I was asked to complete some writing before the next session.
These three books became central to the collection of key quotes about postmodern theory.
The case can be made that Critical Regionalism is a cultural strategy is a much a bearer of world culture as it is a vehicle of universal civilisation. And while it is obviously misleading to conceive of our inheriting world culture to the same degree as we are all heirs to universal civilisation , it is nonetheless evident that since we are in principle, subject to the impact of both, that we have no choice but to take cognisance today of their interaction. Pg 23 - Foster, H., 2017. The Anti-aesthetic. New Press. - Towards a critical regionalism.
That critical regionalism cannot be simply based on the autochthonous for of a specific region alone was well put by the Californian architect Hamilton Harrell Harris when he wrote, now nearly thirty years ago: Opposed to the Regionalism of Restriction is another type of regionalism, the Regionalism of Liberation. This is the manifestation of a region that is especially in tune with the emerging thought go the time. We call such manifestation “regional” only because it has not yet emerged elsewhere… A region may develop ideas. A region may accept ideas. Imagination and intelligence are necessary for both. In California in the late Twenties and Thirties modern Europeans ideas met a still developing regionalism. In New England, on the other hand, European Modernism met a rigid and restrictive regionalism that at first resisted and then surrendered. New England accepted European Modernism whole because its own regionalism had been reduced to a collection of restrictions. - Pg 24 - Foster, H., 2017. The Anti-aesthetic. New Press. - Towards a critical regionalism.
The great modernism were, as we have said, predicated on the invention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your finger print, as incomparable as your own body. But this means that the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style. Yet today, from any number of distinct perspectives, the social theorist, the psychoanalysts, even the linguists, not to speak of those of us who work in the area of culture and cultural and formal change., are all exploring the notion that the kind of individualism and personal identity is a thing of the past; that the old individual or individualist subject is “dead”; and that one might even describe the concept of the unique individual and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideological. - Foster, H., 2017. The Anti-aesthetic. New Press. - Jameson - Postmodern and consumer society
Hence once again pastiche: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible , all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum,
- Foster, H., 2017. The Anti-aesthetic. New Press. - Jameson - Postmodern and consumer society
As for language, Lucan’s model is the now orthodox structuralist one, which is based on a conception of a linguistic sign as having two (or perhaps three) components. A sign, a word, a text, is here modelled as a relationship between a signifier – a material object, the sound of a word, the script of a text – and a signified, the meaning of that material word or material text. The third component would be the so-called “referent” the “real” object in the “real’ world to which the sign refers– the real cat as poised to the concept of a cat or the sound “cat”.
- Foster, H., 2017. The Anti-aesthetic. New Press. - Jameson - Postmodern and consumer society
In postmodern culture, “culture” has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself: modernism was still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself. Post modernism is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process.x
Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
It seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allow for the presence and coexistence of a range of different, yet subordinate, features.
—Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
If we do not achieve some general sense of 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. - Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
–the end for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke )as symbolised by the emergent prince of mechanical reproduction). — Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
We have now 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. — Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
The explosion of modern literature into s 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. — Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant ( or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself. — Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
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.
— Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
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 other available and one which to grasp it as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism: the two approaches in fact generate two very different way of conceptualising the phenomenon as a whole: on the one hand, model judgements (about which it is indifferent wehether they are positive or negative), and on the other, a genuinely dialectical attempt to think out present of time in History. — Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
A prodigios 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 yet untheorized sense. — Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
The argument for a certain authenticity in these otherwise patently ideological productions depends on the proper proposition that what we have been calling postmodern (or multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy but has enshrine historical ( and socioeconomic) 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 unreflective attempts of a newer cultural production to explore and to express this new space must then also, in their own fashion, be consider as so many approaches to the representation of (a new) reality (to use a more antiquated language).
PG 49— Jameson, F., 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso.
The phenomenon of universalisation, while being an advancement of mankind, at the same time constitutes a sort if subtle destruction, not only of traditional cultures, which might not be an irreparable wrong, but also of what I shall call for the time being the creative nucleus of great cultures, that nucleus on the basis of which we interpret life, what I shall call in advance ethical and mythical nucleus of mankind.
- Foster, H., 2017. The Anti-aesthetic. New Press. - Kenneth Frampton - Six points for an architecture pf resistance. PG 17 Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth.
We have the feeling that this single word civilisation at the same time exerts a sort of attrition or wearing away at the expense of the cultural resources which have made the great civilisations of the past. - Foster, H., 2017. The Anti-aesthetic. New Press. - Kenneth Frampton - Six points for an architecture pf resistance. PG 17 Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth.
Everywhere throughout the world, one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the plastic or aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc. It seems as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level.
Foster, H., 2017. The Anti-aesthetic. New Press. - Kenneth Frampton - Six points for an architecture pf resistance. PG 17 Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth.
Whence the paradox: on the one hand, it has root itself in the soil of its past, forge a nation spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindication before the colonialist’s personality. But in order to take part in modern civilization, it is necessary at the same time to take part in scientific, technical, and political rationality, something which very often requires the pure and simple abandon of a whole cultural past. It is a fact: every culture cannot sustain ad absorb the shock of modern civilisation. There is the paradox: how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part universal civilization. Foster, H., 2017. The Anti-aesthetic. New Press. - Kenneth Frampton - Six points for an architecture pf resistance. PG 18 Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth.
Today the practice of architecture seems to be increasingly polarised between, on the one hand, a so-called high-tech approach predicted exclusively upon production and, on the other, the provision of a ‘compensatory facade’ to cover up the harsh realities of this universal system. Foster, H., 2017. The Anti-aesthetic. New Press. - Kenneth Frampton - Six points for an architecture pf resistance. PG 18
These selection of quotes would hopefully form the main part on Postmodern theory.
No comments:
Post a Comment