Fragments of Rationality

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In an interview with Don DeLillo that was first published in Rolling Stone in 1988, the interviewer, Anthony DeCurtis, asked: "There's something of an apocalyptic feel about your books, an intimation that our world is moving toward greater randomness and dissolution, or maybe even cataclysm. Do you see this process as irreversible?" DeLillo answered: "This is the shape my books take because this is the reality I see. This reality has become part of all our lives over the past twenty-five years. I don't know how we can deny it." DeLillo's date for the beginning of our current era of randomness and dissolution is 1963, the year of John F. Kennedy's assassination that is the subject of DeLillo's novel, Libra. DeLillo says that "what's been missing over these past twenty-five years is a sense of manageable reality. . . . We seem much more aware of elements like randomness and ambiguity and chaos since then."

This growing awareness of randomness, ambiguity, and chaos since the 1960s is expressed not only in the work of novelists like DeLillo, but also in the work of many other artists, musicians, choreographers, film makers, and architects, and even in the productions of advertisers, fashion designers, sports promoters, and politicians. It is often referred to as postmodern. Postmodern is also used to describe a general movement in philosophy and cultural criticism identified most prominently with French intellectuals of the past three decades--Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari--but also with Americans such as Fredric Jameson, Richard Rorty, and many others. Critics of postmodernism are fond of pointing out the disparities of usage in the term and that any concept of postmodernism is itself contradictory. Both caveats should be kept in mind. There is no way of working quickly through the contradictions described in discussions of postmodernity as a cultural condition, nor is there any satisfactory definition of postmodernism. Indeed, the assertion that there is no satisfactory definition of postmodernism is a positive expression of postmodernism. When it can be defined, the provocativeness of postmodernism will have long since ended.

Yet even those such as Andreas Huyssen and David Harvey, who survey developments called postmodern with a skeptical eye, still claim that there has been a sea-change in cultural, artistic, political, and economic practices during the past three decades, and while Huyssen, Harvey, and others heavily qualify such claims by noting the unevenness of change and the contradictory relationship of postmodernism to modernism, they still maintain that there has been a major shift in what they call "the structure of sensibility." These theorists argue that what is new about postmodernity is not the awareness of the fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the contingent; such awareness was always a part of modernism. The key difference is that modernism posited a tension between the transient and the eternal, between low culture and high culture, between the vernacular and the elite, while in postmodernism this tension is lost. Harvey says that "postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is" (44).

Architecture has been one of the most important discourses for theories of postmodernism because it is easy to demonstrate a disjuncture between the modern and postmodern. When I was a student in architecture in the late 1960s, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright were still spoken of as deities, and the ideal society would give the architect control over planning what buildings should be built, how they should be built, and how land should be used. The architect as urban planner was still thought capable of solving the many problems cities presentedãslums, congestion, sprawl, the waste of land and resources, and general ugliness. Our teachers inspired us with grand schemes for redesigning old cities and erecting new ones devised by planners in the 1950s and 1960s. If some of the realized grand schemes had not worked as well as planners had hoped, the glitches were attributed to unforeseen factors such as the heat of Brasilia that made ordeals out of the treks between widely separated buildings in its architectural sculpture garden. Oscar Niemeyer's grand scheme for Brasilia typified the large-scale, design-from-high-above perspective of urban planning that dominated the modernist era in architecture.

By the end of the 1960s, however, city dwellers began to voice strong resistance to planners as they watched their cities pulled down around them. Urban riots in the United States raised doubts about the motives of "urban renewal," and in Britain, planners were accused of causing more damage to British cities than the bombers of Hitler's Luftwaffe. The most prominent recent example of the failure of comprehensive planning was Nicolae Ceausescu's thwarted plan to bulldoze the picturesque country villages in Romania and replace them with uniform blocks of housing flats. David Harvey observes that today it is "the norm to seek out 'pluralistic' and 'organic' strategies for approaching urban development as a 'collage' of highly differentiated spaces and mixtures, rather than pursuing grandiose plans" (40).

The rejection of comprehensive urban planning is an example of what Harvey and others mean by a shift in the structure of sensibility. Out of the failure of modern planning with its faith in rational design came a new appreciation of the variety of urban life. Writing of Jonathan Raban's Soft City, an exuberant account of life in London in the 1970s, Harvey says that "Raban depicts as both vibrant and present what many earlier writers had felt as a chronic absence. To the thesis that the city was falling victim to a rationalized and automated system of mass production and mass consumption of material goods, Raban replied that it was in practice mainly about the production of signs and images. He rejected the thesis of a city tightly stratified by occupation and class, depicting instead a widespread individualism and entrepreneurialism in which the marks of social distinction were broadly conferred by possessions and appearances" (3).

Rather than viewing the city as a lost but longed-for community as did Jane Jacobs in her analysis of New York City, Raban represents the city as a labyrinth full of diverse and intertwined paths of social interaction without necessary relation to each other, incapable of being understood according to any architectonics. The city is like a huge theater that offers the possibility of playing many different roles but at the same time is extremely stressful and vulnerable to random violence. For Raban the city is held together not by government or by planners but by highly conventionalized semiotic systems which, because of their plasticity, are always in danger of breaking down, throwing the city into chaotic violence and totalitarian nightmare. This deeply contradictory response to urban living--the experience of simultaneous exhilaration and terror--is Harvey's embodiment of postmodern sensibility.

Postmodernism, Postmodern Theory, and Postmodernity

If we cannot define postmodernism, we can at least describe generally how the term is being used today and how the notion of a postmodern sensibility is articulated. Since postmodernism is applied to everything from Andy Warhol's multi-image cpaintings, the music of John Cage, and the novels of William Burroughs to Disneyland, fast food, and MTV, it would seem as fragmented and chaotic a term as the qualities it describes. I am going to follow the suggestion of Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner to sort discussions of postmodernism into three metadiscourses: (1) aesthetic discussions of postmodernism; (2) philosophical discussions of postmodern theory; and (3) socio-historical assertions that Western nations, if not indeed all the world, have entered an era of postmodernity. This classification is not altogether satisfactory because theorists like Lyotard and Jameson are involved in all three discourses, but it does help to distinguish the scope of claims in discussions of postmodernism.

First, postmodernism began to be used in literary criticism in the late 1950s to describe a dwindling in the energy of modernism--authors weren't writing novels like Ulysses anymore. In the 1960s and early 1970s more favorable views of contemporary literature were advanced, and many of the general characteristics of aesthetic postmodernism were identified by Susan Sontag, Leslie Fiedler, and Ihab Hassan. Sontag's essays of the 1960s proclaimed a "new sensibility" of style and "erotics" in fiction that opposes the modernist emphasis on meaning. Fiedler noted a blurring of the distinction between high and low culture, which led to a movement to study popular culture as something other than barbarism or ideological deception. Hassan wrote extensively on postmodernism during this time, describing in The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1971) the nonlinear quality of postmodern literature and its pastiche of names and quotations.

In the 1970s discussions of postmodernism proliferated and came to be applied to art, theater, film, and architecture, where the ruptures with modernism were more dramatic and more evident than in literature. For instance, Charles Jencks popularized the use of postmodern to describe a trend in architecture that cannibalizes elements and styles from many periods and defies the modernist prescription of form following function. But it was Robert Venturi's essays and books, especially Learning from Las Vegas (1972), written in collaboration with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, that announced the rejection of modernist functionalism. Venturi, Brown, and Izenour described the Las Vegas strip as the emergence of a new urban form, one "radically different from that we have known; one that we have been ill-equipped to deal with and that, from ignorance we define today as urban sprawl" (xi). In the energy and eclecticism of Las Vegas, they found proof that the modernist revolution in architecture had failed by forgetting the social symbolism of architecture. Las Vegas gave people symbols on the scale of cathedrals, which Venturi and Brown irreverently pointed out were not so very different from casinos in their complex symbolic development. The major difference is that Las Vegas, unlike Rome, was built in a day.

There is a great divergence in discussions of aesthetic postmodernism on where the break occurs between modernity and postmodernity and whether there is really a "break" rather than merely an exhaustion of modernism. In architecture the break can be documented with specific buildings. While modern architects attacked the clichÈs of traditional genres, they did so by affirming rationality and technological progress, and they thus allied themselves with what has become known as the project of modernism. Modern art and literature, on the other hand, was questioning rationality and technological progress before the end of the nineteenth century. A central problem in aesthetic discussions is what to do with figures like the avant-garde artists of Dada and surrealism, Gertrude Stein, or the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, who from the perspective of the 1990s all look postmodern.

Jameson argues that what makes a monument of high modernism like Finnegans Wake different from the novels of contemporary postmodern writers is not so much its content but how the novel takes its place against the culture of its time. Works of the artists and writers of modernism were part of an oppositional movement that attacked bourgeois culture, and the bourgeoisie often responded with vitriolic condemnation of works like Ulysses, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and Picasso's cubist paintings. Today, the modernist movement has become a canon of "dead classics," and postmodern art has lost the oppositional stance that distinguished modernism. Jameson charges that postmodern artists have become part of a general production of commodities for consumers that expect "fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods . . . at ever greater rates of turnover," and thus postmodern culture "assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation" (Postmodernism 4-5). Don DeLillo sums up the predicament of the contemporary artist in Mao II, when the reclusive writer, Bill Gray, remarks, "Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated" (41).

The aesthetic discourses on postmodernism entered philosophical discourses when at the end of the 1970s postmodern was taken up by French philosophers, notably Julia Kristeva and Jean-Francois Lyotard, who extended its domain to include not only the ongoing poststructuralist critique of the foundations of Western philosophy but also a major transformation in Western thought. Needless to say, this development has a long, complex history, and here I shall note only that postmodern theory now is used to refer to common lines of philosophical critique. A summation of the main targets of critique in postmodern theory is offered by Jane Flax. Flax writes that postmodern discourses "throw into radical doubt beliefs still prevalent in (especially American) culture but derived from the Enlightenment," of which she lists the following:

The existence of a stable, coherent self.
Reason and its "science"--philosophy--can provide an objective, reliable, and universal foundation for knowledge.
The Knowledge acquired from the right use of reason will be "true"--for example, such knowledge will represent something real and unchanging (universal) about our minds and the structure of the natural world.
Reason itself has transcendent and universal qualities. It exists independently of the self's contingent existence.
There are complex connections between reason, autonomy, and freedom. All claims to truth and rightful authority are to be submitted to the tribunal of reason. Freedom consists of obedience to laws that conform to the necessary results of the right use of reason.
By grounding claims in the authority of reason, the conflicts between truth, knowledge, and power can be overcome. Truth can serve power without distortion; in turn, by utilizing knowledge in the service of power, both freedom and progress will be assured. Knowledge can be neutral.
Science, as the exemplar of the right use of reason, is also the paradigm of all true knowledge.
Language is in some sense transparent. (41-42)

If I can generalize even further from Flax's list, the key assumption that motivates each of these lines of critique is that there is nothing outside contingent discourses to which a discourse of values can be grounded--no eternal truths, no universal human experience, no universal human rights, no overriding narrative of human progress. This assumption carries many radical implications. The foundational concepts associated with artistic judgment such as "universal value" and "intrinsic merit," with science such as "truth" and "objectivity," and with ethics and law such as "rights" and "freedoms" suddenly have no meaning outside of particular discourses and are deeply involved in the qualities they are alleged to be describing objectively.

The radical critiques of knowledge and the sign in postmodern theory fold back on the modernist conception of the subject and for some commentators represent the culmination of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century critiques of the modernist subject. The modernist conception of the subject is frequently traced to Descartes and is characterized as the final reduction of the corporeal, ethical self of classical philosophy to the state of pure consciousness detached from the world. Since the nineteenth century, that conception and its corollary assumption--that language provides an unproblematic access to reality--have undergone repeated critiques. Marx reinterpreted the autonomous subject as a collective entity located in a historical teleology, Freud explored the desires of the unconscious and found that representation involves repression, and Nietzsche saw the Cartesian subject as a will to domination. More recently, many feminist scholars have shown how the self-knowing Cartesian subject is a gendered construct and a product of patriarchal culture. Postmodern theory decisively rejects the primacy of consciousness and instead has consciousness originating in language, thus arguing that the subject is an effect rather than a cause of discourse. Because the subject is the locus of overlapping and competing discourses, it is a temporary stitching together of a series of often contradictory subject positions. In other words, what person does, thinks, says, and writes cannot be interpreted unambiguously because any human action does not rise out of a unified consciousness but rather from a momentary identity that is always multiple and in some respects incoherent. If consciousness is not fully present to one's own self, then it cannot be made transparent to another.

The debate over the identity of the subject might seem relatively unimportant if it concerned only the academics who participate in these discussions, but in the third metadiscourse on postmodernism, discourses that propose an era of postmodernity, the dislocations of postmodern theory are claimed to be indicative of a more general cultural condition. Unlike the metadiscourses on aesthetic postmodernism and philosophical postmodern theory, which are predominantly housed in the academy, the metadiscourse on postmodernity is widespread, extending from academic philosophers like Lyotard to novelists like DeLillo to media theorists like McLuhan to "futurologists" like John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler to popular media uses of "postmodern," such as a program on MTV called Postmodern MTV. Discourses on postmodernity also run across the political spectrum from right to left. Similar to the critiques of postmodern theory, discourses on postmodernity often speak of the fragmentation of the subject, the loss of faith in science and progress, and a rising awareness of irrationality and chaos, but they attribute these effects to major economic and cultural shifts.

Nearly all who theorize a disjuncture between modernity and postmodernity locate the break after World War II, with the most usual date somewhere between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. The conservative cultural historian Daniel Bell speaks of the advent of a "postindustrial society" or an "information society" in the United States brought about by a shift from the manufacture of traditional economic products to the production and distribution of knowledge ("Social Framework"). Bell's postindustrial society was popularized by John Naisbitt in Megatrends and Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave, both of whom envision a high-tech world where smokestacks and poverty have disappeared, robots perform the routine jobs previously done by people, computers run households, and advanced telecommunications technology removes the need for being physically present at a job and allows access to data bases worldwide. Unlike the postindustrial utopias of Naisbitt and Toffler, however, in Bell's the foundations of contemporary capitalism are built on the privileging of self-gratification and hedonism to keep the economy expanding. Without the balancing constraints of religion, Bell sees free market capitalism eventually undermining traditional authority and promoting an "anything goes" ethic of individual fulfillment at the expense of the social fabric

Cultural historians on the left make analyses similar to Bell's in theorizing that capitalism has entered a new stage. The best known of these analyses in the United States is Fredric Jameson's claim that postmodernism reflects a new "cultural dominant" where cultural production has become integrated into commodity production. This claim is advanced in "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," a much discussed essay published in New Left Review in 1984, and in a 1991 book with the same title that supplements the essay. Jameson adapts the argument of Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism that there have been three periods in capitalism, "each one marking a dialectal expansion over the previous stage. These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital" (Postmodernism 35). Jameson connects the trajectory of capitalism with the artistic movements of realism, modernism, and postmodernism through a mediation that would explain postmodernism as a new cultural logic. Jameson links postmodern styles of art, architecture, literature, and music to the larger culture when he cites the correspondences between the flatness, decenteredness, and fragmented quality of contemporary art with the lack of depth, unity, and coherence in contemporary life. Where Jameson is least explicit, however, is in his characterization of multinational capitalism itself.

British theorists have been more thorough in analyzing the advent of multinational capitalism, describing the effects of a transition from "Fordism" to "post-Fordism." "Fordism" is a summary term for the system of mass production consolidated by Henry Ford in the early decades of this century. Fordism required elaborate central planning to standardize tasks and parts, to analyze discrete tasks, and to arrange tasks in a sequence on an assembly line, and Fordism used an authoritarian hierarchical management structure to ensure that the plan was followed. After its initiation in the United States (Ford installed the assembly line in his Dearborn factory in 1913), Fordism soon spread to other industries and to other nations. Probably the most committed convert to Fordism was Lenin, who based Soviet industrialization on the Fordist principles of central planning, hierarchical organization, and large-scale production. Because establishing an assembly line and mechanizing part of that line requires a large initial commitment of capital, Fordism is predicated on mass consumption in order to be profitable. Mass consumption in turn requires elaborate systems of distribution and an economic climate that produces steady demand. For Fordism to flourish, nations had to build infrastructures and manage markets with a degree of hierarchical control similar to that used by corporations to manage workers. Large variations in consumer demand, such as the slackening of demand during the 1930s, could be catastrophic for Fordist industries. It was not until the application of Keynesian economics following World War II that the Fordist economic era realized its potential. The United States and other Western governments actively managed the national economies to promote stable economic growth that enabled ongoing mass consumption of mass-produced goods.

The triumph of Fordism proved to be short-lived. By the 1960s the Fordist model began to be eroded by transnational competition and by more diversified and volatile markets. West Germany and Japan grew to be major forces in the world's markets, and multinational corporations began to shift production overseas in search of cheap labor. The Keynesian solution of increasing the money supply brought inflation that threatened steady economic growth. These weaknesses in Fordism were exposed in the sharp economic downturn caused by the OPEC oil embargo following the Arab-Israeli War in 1973. The old-style factories of the Rust Belt in the United States declined rapidly in 1970s, and economic growth was concentrated in the Sun Belt and in areas where high-tech, computer-based companies were located such as the Route 128 corridor around Boston. Those industries that remained were forced to become more sensitive to consumer demand following the lead of retailers.

Market researchers developed new ways of analyzing of patterns of consumption, and markets became divided into numerous specialized niches according to income level, age, household type, and locality, each to be "targeted" with particular products and stores. Manufacturers also reorganized their mode of production, following a model developed in Japan by Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, who computerized production and quality control. This systemization of production not only allows stocks of supplies to be reduced and items assembled far more quickly, but it also changes the organization of the work force so that fewer workers control assembly and more of the routine tasks are shifted to subcontractors. As a consequence, the workforce has become divided into knowledgeable core work groups and low-paid peripheral contract workers.

The term for this development in the discourse of business management is flexibility. In post-Fordism the work force becomes flexible in several senses: (1) core workers are flexible since they are trained to do varied tasks, including some assigned to supervisors in Fordist management; (2) peripheral workers are flexible because their numbers can rise and fall according to the specific needs of a company; (3) the entire work force becomes geographically flexible as production is dispersed across regions and national boundaries; (4) production becomes flexible as it responds to specific consumer demands. Besides shifting the work force away from manufacturing to service occupations in Western nations, thus eliminating many high-paid working-class jobs and creating many low-paid jobs, post-Fordism has also shifted many of the risks of capitalism onto these low-paid contract workers, who have few benefits and little job security.

Accompanying the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism has been the breakup of mass culture as it was constituted in the United States throughout much of this century into a pluralization of tastes, styles, and practices. The formerly common experiences of popular culture--reading Look, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post, listening to and later watching the programs of the three major broadcast networks, eating similar foods, wearing similar fashions, and living in similarly structured male-headed familiesãwere closely tied to Fordism. Look, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post have long since ceased publishing as mass circulation magazines, replaced by hundreds of specialized magazines devoted to hobbies, fashion, interests, and occupations. Many former viewers of the major networks have been diverted to the multitude of television channels available on cable or by satellite dish or they watch thousands of movie titles available on video. Even in small provincial cities, exotic items for consumption are becoming commonplace: clothing from Africa, South America, and Asia, restaurants featuring food from India to Caribbean, luxury cars from Europe and Japan, and collectible items from many parts of the world. The expansion of leisure time has led to numerous new social movements ranging from Tai Chi and Kung Fu to jogging and aerobics to yoga and massage to gourmet cooking and wine making to amateur magic and computer hacking. The world has become a bazaar from which to shop for an individual "lifestyle." If traditional religion doesn't inspire, New Age religion encourages you to make up your own, selecting beliefs and practices from a smorgasbord of Western religions including Christianity and Judaism; Oriental imports including Islam, Buddhism, Vedanta, Hinduism, Zen, Sufism, and other Eastern teachings; religions of native Americans, astrology, paganism, Satanism, witchcraft, and numerous new religions ranging from science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology to Rastafarianism.

Like postmodern theory, theories of postmodernity also describe the fragmentation of the subject, but they work from a different line of reasoning that associates the fragmentary subject with the desires of consumption that Daniel Bell feared would result from unrestrained capitalism. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord observed that what is consumed in contemporary Western societies is not so much objects but images of objects, through which consumers imagine themselves as consuming subjects. Acts of consumption thus close the gap between subject and object but open the gap within the subject. Because living consumers can never be self-identical with the imaginary consuming subject, the desires of the consuming subject are never completely fulfilled. The desire to consume is predicated on the lack of a stable identity. Purchasing and using a consumer object is a temporary and unstable attempt to occupy an imagined identity provoked by an image.

Jameson would see the decentered subject of postmodern theory as a kind of epiphenomenon of the fragmented social subject of post-Fordism or what he calls "multinational capitalism." Jameson is one of the theorists who describes the breakdown of links between signifiers in postmodernity as a kind of cultural schizophrenia. In "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," he writes that the schizophrenic "is condemned to live in a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers that fail to link up into a coherent sequence" (119). The experience of flipping across television programming approximates the consciousness of the schizophrenic living in the intense, eternal present. The viewer watches a series of spectacles from around the world--"smart" bombs exploding buildings, sports heroes in the elation of victory, royal marriages, plane crashes, assassinations, rock concerts, ranting dictators, shuttle launches, hurricanes, scandals, earthquakes, revolutions, eclipses, and international terrorism--all issued in an economy of images competing for attention. Jameson proposes that if "theory" (he does not make the distinction I am making between postmodern theory and theories of postmodernity) is to have a political project, then it will be to provide "cognitive maps" so that "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" (Postmodernism 54).