has today in the world of organizational
bureaucracy dissolved; and the more radical poststructuralist position
for which such a subject never existed in the first place but constituted
something like an ideological mirage—I obviously incline towards the
former; the latter must in any case take into account something like a
‘reality of the appearance’.)

We must add that the problem of expression is itself closely linked to
some conception of the subject as a monad-like container, within which
things are felt which are then expressed by projection outwards. What
we must now stress, however, is the degree to which the high-modernist
conception of a unique style, along with the accompanying collective
ideals of an artistic or political vanguard or avant-garde, themselves stand
or fall along with that older notion (or experience) of the so-called
centred subject.

Here too Munch’s painting stands as a complex reflexion on this
complicated situation: it shows us that expression requires the category
of the individual monad, but it also shows us the heavy price to be paid
for that precondition, dramatizing the unhappy paradox that when you
constitute your individual subjectivity as a self-sufficient field and a

closed realm in its own right, you thereby also shut yourself off from
everything else and condemn yourself to the windless solitude of the
monad, buried alive and condemned to a prison-cell without egress.

Postmodernism will presumably signal the end of this dilemma, which
it replaces with a new one. The end of the bourgeois ego or monad no
doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego as
well—what I have generally here been calling the waning of affect. But
it means the end of much more—the end for example of style, in the
sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive
individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of
mechanical reproduction). As for expression and feelings or emotions,
the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the
centred subject may also mean, not merely a liberation from anxiety,
but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is
no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the
cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling,
but rather that such feelings—which it may be better and more accurate
to call ‘intensities’—are now free-floating and impersonal, and tend to
be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria to which I will want to
return at the end of this essay.

The waning of affect, however, might also have been characterized, in
the narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of the great
high-modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries
of durée and of memory (something to be understood fully as a category
of literary criticism associated as much with high modernism as with
the works themselves). We have often been told, however, that we now
inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at
least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our
cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather
than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism
proper.

II. The Postmodern and the Past

Pastiche Eclipses Parody

The disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal
consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engender
the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche.
This concept, which we owe to Thomas Mann (in Doktor Faustus), who
owed it in turn to Adorno’s great work on the two paths of advanced
musical experimentation (Schoenberg’s innovative planification, Stra-
vinsky’s irrational eclecticism), is to be sharply distinguished from the
more readily received idea of parody.

This last found, to be sure, a fertile area in the idiosyncracies of the
moderns and their ‘inimitable’ styles: the Faulknerian long sentence
with its breathless gerundives, Lawrentian nature imagery punctuated
by testy colloquialism, Wallace Stevens’ inveterate hypostasis of non-
substantive parts of speech (‘the intricate evasions of as’), the fateful,

but finally predictable, swoops in Mahler from high orchestral pathos
into village accordeon sentiment, Heidegger’s meditative-solemn prac-
tice of the false etymology as a mode of ‘proof’ . . . All these strike one
as somehow ‘characteristic’, insofar as they ostentatiously deviate from
a norm which then reasserts itself, in a not necessarily unfriendly way,
by a systematic mimicry of their deliberate eccentricities.

Yet, in the dialectical leap from quantity to quality, the explosion of
modern literature into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms
has been followed by a linguistic fragmentation of social life itself to the
point where the norm itself is eclipsed: reduced to a neutral and reified
media speech (far enough from the Utopian aspirations of the inventors
of Esperanto or Basic English), which itself then becomes but one more
idiolect among many. Modernist styles thereby become postmodernist
codes: and that the stupendous proliferation of social codes today into
professional and disciplinary jargons, but also into the badges of
affirmation of ethnic, gender, race, religious, and class-fraction adhesion,
is also a political phenomenon, the problem of micropolitics sufficiently
demonstrates. If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or
hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist
countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity
without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic
strategies which constrain our existences, but no longer need to impose
their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the
late capitalist world reflects, not only the absence of any great collective
project, but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.

In this situation, parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and
that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place. Pastiche
is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead
language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of
parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of
laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you
have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still
exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to
parody what that other interesting and historically original modern
thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth
calls the ‘stable ironies’ of the 18th century.

It would therefore begin to seem that Adorno’s prophetic diagnosis has
been realized, albeit in a negative way: not Schoenberg (the sterility of
whose achieved system he already glimpsed) but Stravinsky is the true
precursor of the postmodern cultural production. For with the collapse
of the high-modernist ideology of style—what is as unique and
unmistakable as your own fingerprints, as incomparable as your own
body (the very source, for an early Roland Barthes, of stylistic invention
and innovation)—the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to
the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and
voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.

‘Historicism’ Effaces History

This situation evidently determines what the architecture historians call
‘historicism’, namely the random cannibalization of all the styles of the

past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri
Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the ‘neo’. This omnipres-
ence of pastiche is, however, not incompatible with a certain humour
(nor is it innocent of all passion) or at least with addiction—with a
whole historically original consumers’ appetite for a world transformed
into sheer images of itself and for pseudo-events and ‘spectacles’ (the
term of the Situationists). It is for such objects that we may reserve
Plato’s conception of the ‘simulacrum’—the identical copy for which
no original has ever existed. Appropriately enough, the culture of the
simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange-value has been
generalized to the point at which the very memory of use-value is
effaced, a society of which Guy Debord has observed, in an extraordi-
nary phrase, that in it ‘the image has become the final form of
commodity reification’ (The Society of the Spectacle).

The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected to have
a momentous effect on what used to be historical time.

The past is thereby itself modified: what was once, in the historical
novel as Lukács defines it, the organic genealogy of the bourgeois
collective project—what is still, for the redemptive historiography of
an E. P. Thompson or of American ‘oral history’, for the resurrection
of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations, the retrospective
dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective
future—has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a
multitudinous photographic simulacrum. Guy Debord’s powerful slo-
gan is now even more apt for the ‘prehistory’ of a society bereft of all
historicity, whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty
spectacles. In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory,
the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced
altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.

The Nostalgia Mode

Yet it should not be thought that this process is accompanied by
indifference: on the contrary, the remarkable current intensification of
an addiction to the photographic image is itself a tangible symptom of
an omnipresent, omnivorous and well-nigh libidinal historicism. The
architects use this (exceedingly polysemous) word for the complacent
eclecticism of postmodern architecture, which randomly and without
principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the architectural styles of the
past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles. Nostalgia does
not strike one as an altogether satisfactory word for such fascination
(particularly when one thinks of the pain of a properly modernist
nostalgia with a past beyond all but aesthetic retrieval), yet it directs
our attention to what is a culturally far more generalized manifestation
of the process in commercial art and taste, namely the so-called
‘nostalgia film’ (or what the French call ‘la mode rétro’).

These restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a
collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate
a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change
and the emergent ideology of the ‘generation’. American Graffiti (19

)

set out to recapture, as so many films have attempted since, the
henceforth mesmerizing lost reality of the Eisenhower era: and one
tends to feel that for Americans at least, the 1950s remain the privileged
lost object of desire—not merely the stability and prosperity of a pax
Americana, but also the first naive innocence of the countercultural
impulses of early rock-and-roll and youth gangs (Coppola’s Rumble Fish
will then be the contemporary dirge that laments their passing, itself,
however, still contradictorily filmed in genuine ‘nostalgia film’ style).
With this initial breakthrough, other generational periods open up for
aesthetic colonization: as witness the stylistic recuperation of the
American and the Italian 1930s, in Polanski’s Chinatown and Bertolluci’s
Il Conformista respectively. What is more interesting, and more problem-
atical, are the ultimate attempts, through this new discourse, to lay siege
either to our own present and immediate past, or to a more distant
history that escapes individual existential memory.

Faced with these ultimate objects—our social, historical and existential
present, and the past as ‘referent’—the incompatibility of a postmodern-
ist ‘nostalgia’ art language with genuine historicity becomes dramatically
apparent. The contraction propels this model, however, into complex
and interesting new formal inventiveness: it being understood that the
nostalgia film was never a matter of some old-fashioned ‘representation’
of historical content, but approached the ‘past’ through stylistic con-
notation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image, and
‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ by the attributes of fashion (therein follow-
ing the prescription of the Barthes of Mythologies, who saw connotation
as the purveying of imaginary and stereotypical idealities, ‘Sinité’, for
example, as some Disney-EPCOT ‘concept’ of China).

The insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode can be
observed in Lawrence Kazdan’s elegant film, Body Heat, a distant
‘affluent society’ remake of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings
Twice, set in a contemporary Florida small town not far from Miami.
The word ‘remake’ is, however, anachronistic to the degree to which
our awareness of the pre-existence of other versions, previous films of
the novel as well as the novel itself, is now a constitutive and essential
part of the film’s structure: we are now, in other words, in ‘intertex-
tuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect, and as the
operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudo-historical depth,
in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history.

Yet from the outset a whole battery of aesthetic signs begin to distance
the officially contemporary image from us in time: the art deco scripting
of the credits, for example, serves at once to programme the spectator
for the appropriate ‘nostalgia’ mode of reception (art deco quotation
has much the same function in contemporary architecture, as in
Toronto’s remarkable Eaton Centre). Meanwhile, a somewhat different
play of connotations is activated by complex (but purely formal)
allusions to the institutions of the star system itself. The protagonist,
William Hurt, is one of a new generation of film ‘stars’ whose status is
markedly distinct from that of the preceding generation of male
superstars, such as Steve McQueen or Jack Nicholson (or even, more
distantly, Brando), let alone of earlier moments in the evolution of the

institutions of the star. The immediately preceding generation projected
its various roles through, and by way of, well-known ‘off-screen’
personalities, who often connoted rebellion and non-conformism. The
latest generation of starring actors continues to assure the conventional
functions of stardom (most notably, sexuality) but in the utter absence
of ‘personality’ in the older sense, and with something of the anonymity
of character acting (which in actors like Hurt reaches virtuouso
proportions, yet of a very different kind from the virtuosity of the older
Brando or Olivier). This ‘death of the subject’ in the institution of the
star, however, opens up the possibility of a play of historical allusions
to much older roles—in this case to those associated with Clark Gable—
so that the very style of the acting can now also serve as a ‘connotator’
of the past.

Finally, the setting has been strategically framed, with great ingenuity,
to eschew most of the signals that normally convey the contemporaneity
of the United States in its multinational era: the small-town setting
allows the camera to elude the high-rise landscape of the 1970s and

s
(even though a key episode in the narrative involves the fatal destruction
of older buildings by land speculators); while the object world of the
present-day—artifacts and appliances, even automobiles, whose styling
would at once serve to date the image—is elaborately edited out.
Everything in the film, therefore, conspires to blur its official contem-
poraneity and to make it possible for you to receive the narrative as
though it were set in some eternal Thirties, beyond real historical time.
The approach to the present by way of the art language of the
simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present
reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of
a glossy mirage. But this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged
as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived
possibility of experiencing history in some active way: it cannot
therefore be said to produce this strange occultation of the present by
its own formal power, but merely to demonstrate, through these inner
contradictions, the enormity of a situation in which we seem increas-
ingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current
experience.

The Fate of ‘Real History’

As for ‘real history’ itself—the traditional object, however it may be
defined, of what used to be the historical novel—it will be more
revealing now to turn back to that older form and medium and to read
its postmodern fate in the work of one of the few serious and innovative
Left novelists at work in the United States today, whose books are
nourished with history in the more traditional sense, and seem, so far,
to stake out successive generational moments in the ‘epic’ of American
history. E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime gives itself officially as a panorama
of the first two decades of the century; his most recent novel, Loon
Lake, addresses the Thirties and the Great Depression; while The Book
of Daniel holds up before us, in painful juxtaposition, the two great
moments of the Old Left and the New Left, of Thirties and Forties
Communism and the radicalism of the 1960s (even his early Western
may be said to fit into this scheme and to designate in a less articulated

and formally self-conscious way the end of the frontier of the late
nineteenth century).

The Book of Daniel is not the only one of these three major historical
novels to establish an explicit narrative link between the reader’s and
the writer’s present and the older historical reality which is the subject
of the work; the astonishing last page of Loon Lake, which I will not
disclose, also does this in a very different way; while it is a matter of
some interest to note that the first sentence of the first version of
Ragtime positions us explicitly in our own present, in the novelist’s
house in New Rochelle, New York, which will then at once become the
scene of its own (imaginary) past in the 1

0s. This detail has been
suppressed from the published text, symbolically cutting its moorings
and freeing the novel to float in some new world of past historical time
whose relationship to us is problematical indeed. The authenticity of
the gesture, however, may be measured by the evident existential fact
of life that there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship
between the American history we learn from the schoolbooks and the
lived experience of the current multinational, high-rise, stagflated city
of the newspapers and of our own daily life.

A crisis in historicity, however, inscribes itself symptomally in several
other curious formal features within this text. Its official subject is the
transition from a pre-World-War I radical and working-class politics
(the great strikes) to the technological invention and new commodity
production of the 1

0s (the rise of Hollywood and of the image as
commodity): the interpolated version of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, the
strange tragic episode of the Black protagonist’s revolt, may be thought
to be a moment related to this process. My point, however, is not some
hypothesis as to the thematic coherence of this decentred narrative; but
rather just the opposite, namely the way in which the kind of reading
this novel imposes makes it virtually impossible for us to reach and to
thematize those official ‘subjects’ which float above the text but cannot
be integrated into our reading of the sentences. In that sense, not only
does the novel resist interpretation, it is organized systematically and
formally to short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpret-
ation which it perpetually holds out and withdraws. When we remember
that the theoretical critique and repudiation of interpretation as such is
a fundamental component of poststructuralist theory, it is difficult not
to conclude that Doctorow has somehow deliberately built this very
tension, this very contradiction, into the flow of his sentences.

As is well known, the book is crowded with real historical figures—
from Teddy Roosevelt to Emma Goldman, from Harry K. Thaw and
Sandford White to J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford, not to speak
of the more central role of Houdini—who interact with a fictive family,
simply designated as Father, Mother, Older Brother, and so forth. All
historical novels, beginning with Scott himself, no doubt in one way or
another involve a mobilization of previous historical knowledge,
generally acquired through the schoolbook history manuals devised for
whatever legitimizing purpose by this or that national tradition—
thereafter instituting a narrative dialectic between what we already
‘know’ about The Pretender, say, and what he is then seen to be

concretely in the pages of the novel. But Doctorow’s procedure seems
much more extreme than this; and I would argue that the designation
of both types of characters—historical names or capitalized family
roles—operates powerfully and systematically to reify all these charac-
ters and to make it impossible for us to receive their representation
without the prior interception of already-acquired knowledge or doxa—
something which lends the text an extraordinary sense of déjà-vu and a
peculiar familiarity one is tempted to associate with Freud’s ‘return of
the repressed’ in ‘The Uncanny’, rather than with any solid historio-
graphic formation on the reader’s part.

Loss of the Radical Past

Meanwhile, the sentences in which all this is happening have their own
specificity, which will allow us a little more concretely to distinguish
the moderns’ elaboration of a personal style from this new kind of
linguistic innovation, which is no longer personal at all but has its
family kinship rather with what Barthes long ago called ‘white writing’.
In this particular novel, Doctorow has imposed upon himself a rigorous
principle of selection in which only simple declarative sentences
(predominantly mobilized by the verb ‘to be’) are received. The effect
is, however, not really one of the condescending simplification and
symbolic carefulness of children’s literature, but rather something more
disturbing, the sense of some profound subterranean violence done to
American English which cannot, however, be detected empirically in
any of the perfectly grammatical sentences with which this work is
formed. Yet other more visible technical ‘innovations’ may supply a
clue to what is happening in the language of Ragtime: it is for example
well-known that the source of many of the characteristic effects of
Camus’ novel ’Etranger can be traced back to that author’s wilful
decision to substitute, throughout, the French tense of the ‘passé
composé’ for the other past tenses more normally employed in narration
in that language. I will suggest that it is as if something of that sort
were at work here (without committing myself further to what is
obviously an outrageous leap): it is, I say, as though Doctorow had set
out systematically to produce the effect or the equivalent, in his
language, of a verbal past tense we do not possess in English, namely
the French preterite (or passé simple), whose ‘perfective’ movement, as
Émile Benveniste taught us, serves to separate events from the present
of enunciation and to transform the stream of time and action into so
many finished, complete, and isolated punctual event-objects which find
themselves sundered from any present situation (even that of the act of
storytelling or enunciation).

E. L. Doctorow is the epic poet of the disappearance of the American
radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of the
American radical tradition: no one with left sympathies can read these
splendid novels without a poignant distress which is an authentic way
of confronting our own current political dilemmas in the present. What
is culturally interesting, however, is that he has had to convey this great
theme formally (since the waning of the content is very precisely his
subject), and, more than that, has had to elaborate his work by way of
that very cultural logic of the postmodern which is itself the mark and

symptom of his dilemma. Loon Lake much more obviously deploys the
strategies of the pastiche (most notably in its reinvention of Dos
Passos); but Ragtime remains the most peculiar and stunning monument
to the aesthetic situation engendered by the disappearance of the
historical referent. This historical novel can no longer set out to
represent the historical past; it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and
stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes ‘pop
history’). Cultural production is thereby driven back inside a mental
space which is no longer that of the old monadic subject, but rather
that of some degraded collective ‘objective spirit’: it can no longer gaze
directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past
history which was once itself a present; rather, as in Plato’s cave, it
must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls. If
there is any realism left here, therefore, it is a ‘realism’ which is meant
to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement, and of slowly
becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we
are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and
simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.

III. The Breakdown of the Signifying Chain

The crisis in historicity now dictates a return, in a new way, to the
question of temporal organization in general in the postmodern force
field, and indeed, to the problem of the form that time, temporality and
the syntagmatic will be able to take in a culture increasingly dominated
by space and spatial logic. If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity
actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal
manifold, and to organize its past and future into coherent experience,
it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such
a subject could result in anything but ‘heaps of fragments’ and in a
practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the
aleatory. These are, however, very precisely some of the privileged
terms in which postmodernist cultural production has been analysed
(and even defended, by its own apologists). Yet they are still privative
features; the more substantive formulations bear such names as textual-
ity, écriture, or schizophrenic writing, and it is to these that we must
now briefly turn.

I have found Lacan’s account of schizophrenia useful here, not because
I have any way of knowing whether it has clinical accuracy, but chiefly
because—as description rather than diagnosis—it seems to me to offer
a suggestive aesthetic model. (I am obviously very far from thinking
that any of the most significant postmodernist artists—Cage, Ashbery,
Sollers, Robert Wilson, Ishmael Reed, Michael Snow, Warhol or even
Beckett himself—are schizophrenics in any clinical sense.) Nor is the
point some culture-and-personality diagnosis of our society and its art,
as in culture critiques of the type of Christopher Lasch’s influential The
Culture of Narcissism, from which I am concerned radically to distance
the spirit and the methodology of the present remarks: there are, one
would think, far more damaging things to be said about our social
system than are available through the use of psychological categories.

Very briefly, Lacan describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the

signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers
which constitutes an utterance or a meaning. I must omit the familial or
more orthodox psychoanalytic background to this situation, which
Lacan transcodes into language by describing the Oedipal rivalry in
terms, not so much of the biological individual who is your rival for
the mother’s attention, but rather of what he calls the Name-of-the-
Father, paternal authority now considered as a linguistic function. His
conception of the signifying chain essentially presupposes one of the
basic principles (and one of the great discoveries) of Saussurean
structuralism, namely the proposition that meaning is not a one-to-one
relationship between signifier and signified, between the materiality of
language, between a word or a name, and its referent or concept.
Meaning on the new view is generated by the movement from Signifier
to Signifier: what we generally call the Signified—the meaning or
conceptual content of an utterance—is now rather to be seen as a
meaning-effect, as that objective mirage of signification generated and
projected by the relationship of Signifiers among each other. When that
relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap,
then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and
unrelated signifiers. The connection between this kind of linguistic
malfunction and the psyche of the schizophrenic may then be grasped
by way of a two-fold proposition: first, that personal identity is itself
the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with the
present before me; and second, that such active temporal unification is
itself a function of language, or better still of the sentence, as it moves
along its hermeneutic circle through time. If we are unable to unify the
past, present and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to
unify the past, present and future of our own biographical experience
or psychic life.

With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizo-
phrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material Signifiers, or in
other words of a series of pure and unrelated presents in time. We will
want to ask questions about the aesthetic or cultural results of such a
situation in a moment; let us first see what it feels like: ‘I remember
very well the day it happened. We were staying in the country and I
had gone for a walk alone as I did now and then. Suddenly, as I was
passing the school, I heard a German song; the children were having a
singing lesson. I stopped to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling
came over me, a feeling hard to analyse but akin to something I was to
know too well later—a disturbing sense of unreality. It seemed to me
that I no longer recognized the school, it had become as large as a
barracks; the singing children were prisoners, compelled to sing. It was
as though the school and the children’s song were set apart from the
rest of the world. At the same time my eye encountered a field of wheat
whose limits I could not see. The yellow vastness, dazzling in the sun,
bound up with the song of the children imprisoned in the smooth stone
school-barracks, filled me with such anxiety that I broke into sobs. I ran
home to our garden and began to play “to make things seem as they
usually were,” that is, to return to reality. It was the first appearance of
those elements which were always present in later sensations of

unreality: illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smooth-
ness of material things.’*

In our present context, this experience suggests the following remarks:
first, the breakdown of temporality suddenly releases this present of
time from all the activities and the intentionalities that might focus it
and make it a space of praxis; thereby isolated, that present suddenly
engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of
perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the
power of the material—or better still, the literal—Signifier in isolation.
This present of the world or material signifier comes before the subject
with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, here
described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which
one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, the
high, the intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity.

‘China’

What will happen in textuality or schizophrenic art is strikingly
illuminated by such clinical accounts, although in the cultural text, the
isolated Signifier is no longer an enigmatic state of the world or an
incomprehensible yet mesmerizing fragment of language, but rather
something closer to a sentence in free-standing isolation. Think, for
example, of the experience of John Cage’s music, in which a cluster of
material sounds (on the prepared piano for example) is followed by a
silence so intolerable that you cannot imagine another sonorous chord
coming into existence, and cannot imagine remembering the previous
one well enough to make any connection with it if it does. Some of
Beckett’s narratives are also of this order, most notably Watt, where a
primacy of the present sentence in time ruthlessly disintegrates the
narrative fabric that attempts to reform around it. My example will,
however, be a less sombre one, a text by a younger San Francisco poet
whose group or school—so-called Language Poetry or the New
Sentence—seems to have adopted schizophrenic fragmentation as its
fundamental aesthetic.

China
We live on the third world from the sun. Number three. Nobody tells
us what to do.
The people who taught us to count were being very kind.
It’s always time to leave.
If it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don’t.
The wind blows your hat off.
The sun rises also.
I’d rather the stars didn’t describe us to each other; I’d rather we do it
for ourselves.
Run in front of your shadow.
A sister who points to the sky at least once a decade is a good sister.
The landscape is motorized.
The train takes you where it goes.
Bridges among water.

* Marguerite Séchehaye, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, trans. by G. Rubin-Rabson, New York
1968, p.19.

Folks straggling along vast stretches of concrete, heading into the
plane.
Don’t forget what your hat and shoes will look like when you are
nowhere to be found.
Even the words floating in air make blue shadows.
If it tastes good we eat it.
The leaves are falling. Point things out.
Pick up the right things.
Hey guess what? What? I’ve learned how to talk. Great.
The person whose head was incomplete burst into tears.
As it fell, what could the doll do? Nothing.
Go to sleep.
You look great in shorts. And the flag looks great too.
Everyone enjoyed the explosions.
Time to wake up.
But better get used to dreams.

Bob Perelman from Primer, This Press, Berkeley

Many things could be said about this interesting exercise in discontin-
uities: not the least paradoxical is the reemergence here across these
disjoined sentences of some more unified global meaning. Indeed,
insofar as this is in some curious and secret way a political poem, it
does seem to capture something of the excitement of the immense,
unfinished social experiment of the New China—unparalleled in world
history—the unexpected emergence, between the two super-powers, of
‘number three’, the freshness of a whole new object world produced by
human beings in some new control over their collective destiny, the
signal event, above all, of a collectivity which has become a new ‘subject
of history’ and which, after the long subjection of feudalism and
imperialism, again speaks in its own voice, for itself as though for the
first time.

I mainly wanted to show, however, the way in which what I have been
calling schizophrenic disjunction or écriture, when it becomes general-
ized as a cultural style, ceases to entertain a necessary relationship to the
morbid content we associate with terms like schizophrenia, and becomes
available for more joyous intensities, for precisely that euphoria which
we saw displacing the older affects of anxiety and alienation.

Consider, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of a similar tendency
in Flaubert: ‘His sentence (Sartre tells us about Flaubert) closes in on
the object, seizes it, immobilizes it, and breaks its back, wraps itself
around it, changes into stone and petrifies its object along with itself. It
is blind and deaf, bloodless, not a breath of life; a deep silence separates
it from the sentence which follows; it falls into the void, eternally, and
drags its prey down into that infinite fall. Any reality, once described,
is struck off the inventory.’ (What is Literature?)

Yet I am tempted to see this reading as a kind of optical illusion (or
photographic enlargment) of an unwittingly genealogical type: in which
certain latent or subordinate, properly postmodernist features of Flaub-
ert’s style are anachronistically foregrounded. Yet it affords another

interesting lesson in periodization, and in the dialectical restructuring
of cultural dominants and subordinates. For these features, in Flaubert,
were symptoms and strategies in that whole posthumous life and
resentment of praxis which is denounced (with increasing sympathy)
throughout the three thousand pages of Sartre’s Family Idiot. When
such features become themselves the cultural norm, they shed all such
forms of negative affect and become available for other, more decorative
uses.

But we have thereby not fully exhausted the structural secrets of
Perelman’s poem, which turns out to have little enough to do with that
referent called China. The author has in fact related how, strolling
through Chinatown, he came across a book of photographs whose
idiogrammatic captions remained a dead letter to him (or perhaps one
should say, a material signifier). The sentences of the poem in question
are then Perelman’s own captions to those pictures, their referents
another image, another absent text; and the unity of the poem is no
longer to be found within its language, but outside itself, in the bound
unity of another, absent book. There is here a striking parallel to the
dynamics of so-called photorealism, which looked like a return to
representation and figuration after the long hegemony of the aesthetics
of abstraction, until it became clear that its objects were not to be found
in the ‘real world’ either, but were themselves photographs of that real
world, this last now transformed into images, of which the ‘realism’ of
the photorealist painting is now the simulacrum.

Collage and Radical Difference

This account of schizophrenia and temporal organization might, how-
ever, have been formulated in a different way, which brings us back to
Heidegger’s notion of a gap or rift, albeit in a fashion that would have
horrified him. I would like, indeed, to characterize the postmodernist
experience of form with what will seem, I hope, a paradoxical slogan:
namely the proposition that ‘difference relates’. Our own recent criti-
cism, from Macherey on, has been concerned to stress the heterogeneity
and profound discontinuities of the work of art, no longer unified or
organic, but now virtual grab-bag or lumber room of disjoined sub-
systems and random raw materials and impulses of all kinds. The former
work of art, in other words, has now turned out to be a text, whose
reading proceeds by differentiation rather than by unification. Theories
of difference, however, have tended to stress disjunction to the point at
which the materials of the text, including its words and sentences, tend
to fall apart into random and inert passivity, into a set of elements
which entertain purely external separations from one another.

In the most interesting postmodernist works, however, one can detect
a more positive conception of relationship which restores its proper
tension to the notion of differences itself. This new mode of relationship
through difference may sometimes be an achieved new and original way
of thinking and perceiving; more often it takes the form of an
impossible imperative to achieve that new mutation in what can perhaps
no longer be called consciousness. I believe that the most striking
emblem of this new mode of thinking relationships can be found in the

work of Nam June Paik, whose stacked or scattered television screens,
positioned at intervals within lush vegetation, or winking down at us
from a ceiling of strange new video stars, recapitulate over and over
again prearranged sequences or loops of images which return at
dysynchronous moments on the various screens. The older aesthetic is
then practised by viewers, who, bewildered by this discontinuous
variety, decide to concentrate on a single screen, as though the relatively
worthless image sequence to be followed there had some organic value
in its own right. The postmodernist viewer, however, is called upon to
do the impossible, namely to see all the screens at once, in their radical
and random difference; such a viewer is asked to follow the evolutionary
mutation of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, and to rise
somehow to a level at which. the vivid perception of radical difference
is in and of itself a new mode of grasping what used to be called
relationship: something for which the word collage is still only a very
feeble name.

IV. The Hysterical Sublime

Now we need to complete this exploratory account of postmodernist
space and time with a final analysis of that euphoria or those intensities
which seem so often to characterize the newer cultural experience. Let
us stress again the enormity of a transition which leaves behind it the
desolation of Hopper’s buildings or the stark Midwest syntax of
Sheeler’s forms, replacing them with the extraordinary surfaces of the
photorealist cityscape, where even the automobile wrecks gleam with
some new halluncinatory splendour. The exhilaration of these new
surfaces is all the more paradoxical in that their essential content—the
city itself—has deteriorated or disintegrated to a degree surely still
inconceivable in the early years of the 20th century, let alone in the
previous era. How urban squalor can be a delight to the eyes, when
expressed in commodification, and how an unparalleled quantum leap
in the alienation of daily life in the city can now be experienced in the
form of a strange new hallucinatory exhilaration—these are some of the
questions that confront us in this moment of our inquiry. Nor should
the human figure be exempted from investigation, although it seems
clear that for the newer aesthetic the representation of space itself has
come to be felt as incompatible with the representation of the body: a
kind of aesthetic division of labour far more pronounced than in any of
the earlier generic conceptions of landscape, and a most ominous
symptom indeed. The privileged space of the newer art is radically
anti-anthropomorphic, as in the empty bathrooms of Doug Bond’s
work. The ultimate contemporary fetishization of the human body,
however, takes a very different direction in the statues of Duane
Hanson—what I have already called the simulacrum, whose peculiar
function lies in what Sartre would have called the derealization of the
whole surrounding world of everyday reality. Your moment of doubt
and hesitation as to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures, in
other words, tends to return upon the real human beings moving about
you in the museum, and to transform them also for the briefest instant
into so many dead and flesh-coloured simulcra in their own right. The
world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a

glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without
density. But is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?

It has proved fruitful to think such experience in terms of what Susan
Sontag once, in an influential statement, isolated as ‘camp’. I propose a
somewhat different cross-light on it, drawing on the equally fashionable
current theme of the ‘sublime’, as it has been rediscovered in the works
of Edmund Burke and Kant; or perhaps, indeed, one might well want
to yoke the two notions together in the form of something like a camp
or ‘hysterical’ sublime. The sublime was for Burke, as you will recall,
an experience bordering on terror, the fitful glimpse, in astonishment,
stupor and awe, of what was so enormous as to crush human life
altogether: a description then refined by Kant to include the question of
representation itself—so that the object of the sublime is now not only
a matter of sheer power and of the physical incommensurability of the
human organism with Nature, but also of the limits of figuration and
the incapacity of the human mind to give representation to such
enormous forces. Such forces Burke, in his historical moment at the
dawn of the modern bourgeois state, was only able to conceptualize in
terms of the divine; while even Heidegger continues to entertain a
fantasmatic relationship with some organic precapitalist peasant land-
scape and village society, which is the final form of the image of Nature
in our own time.

Today, however, it may be possible to thik all this in a different way, at
the moment of a radical eclipse of Nature itself: Heidegger’s ‘field path’
is after all irredeemably and irrevocably destroyed by late capital, by the
green revolution, by neocolonialism and the megapopolis, which runs
its superhighways over the older fields and vacant lots, and turns
Heidegger’s ‘house of being’ into condominiums, if not the most
miserable unheated rat-infested tenement buildings. The other of our
society is in that sense no longer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist
societies, but something else which we must now identify.

The Apotheosis of Capitalism

I am anxious that this other thing should not overhastily be grasped as
technology per se, since I will want to show that technology is here
itself a figure for something else. Yet technology may well serve as
adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and
anti-natural power of dead human labour stored up in our machinery,
an alienated power, what Sartre calls the counterfinality of the
practico-inert, which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable
forms and seems to constitute the massive dystopian horizon of our
collective as well as our individual praxis.

Technology is, however, on the Marxist view the result of the
development of capital, rather than some primal cause in its own right.
It will therefore be appropriate to distinguish several generations of
machine power, several stages of technological revolution within capital
itself. I here follow Ernest Mandel who outlines three such fundamental
breaks or quantum leaps in the evolution of machinery under capital:
‘The fundamental revolutions in power technology—the technology of

the production of motive machines by machines—thus appears as the
determinant moment in revolutions of technology as a whole. Machine
production of steam-driven motors since 1848; machine production of
electric and combustion motors since the 90s of the 19th century;
machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses
since the 40s of the 20th century—these are the three general revolutions
in technology engendered by the capitalist mode of production since
the “original” industrial revolution of the later 18th century.’ (Late
Capitalism, p. 18.)

The periodization underscores the general thesis of Mandel’s book Late
Capitalism, namely that there have been three fundamental moments in
capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous
stage: these are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of
imperialism, and our own—wrongly called postindustrial, but what
might better be termed multinational capital. I have already pointed out
that Mandel’s intervention in the postindustrial involves the proposition
that late or multinational or consumer capitalism, far from being
inconsistent with Marx’s great 19th-century analysis, constitutes on the
contrary the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious
expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas. This purer
capitalism of our own time thus eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist
organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way:
one is tempted to speak in this connection of a new and historically
original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious:
that is, the destruction of precapitalist third world agriculture by the
Green Revolution, and the rise of the media and the advertising
industry. At any rate, it will also have been clear that my own cultural
periodization of the stages of realism, modernism and postmodernism
is both inspired and confirmed by Mandel’s tripartite scheme.

We may speak therefore of our own age as the Third (or even Fourth)
Machine Age; and it is at this point that we must reintroduce the
problem of aesthetic representation already explicitly developed in
Kant’s earlier analysis of the sublime—since it would seem only logical
that the relationship to, and representation of, the machine could be
expected to shift dialectically with each of these qualitatively different
stages of technological development.

It is appropriate therefore to recall the excitement of machinery in the
preceding moment of capital, the exhilaration of futurism most notably,
and of Marinetti’s celebration of the machine gun and the motor car.
These are still visible emblems, sculptural nodes of energy which give
tangibility and figuration to the motive energies of that earlier moment
of modernization. The prestige of these great streamlined shapes can be
measured by their metaphorical presence in Le Corbusier’s buildings,
vast Utopian structures which ride like so many gigantic steamshipliners
upon the urban scenery of an older fallen earth. Machinery exerts
another kind of fascination in artists like Picabia and Duchamp, whom
we have no time to consider here; but let me mention, for the sake of
completeness, the ways in which revolutionary or communist artists of
the 1930s also sought to reappropriate this excitement of machine

energy for a Promethean reconstruction of human society as a whole, as
in Fernand Leger and Diego Rivera.

What must then immediately be observed is that the technology of our
own moment no longer possesses this same capacity for representation:
not the turbine, nor even Sheeler’s grain elevators or smokestacks, not
the baroque elaboration of pipes and conveyor belts nor even the
streamlined profile of the railroad train—all vehicles of speed still
concentrated at rest—but rather the computer, whose outer shell has no
emblematic or visual power, or even the casings of the various media
themselves, as with that home appliance called television which articu-
lates nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface
within itself.

Such machines are indeed machines of reproduction rather than of
production, and they make very different demands on our capacity for
aesthetic representation than did the relatively mimetic idolatry of the
older machinery of the futurist moment, of some older speed-and-
energy sculpture. Here we have less to do with kinetic energy than with
all kinds of new reproductive processes; and in the weaker productions
of postmodernism the aesthetic embodiment of such processes often
tends to slip back more comfortably into a mere thematic representation
of content—into narratives which are about the processes of reproduc-
tion, and include movie cameras, video, tape recorders, the whole
technology of the production and reproduction of the simulacrum.
(The shift from Antonioni’s modernist Blowup to DePalma’s postmod-
ernist Blowout is here paradigmatic.) When Japanese architects, for
example, model a building on the decorative imitation of stacks of
cassettes, then the solution is at best a thematic and allusive, although
often humorous, one.

Yet something else does tend to emerge in the most energetic postmod-
ernist texts, and it is the sense that beyond all thematics or content the
work seems somehow to tap the networks of reproductive process and
thereby to afford us some glimpse into a post-modern or technological
sublime, whose power or authenticity is documented by the success of
such works in evoking a whole new postmodern space in emergence
around us. Architecture therefore remains in this sense the privileged
aesthetic language; and the distorting and fragmenting reflexions of one
enormous glass surface to the other can be taken as paradigmatic of the
central role of process and reproduction in postmodernist culture.

As I have said, however, I want to avoid the implication that technology
is in any way the ‘ultimately determining instance’ either of our
present-day social life or of our cultural production: such a thesis is of
course ultimately at one with the post-Marxist notion of a ‘post-
industrialist’ society. Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty represen-
tations of some immense communicational and computer network are
themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely
the whole world system of present-day multinational capitalism. The
technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and
fascinating, not so much in its own right, but because it seems to offer
some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of

power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations
to grasp—namely the whole new decentred global network of the third
stage of capital itself. This is a figural process presently best observed in
a whole mode of contemporary entertainment literature, which one is
tempted to characterize as ‘high tech paranoia’, in which the circuits
and networks of some putative global computer hook-up are narratively
mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous but deadly
interlocking and competing information agencies in a complexity often
beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind. Yet conspiracy theory
(and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded
attempt—through the figuration of advanced technology—to think the
impossible totality of the contemporary world system. It is therefore in
terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable,
other reality of economic and social institutions that in my opinion the
postmodern sublime can alone be adequately theorized.

V. Post-Modernism and the City

Now, before I try to offer a somewhat more positive conclusion, I want
to sketch the analysis of a full-blown postmodern building—a work
which is in many ways uncharacteristic of that postmodern architecture
whose principal names are Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Michael
Graves, and more recently Frank Gehry, but which to my mind offers
some very striking lessons about the originality of postmodernist space.
Let me amplify the figure which has run through the preceding remarks,
and make it even more explicit: I am proposing the motion that we are
here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself.
My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen
into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has
been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent
mutation in the subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment
to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our
perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called
the space of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore—like
many of the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding
remarks—stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs,
to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimagin-
able, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions.

The Bonaventura Hotel

The building whose features I will very rapidly enumerate in the next
few moments is the Bonaventura Hotel, built in the new Los Angeles
downtown by the architect and developer John Portman, whose other
works include the various Hyatt Regencies, the Peachtree Center in
Atlanta, and the Renaissance Center in Detroit. I have mentioned the
populist aspect of the rhetorical defence of postmodernism against the
elite (and Utopian) austerities of the great architectural modernisms: it
is generally affirmed, in other words, that these newer buildings are
popular works on the one hand; and that they respect the vernacular of
the American city fabric on the other, that is to say, that they no longer
attempt, as did the masterworks and monuments of high modernism, to
insert a different, a distinct, an elevated, a new Utopian language into

the tawdry and commercial sign-system of the surrounding city, but
rather, on the contrary, seek to speak that very language, using its
lexicon and syntax as that has been emblematically ‘learned from Las
Vegas’.

On the first of these counts, Portman’s Bonaventura fully confirms the
claim: it is a popular building, visited with enthusiasm by locals and
tourists alike (although Portman’s other buildings are even more
successful in this respect). The populist insertion into the city fabric is,
however, another matter, and it is with this that we will begin. There
are three entrances to the Bonaventura, one from Figueroa, and the other
two by way of elevated gardens on the other side of the hotel, which is
built into the remaining slope of the former Beacon Hill. None of these
is anything like the old hotel marquee, or the monumental porte-
cochère with which the sumptuous buildings of yesteryear were wont
to stage your passage from city street to the older interior. The entry-
ways of the Bonaventura are as it were lateral and rather backdoor affairs:
the gardens in the back admit you to the sixth floor of the towers, and
even there you must walk down one flight to find the elevator by which
you gain access to the lobby. Meanwhile, what one is still tempted to
think of as the front entry, on Figueroa, admits you, baggage and all,
onto the second-storey shopping balcony, from which you must take an
escalator down to the main registration desk. More about these elevators
and escalators in a moment. What I first want to suggest about these
curiously unmarked ways-in is that they seem to have been imposed by
some new category of closure governing the inner space of the hotel
itself (and this over and above the material constraints under which
Portman had to work). I believe that, with a certain number of other
characteristic postmodern buildings, such as the Beaubourg in Paris, or
the Eaton Centre in Toronto, the Bonaventura aspires to being a total
space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city (and I would want to
add that to this new total space corresponds a new collective practice,
a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like
the practice of a new and historically original kind of hyper-crowd). In
this sense, then, ideally the mini-city of Portman’s Bonaventura ought
not to have entrances at all, since the entryway is always the seam that
links the building to the rest of the city that surrounds it: for it does not
wish to be a part of the city, but rather its equivalent and its replacement
or substitute. That is, however, obviously not possible or practical,
whence the deliberate downplaying and reduction of the entrance
function to its bare minimum. But this disjunction from the surrounding
city is very different from that of the great monuments of the
International Style: there, the act of disjunction was violent, visible,
and had a very real symbolic significance—as in Le Corbusier’s great
pilotis whose gesture radically separates the new Utopian space of the
modern from the degraded and fallen city fabric which it thereby
explicitly repudiates (although the gamble of the modern was that this
new Utopian space, in the virulence of its Novum, would fan out and
transform that eventually by the very power of its new spatial language).
The Bonaventura, however, is content to ‘let the fallen city fabric
continue to be in its being’ (to parody Heidegger); no further effects, no
larger protopolitical Utopian transformation, is either expected or
desired.

This diagnosis is to my mind confirmed by the great reflective glass
skin of the Bonaventura, whose function I will now interpret rather
differently than I did a moment ago when I saw the phenomenon of
reflexion generally as developing a thematics of reproductive technology
(the two readings are however not incompatible). Now one would want
rather to stress the way in which the glass skin repels the city outside;
a repulsion for which we have analogies in those reflector sunglasses
which make it impossible for your interlocutor to see your own eyes
and thereby achieve a certain aggressivity towards and power over the
Other. In a similar way, the glass skin achieves a peculiar and placeless
dissociation of the Bonaventura from its neighbourhood: it is not even an
exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel’s outer walls
you cannot see the hotel itself, but only the distorted images of
everything that surrounds it.

Now I want to say a few words about escalators and elevators: given
their very real pleasures in Portman, particularly these last, which the
artist has termed ‘gigantic kinetic sculptures’ and which certainly
account for much of the spectacle and the excitement of the hotel
interior, particularly in the Hyatts, where like great Japanese lanterns or
gondolas they ceaselessly rise and fall—given such a deliberate marking
and foregrounding in their own right, I believe one has to see such
‘people movers’ (Portman’s own term, adapted from Disney) as some-
thing a little more than mere functions and engineering components.
We know in any case that recent architectural theory has begun to
borrow from narrative analysis in other fields, and to attempt to see our
physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives or
stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors
are asked to fulfil and to complete with our own bodies and movements.
In the Bonaventura, however, we find a dialectical heightening of this
process: it seems to me that the escalators and elevators here henceforth
replace movement but also and above all designate themselves as new
reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper (something which
will become evident when we come to the whole question of what
remains of older forms of movement in this building, most notably
walking itself). Here the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbol-
ized, reified and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes
the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer
allowed to conduct on our own: and this is a dialectical intensification
of the autoreferentiality of all modern culture, which tends to turn upon
itself and designate its own cultural production as its content.

I am more at a loss when it comes to conveying the thing itself, the
experience of space you undergo when you step off such allegorical
devices into the lobby or atrium, with its great central column,
surrounded by a miniature lake, the whole positioned between the four
symmetrical residential towers with their elevators, and surrounded by
rising balconies capped by a kind of greenhouse roof at the sixth level.
I am tempted to say that such space makes it impossible for us to use
the language of volume or volumes any longer, since these last are
impossible to seize. Hanging streamers indeed suffuse this empty space
in such a way as to distract systematically and deliberately from
whatever form it might be supposed to have; while a constant busyness

gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely packed, that it is an
element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that
distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume.
You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your body; and if it
seemed to you before that that suppression of depth I spoke of in
postmodern painting or literature would necessarily be difficult to
achieve in architecture itself, perhaps you may now be willing to see
this bewildering immersion as the formal equivalent in the new medium.

Yet escalator and elevator are also in this context dialectical opposites;
and we may suggest that the glorious movement of the elevator
gondolas is also a dialectical compensation for this filled space of the
atrium—it gives us the chance at a radically different, but complemen-
tary, spatial experience, that of rapidly shooting up through the ceiling
and outside, along one of the four symmetrical towers, with the
referent, Los Angeles itself, spread out breathtakingly and even alarm-
ingly before us. But even this vertical movement is contained: the
elevator lifts you to one of those revolving cocktail lounges, in which
you, seated, are again passively rotated about and offered a contempla-
tive spectacle of the city itself, now transformed into its own images by
the glass windows through which you view it.

Let me quickly conclude all this by returning to the central space of the
lobby itself (with the passing observation that the hotel rooms are
visibly marginalized: the corridors in the residential sections are low-
ceilinged and dark, most depressingly functional indeed; while one
understands that the rooms are in the worst of taste). The descent is
dramatic enough, plummeting back down through the roof to splash
down in the lake; what happens when you get there is something else,
which I can only try to characterize as milling confusion, something
like the vengeance this space takes on those who still seek to walk
through it. Given the absolute symmetry of the four towers, it is quite
impossible to get your bearings in this lobby; recently, colour coding
and directional signals have been added in a pitiful and revealing, rather
desperate attempt to restore the coordinates of an older space. I will
take as the most dramatic practical result of this spatial mutation the
notorious dilemma of the shopkeepers on the various balconies: it has
been obvious, since the very opening of the hotel in 1977, that nobody
could ever find any of these stores, and even if you located the
appropriate boutique, you would be most unlikely to be as fortunate a
second time; as a consequence, the commercial tenants are in despair
and all the merchandise is marked down to bargain prices. When you
recall that Postman is a businessman as well as an architect, and a
millionaire developer, an artist who is at one and the same time a
capitalist in his own right, one cannot but feel that here too something
of a ‘return of the repressed’ is involved.

So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in
space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending
the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize
its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its
position in a mappable external world. And I have already suggested
that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built

environment—which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modern-
ism as the velocities of space craft are to those of the automobile—can
itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma
which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the
great global multinational and decentred communicational network in
which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.

The New Machine

But as I am anxious that Portman’s space not be perceived as something
either exceptional or seemingly marginalized and leisure-specialized on
the order of Disneyland, I would like in passing to juxtapose this
complacent and entertaining (although bewildering) leisure-time space
with its analogue in a very different area, namely the space of
postmodern warfare, in particular as Michael Herr evokes it in his great
book on the experience of Vietnam, called Dispatches. The extraordinary
linguistic innovations of this work may still be considered postmodern,
in the eclectic way in which its language impersonally fuses a whole
range of contemporary collective idiolects, most notably rock language
and Black language: but the fusion is dictated by problems of content.
This first terrible postmodernist war cannot be told in any of the
traditional paradigms of the war novel or movie—indeed that break-
down of all previous narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown
of any shared language through which a veteran might convey such
experience, among the principal subjects of the book and may be said to
open up the place of a whole new reflexivity. Benjamin’s account of
Baudelaire, and of the emergence of modernism from a new experience
of city technology which transcends all the older habits of bodily
perception, is both singularly relevant here, and singularly antiquated,
in the light of this new and virtually unimaginable quantum leap in
technological alienation: ‘He was a moving-target-survivor subscriber,
a true child of the war, because except for the rare times when you were
pinned or stranded the system was geared to keep you mobile, if that
was what you thought you wanted. As a technique for staying alive it
seemed to make as much sense as anything, given naturally that you
were there to begin with and wanted to see it close; it started out sound
and straight but it formed a cone as it progressed, because the more you
moved the more you saw, the more you saw the more besides death and
mutilation you risked, and the more you risked of that the more you
would have to let go of one day as a “survivor”. Some of us moved
around the war like crazy people until we couldn’t see which way the
run was taking us anymore, only the war all over its surface with
occasional, unexpected penetration. As long as we could have choppers
like taxis it took real exhaustion or depression near shock or a dozen
pipes of opium to keep us even apparently quiet, we’d still be running
around inside our skins like something was after us, ha ha, La Vida
Loca. In the months after I got back the hundreds of helicopters I’d
flown in began to draw together until they’d formed a collective meta-
chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer,
provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human;
hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and
warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire

in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an
intruder.’*

In this new machine, which does not, like the older modernist machinery
of the locomotive or the airplane, represent motion, but which can only
be represented in motion, something of the mystery of the new postmod-
ernist space is concentrated.

VI. The Abolition of Critical Distance

The conception of postmodernism outlined here is a historical rather
than a merely stylistic one. I cannot stress too greatly the radical
distinction between a view for which the postmodern is one (optional)
style among many others available, and one which seeks to grasp it as
the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism: the two approaches
in fact generate two very different ways of conceptualizing the pheno-
menon as a whole, on the one hand moral judgements (about which it
is indifferent whether they are positive or negative), and on the other a
genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History.

Of some positive moral evaluation of postmodernism little needs to be
said: the complacent (yet delirious) camp-following celebration of this
aesthetic new world (including its social and economic dimension,
greeted with equal enthusiasm under the slogan of ‘post-industrial
society’) is surely unacceptable—although it may be somewhat less
obvious the degree to which current fantasies about the salvational
nature of high technology, from chips to robots—fantasies entertained
not only by left as well as right governments in distress, but also by
many intellectuals—are essentially of a piece with more vulgar apologies
for postmodernism.

But in that case it is also logical to reject moralizing condemnations of
the postmodern and of its essential triviality, when juxtaposed against
the Utopian ‘high seriousness’ of the great modernisms: these are also
judgements one finds both on the Left and on the radical Right. And
no doubt the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older
realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the
logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it. Meanwhile, for
political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to
modify its otherwise passive momentum (whether with a view towards
channeling it into a socialist transformation of society or diverting it
into the regressive reestablishment of some simpler fantasy past), there
cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural
form of image addiction which, by transforming the past visual mirages,
stereotypes or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the
future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of
future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cata-
clysm—from visions of ‘terrorism’ on the social level to those of cancer
on the personal. Yet if postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then
the attempt to conceptualize it in terms of moral or moralizing
judgements must finally be identified as a category-mistake. All of
which becomes more obvious when we interrogate the position of the

* Michael Herr, Dispatches, New York 1978, pp. 8–9.

cultural critic and moralist: this last, along with all the rest of us, is now
so deeply immersed in postmodernist space, so deeply suffused and
infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-
fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the
other, becomes unavailable.

The distinction I am proposing here knows one canonical form in
Hegel’s differentiation of the thinking of individual morality or moral-
izing (Moralitá́t) from that whole very different realm of collective social
values and practices (Sittlichkeit). But it finds its definitive form in
Marx’s demonstration of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those
classic pages of the Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of some more
genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and change.
The topic of the lesson is, of course, the historical development of
capitalism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In
a well-known passage, Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible,
namely to think this development positively and negatively all at once;
to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of
grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its
extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously, within a single
thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgement.
We are, somehow, to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to
understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing
that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse
from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance
of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still,
the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to
think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe
and progress all together.

Such an effort suggests two immediate questions, with which we will
conclude these reflexions. Can we in fact identify some ‘moment of
truth’ within the more evident ‘moments of falsehood’ of postmodern
culture? And, even if we can do so, is there not something ultimately
paralysing in the dialectical view of historical development proposed
above; does it not tend to demobilize us and to surrender us to passivity
and helplessness, by systematically obliterating possibilities of action
under the impenetrable fog of historical inevitability? It will be
appropriate to discuss these two (related) issues in terms of current
possibilities for some effective contemporary cultural politics and for
the construction of a genuine political culture.

To focus the problem in this way is of course immediately to raise the
more genuine issue of the fate of culture generally, and of the function
of culture specifically, as one social level or instance, in the postmodern
era. Everything in the previous discussion suggests that what we have
been calling postmodernism is inseparable from, and unthinkable
without the hypothesis of, some fundamental mutation of the sphere of
culture in the world of late capitalism, which includes a momentous
modification of its social function. Older discussions of the space,
function or sphere of culture (most notably Herbert Marcuse’s classic
essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’) have insisted on what
a different language would call the ‘semi-autonomy’ of the cultural

realm: its ghostly, yet Utopian, existence, for good or ill, above the
practical world of the existent, whose mirror image it throws back in
forms which vary from the legitimations of flattering resemblance to
the contestatory indictments of critical satire or Utopian pain.

What we must now ask ourselves is whether it is not precisely this
‘semi-autonomy’ of the cultural sphere which has been destroyed by the
logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is today no longer
endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level among
others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in pre-capitalist
societies), is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. On
the contrary: we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an
autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an
explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social
realm, to the point at which everything in our social life—from
economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure
of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some
original and as yet untheorized sense. This perhaps startling proposition
is, however, substantively quite consistent with the previous diagnosis
of a society of the image or the simulacrum, and a transformation of the
‘real’ into so many pseudo-events.

It also suggests that some of our most cherished and time-honoured
radical conceptions about the nature of cultural politics may thereby
find themselves outmoded. However distinct those conceptions may
have been—which range from slogans of negativity, opposition, and
subversion to critique and reflexivity—they all shared a single, funda-
mentally spatial, presupposition, which may be resumed in the equally
time-honoured formula of ‘critical distance’. No theory of cultural
politics current on the Left today has been able to do without one
notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the
possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive
Being of capital, which then serves as an Archimedean point from
which to assault this last. What the burden of our preceding demon-
stration suggests, however, is that distance in general (including ‘critical
distance’ in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new
space of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and
suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are
bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically)
incapable of distantiation; meanwhile, it has already been observed how
the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrat-
ing and colonizing those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the
Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds
for critical effectivity. The short-hand language of ‘cooptation’ is for
this reason omnipresent on the Left; but offers a most inadequte
theoretical basis for understanding a situation in which we all, in one
way or another, dimly feel that not only punctual and local countercul-
tural forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare, but also even
overtly political interventions like those of The Clash, are all somehow
secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves
might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance
from it.

What we must now affirm is that it is precisely this whole extraordinarily
demoralizing and depressing original new global space which is the
‘moment of truth’ of postmodernism. What has been called the
postmodernist ‘sublime’ is only the moment in which this content has
become most explicit, has moved the closest to the surface of conscious-
ness, as a coherent new type of space in its own right—even though a
certain figural concealment or disguise is still at work here, most
notably in the high-technological thematics in which the new spatial
content is still dramatized and articulated. Yet the earlier features of the
postmodern which were enumerated above can all now be seen as
themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial
object.

The argument for a certain authenticity in these otherwise patently
ideological productions depends on the prior proposition that what we
have now been calling postmodern (or multinational) space is not
merely a cultural ideology or fantasy, but has genuine historical (and
socio-economic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism
around the globe (after the earlier expansions of the national market
and the older imperialist system, which each had their own cultural
specificity and generated new types of space appropriate to their
dynamics). The distorted and unreflexive attempts of newer cultural
production to explore and to express this new space must then also, in
their own fashion, be considered as so many approaches to the
representation of (a new) reality (to use a more antiquated language).
As paradoxical as the terms may seem, they may thus, following a
classic interpretive option, be read as peculiar new forms of realism (or
at least of the mimesis of reality), at the same time that they can equally
well be analysed as so many attempts to distract and to divert us from
that reality or to disguise its contradictions and resolve them in the
guise of various formal mystifications.

As for that reality itself, however—the as yet untheorized original space
of some new ‘world system’ of multinational or late capitalism (a space
whose negative or baleful aspects are only too obvious), the dialectic
requires us to hold equally to a positive or ‘progressive’ evaluation of
its emergence, as Marx did for the newly unified space of the national
markets, or as Lenin did for the older imperialist global network. For
neither Marx nor Lenin was socialism a matter of returning to small
(and thereby less repressive and comprehensive) systems of social
organization; rather, the dimensions attained by capital in their own
times were grasped as the promise, the framework, and the precondition
for the achievement of some new and more comprehensive socialism.
How much the more is this not the case with the even more global and
totalizing space of the new world system, which demands the invention
and elaboration of an internationalism of a radically new type? The
disastrous realignment of socialist revolution with the older nationalisms
(not only in Southeast Asia), whose results have necessarily aroused
much serious recent Left reflexion, can be adduced in support of this
position.

The Need for Maps

But if all this is so, then at least one possible form of a new radical
cultural politics becomes evident: with a final aesthetic proviso that
must quickly be noted. Left cultural producers and theorists—particu-
larly those formed by bourgeois cultural traditions issuing from
romanticism and valorizing spontaneous, instinctive or unconscious
forms of ‘genius’—but also for very obvious historical reasons such as
Zhdanovism and the sorry consequences of political and party interven-
tions in the arts—have often by reaction allowed themselves to be
unduly intimidated by the repudiation, in bourgeois aesthetics and most
notably in high modernism, of one of the age-old functions of art—
namely the pedagogical and the didactic. The teaching function of art
was, however, always stressed in classical times (even though it there
mainly took the form of moral lessons); while the prodigious and still
imperfectly understood work of Brecht reaffirms, in a new and formally
innovative and original way, for the moment of modernism proper, a
complex new conception of the relationship between culture and
pedagogy. The cultural model I will propose similarly foregrounds the
cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of political art and culture,
dimensions stressed in very different ways by both Lukács and Brecht
(for the distinct moments of realism and modernism, respectively).

We cannot, however, return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the
basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours.
Meanwhile, the conception of space that has been developed here
suggests that a model of political culture appropriate to our own
situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental
organizing concern. I will therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of
such new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive
mapping.

In a classic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that the
alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in
their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which
they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none
of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built
perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples. Disalienation in
the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of
place, and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble
which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can
map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories.
Lynch’s own work is limited by the deliberate restriction of his topic to
the problems of the city form as such; yet it becomes extraordinarily
suggestive when projected outwards onto some of the larger national
and global spaces we have touched on here. Nor should it be too hastily
assumed that his model—while it clearly raises very central issues of
representation as such—is in any way easily vitiated by the conventional
poststructuralist critiques of the ‘ideology of representation’ or mimesis.
The cognitive map is not exactly mimetic, in that older sense; indeed
the theoretical issues it poses allow us to renew the analysis of
representation on a higher and much more complex level.

There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the
empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the
great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as ‘the
representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real
conditions of existence’. Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is
called upon to do, in the narrower framework of daily life in the
physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the
individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality
which is the ensemble of the city’s structure as a whole.

Yet Lynch’s work also suggests a further line of development insofar as
cartography itself constitutes its key mediatory instance. A return to the
history of this science (which is also an art) shows us that Lynch’s
model does not yet in fact really correspond to what will become map-
making. Rather, Lynch’s subjects are clearly involved in pre-carto-
graphic operations whose results traditionally are described as itineraries
rather than as maps; diagrams organized around the still subject-centred
or existential journey of the traveller, along which various significant
key features are marked—oases, mountain ranges, rivers, monuments
and the like. The most highly developed form of such diagrams is the
nautical itinerary, the sea chart or portulans, where coastal features are
noted for the use of Mediterranean navigators who rarely venture out
into the open sea.

Yet the compass at once introduces a new dimension into sea charts, a
dimension that will utterly transform the problematic of the itinerary
and allow us to pose the problem of a genuine cognitive mapping in a
far more complex way. For the new instruments—compass, sextant and
theodolite—do not merely correspond to new geographic and naviga-
tional problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude, particu-
larly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler
matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically
determine by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce
a whole new coordinate—that of relationship to the totality, particuarly
as it is mediated by the stars and by new operations like that of
triangulation. At this point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense
comes to require the coordination of existential data (the empirical
position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the
geographic totality.

Finally, with the first globe (1490) and the invention of the Mercator
projection around the same period, yet a third dimension of cartography
emerges, which at once involves what we would today call the nature
of representational codes, the intrinsic structures of the various media,
the intervention, into more naive mimetic conceptions of mapping, of
the whole new fundamental question of the languages of representation
itself: and in particular the unresolvable (well-nigh Heisenbergian)
dilemma of the transfer of curved space to flat charts; at which point it
becomes clear that there can be no true maps (at the same time in which
it also becomes clear that there can be scientific progress, or better still,
a dialectical advance, in the various historical moments of map-making).

Social Cartography and Symbol

Transcoding all this now into the very different problematic of the
Althusserian definition of ideology, one would want to make two
points. The first is that the Althusserian concept now allows us to
rethink these specialized geographical and cartographic issues in terms
of social space, in terms, for example, of social class and national or
international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily
also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national
and international class realities. Yet to reformulate the problem in this
way is also to come starkly up against those very difficulties in mapping
which are posed in heightened and original ways by that very global
space of the postmodernist or multinational moment which has been
under discussion here. These are not merely theoretical issues, but have
urgent practical political consequences: as is evident from the conven-
tional feelings of First World subjects that existentially (or ‘empirically’)
they really do inhabit a ‘postindustrial society’, from which traditional
production has disappeared and in which social classes of the classical
type no longer exist—a conviction which has immediate effects on
political praxis.

The second observation to be proposed is that a return to the Lacanian
underpinnings of Althusser’s theory can afford some useful and sugges-
tive methodological enrichments. Althusser’s formulation remobilizes
an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between science
and ideology, which is still not without value for us. The existential—
the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of daily life, the
monadic ‘point of view’ on the world to which we are necessarily, as
biological subjects, restricted—is in Althusser’s formula implicitly
opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which as Lacan
reminds us is never positioned in or actualized by any concrete subject
but rather by that structural void called ‘le sujet supposé savoir’, ‘the
subject supposed to know’, a subject-place of knowledge: what is
affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some
abstract or ‘scientific’ way—Marxian ‘science’ provides just such a way
of knowing and conceptualizing the world abstractly, in the sense in
which, e.g. Mandel’s great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge
of that global world system, of which it has never been said here that it
was unknowable, but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a
very different matter. The Althusserian formula in other words desig-
nates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowl-
edge: ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of
articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. What a
historicist view of this ‘definition’ would want to add is that such
coordination, the production of functioning and living ideologies, is
distinct in different historical situations, but above all, that there may be
historical situations in which it is not possible at all—and this would
seem to be our situation in the current crisis.

But the Lacanian system is three-fold and not dualistic. To the
Marxian-Althusserian opposition of ideology and science correspond
only two of Lacan’s tripartite functions, the Imaginary and the Real,
respectively. Our digression on cartography, however, with its final

revelation of a properly representational dialectic of the codes and
capacities of individual languages or media, reminds us that what has
until now been omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic
itself.

An aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical political culture
which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened
sense of its place in the global system—will necessarily have to respect
this now enormously complex representational dialectic and to invent
radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not, then, clearly a
call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more
transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring
perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art—if it is indeed
possible at all—will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is,
to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational
capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some
as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we
may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective
subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present
neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political
form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation
the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social
as well as a spatial scale.

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