The Postmodern Turn

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 them. . . . the younger generation of the 1960s will 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. -Fredric Jameson As Debord and Baudrillard developed their critical analyses of consumer culture in the 1960s, as capitalism was becoming a full-blown society of the spectacle, and as oppositional political movements were contesting existing societies, new tendencies emerged in the arts in the form of new postmodern methods, styles, and consciousness. At this time, a "new sensibility" appeared in criticism and the arts that expressed dissatisfaction with prevailing modernist forms and ideologies. Seen as stale, boring, pretentious, and elitist, European and American high modernism were rejected. The new attitude pronounced the death of modernism and the arrival of "postmodernism," of a new ideology and new aesthetic forms exemplified in the novels of William Burroughs, the music of John Cage and the dance of Merce Cunningham, the paintings of Andy Warhol and pop art, and the architecture of Robert Venturi and Philip Johnson. Postmodernism not only brought dramatic changes in existing fields, such as architecture, literature, painting, film, music, and dance, it also involved a creation of new art forms, such as happenings, performance art, multimedia installations, and computer art, suggesting that we were indeed living in a new culture of the simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1983a, 1993, 1994; see Chapter 3). In the following section, we will describe the lines of the historical shift from modernism to postmodernism in the arts and the emergence of a new postmodern culture. We will illuminate this transformation with discussion of the postmodern turn in a variety of aesthetic fields, ranging from architecture, painting, and literature to multimedia art and media culture. We argue that though there are a number of diverse postmodern expressions in the arts, they share core stylistic features and, with postmodern interventions in social theory and science, are part of a shift to a new postmodern paradigm. From Modernism to Postmodernism The category of the new has been central to art since the middle of the last century. . . . there has not been a single accomplished work of art in the last hundred years or so that was able to dodge the concept of modernism. . . . The more art tried to get away from the problematic of modernism, the sooner it perished. -T. W. Adorno To elucidate the postmodern turn in the arts, we must begin with some reflections on the forms of modernism that postmodernists parody or repudiate. Beginning in the 19th century, "modernism" took shape as a tendency in the arts that articulated new artistic styles and techniques and new ideologies about the function of art and the role of the artist in society.1 In the 1850s, Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire called for a form of modern poetry that would be able to capture the uniqueness of modern experience, especially the shocks of urban life. His successor Arthur Rimbaud demanded, "il faut être absolument moderne," that art be "absolutely modern," and poet Ezra Pound insisted that artists "make it new." Modernist art sought innovation, novelty, and contemporary thematic relevance, rejecting tradition by negating old aesthetic forms and creating new ones. In this sense, modernism in the arts followed the basic processes of modernity, which involved negation of the old and creation of the new, producing continual originality and "creative destruction" in all spheres of life (see Berman, 1982). In response to the romantic failure to preserve a progressive role for art in bourgeois society and to the increasing encroachments of the market and mass society on the artistic world, modernist artists sought autonomy in the arts, aspiring to free art from religion, morality, and politics, thus allowing the artist to pursue purely aesthetic goals. Indeed, a primary characteristic of modernism is its belief in the autonomy of art, involving an active attempt by the artist to abstract art from social ideology in order to focus exclusively on the aesthetic medium itself. Belief in art for art's sake and the autonomy of art ultimately decentered the aesthetic project from representation and the imitation of reality to a concern with the formal aspects of art. Beginning with the French impressionists in painting, modernist art breaks with realist modes of representation and the concept of art as mimesis, an imitation of reality, in order to explore alternative visions and to experiment with the aesthetic possibilities of a given artistic medium. This modernist project echoed through the arts, generating experiments with new forms, styles, and modes of aesthetic creativity. Consequently, modernist artists undertook a series of formalist experiments in an intensive search for new languages that would liberate them from traditional notions of arts and reality, often anticipating later concerns of science, as Cézanne's multiperspectival vision prefigured that of Einstein (see Chapter 5). In some cases, this preoccupation with form, technique, and mode of vision rendered modern art highly self-referential, more about itself, its own artistic form, than about the social world or even the artist's experience of the world. Schoenberg and his followers experimented, for instance, in the production of a radically new system of atonal music that gave each note in the chromatic (twelve-note) scale equal weight by the device of requiring all twelve notes to be used once before any were repeated. The seemingly arbitrary ordering of notes was called a "tone row" and functioned much like a melody in traditional music. When the same idea was applied to other elements of musical language (rhythm, dynamics, timbre), the allinclusive name for the results was "serial" music. (Glass, 1987: 13) This practice produced a very abstract and modern sounding music governed by an inventive technique and rigorous formalism. In each particular art, modernist artists sought to discover what was specific to painting, writing, music, and other arts, to eliminate extraneous elements derived from other spheres: modernist painters, for example, sought to exclude the literary or didactic from painting. Artists like Cézanne and Picasso experimented with abstract and geometric forms that broke with naturalistic representation; composers like Schoenberg and Webern created new atonal and formal systems of music; writers like Pound and Joyce used language in innovative ways and produced new modes of writing; modern architects devised novel modes of housing and forms of urban design, eliminating aesthetic decoration in favor of function and utility; and groups of modern artists in every aesthetic field created dramatically innovative works and techniques. The movement toward innovation and purity in modernist art replicates the logic of cultural modernity not only in its drive for constant originality and novelty, thus producing a "tradition of the new," but also in its pursuit of the modern logic of cultural differentiation. On Habermas's (1983) account, modernity involves the differentiation of spheres of value and judgment into the domains of science, morality, and art, with each sphere following its own logic. Thus, the modernist celebration of the autonomy of art, the specialized development and refinement of specific artistic spheres, and the quest for formal invention follows the broader trends of modernity. In a sense, the modernist imperative toward ceaseless change and development involves an embrace of the ethos of capitalism, in which variation of product means new markets, shifting tastes, and more profits. During the modernist century (approximately the 1850s to the 1950s), the artist was forced to sell his or her wares on the market, independent of the patronage systems that formerly supported art. This led to an internal contradiction within modernism between the need to produce novel and attractive products for the market and the urge to purify art of anything external or extraneous to the art object. Thus, conflicts erupted between the logic of aesthetic autonomy and its religion of "art for art's sake"-driving modernist artists to avoid contaminating their art with mass society and mass culture-and the imperative to sell their products for the highest price. Modernist art became ever more complex and demanding as innovations proliferated, and by the 20th century modernism defined itself as "high art" distinct from the "low art" of the masses (Huyssen, 1986). Elitism became the corresponding attitude of high modernism and the modernist artist, whose genius and purity of vision was incomprehensible to the layperson. Leading modernists sought to develop their own private language, their own unique vision and style that expressed their singular self. Hence, the works of Eliot, Pound, Klee, and Kandinsky articulated an ideolect that proved incomprehensible to the uninitiated but was readily perceivable to the initiate. The search for a private code inscrutable to the masses, or to most critics for that matter, reached its height in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a novel accessible only to patient polyglots. Walking on the clouds of genius, the modernist often feels intense alienation from the masses, such as evident in many of Baudelaire's poems. The modernist artist was thus driven to create the great work, the masterpiece, and his or her own unique individual style. Genius, monumentalism, and distinctive style and vision were thus intrinsic features of modernist aesthetics. One could easily recognize the paintings of Monet or van Gogh; the prose style of Kafka or Hemingway; the music of Schoenberg or Stravinsky; the theater of Pirandello or Brecht; or the buildings of the International Style. Modernist works also expressed the personal vision of the artist, his or her own unique view of the world, and the modernist masterwork attempted to generate new modes of art and new ways of seeing and thinking. During the early decades of the 20th century, however, modernism split into different, often warring, camps. While a formalist modernism sought primarily to pursue pure aesthetic concerns, avant-garde modernist movements emerged that aspired to revolutionize society, culture, and everyday life by assaulting the institution of art, allegedly corrupted by the bourgeois market society, and redefining the relation between art and life.3 Whereas modernism tried to transform (romantic) alienation into individual autonomy and creativity, the political avant-garde exploded the boundaries isolating the artist from society in order to use the unique gifts of the artist as a means of advancing radical social change. Paradoxically, the extreme individualists of avant-garde art worked in artistic movements that sought to align themselves with whatever social forces-scientific, technological, or political-that they believed augured emancipatory change. For the most part, modernism was a male affair, although women were participating in the avant-garde movements by the 20th century. Women painters like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot were active in the impressionist movement, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Käthe Kollwitz were major figures in the expressionist movement, and women became active participants in groups like the Bloomsbury circle, dada and surrealist movements, and the Paris arts community.4 Thus modernist subcultures gave women an opportunity to participate in cultural creation in a wide variety of arts from which women had previously been excluded, although they continued to suffer prejudice and exclusion in many cases. Likewise, people of color and non-Western artists would eventually appropriate the techniques and practices of modernism, though this development would only gradually mature. Although avant-garde movements like expressionism, futurism, dada, and surrealism built on the formal experimentalism of modernism, continuing the attack on realism and mimesis, they assaulted its ideology of aesthetic autonomy and assailed the bourgeois "institution of art" whereby art was produced, distributed, and received as a commodity and tool of political legitimation (see Burger, 1984). Against modernism, the avant-garde movements saw art as a means of social transformation and sought to integrate art into everyday life. Where high modernism was becoming largely conservative in its function, a bastion of elite taste and an "affirmative culture" (Marcuse) that ultimately legitimated bourgeois social and political domination, the avant-garde strove to subvert dominant aesthetic ideologies and to effect revolutionary social change.5 Nevertheless, the avant-garde remained bound, with modernism, to the romantic notion of the artist as privileged social figure or visionary (as in Shelley's claim that artists are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world"). Moreover, much modern art continued to assume the idealist notion that language was an autonomous bearer of meanings and force of change, two key assumptions to be opposed by postmodern art and criticism. Needless to say, the avant-garde failed to deliver on its promises to abolish oppressive ideologies and institutions or to merge art and life in a progressive social transformation. The militant rhetoric and manifestos of the avant-garde rang loudly for little more than a decade before being silenced by fascism, bureaucratic socialism, capitalism, and war. In Germany, the avant-garde tradition was stopped in its tracks in 1933 when Hitler came to power and banished all forms of modern art as decadent. In Soviet Russia, the last vestiges of a flourishing avantgarde tradition were exterminated by 1934 with the declaration of socialist realism as the official style under the cultural czardom of Zhdanov. In the United States, the avant-garde was defanged during the 1940s and 1950s, less harshly but no less decisively, with the canonization of modernism in the universities and museums and the commodification of art in a dramatically expanding art market. Modernist art lost its sharp critical and oppositional edge, becoming an adornment to the consumer society, while its techniques were absorbed into advertising, packaging, and design, as well as the aestheticization of everyday life. From the Shock of the New to Postmodern Historicism The postmodern turn in the arts maintains some links to earlier aesthetic traditions while also breaking sharply from bourgeois elitism, high modernism, and the avant-garde alike. With modernism and the avant-garde, postmodernists reject realism, mimesis, and linear forms of narrative. But while high modernists defended the autonomy of art and excoriated mass culture, postmodernists spurned elitism and combined "high" and "low" cultural forms in an aesthetic pluralism and populism. Against the drive toward militant innovation and originality, postmodernists embraced tradition and techniques of quotation and pastiche. While the modernist artist aspired to create monumental works and a unique style and the avant-garde movements wanted to revolutionize art and society, postmodernists were more ironic and playful, eschewing concepts like "genius," "creativity," and even "author." While modernist art works were signification machines that produced a wealth of meanings and interpretations, postmodern art was more surface-oriented, renouncing depth and grand philosophical or moral visions (Jameson, 1991). Yet a more activist wing of postmodernism advanced the anarchist spirit of the avant-garde through a deconstruction and demystification of meaning, but while breaking with its notions of agency, its idealist definition of language, and its utopian vision of political revolution (Foster, 1983, 1985). Postmodernists abandon the idea that any language-scientific, political, or aesthetichas a privileged vantage point on reality; instead, they insist on the intertextual nature and social construction of all meaning. For postmodernists, the belief of the avant-garde in the integrity of the individual as an activist agent, in language as revelatory of objective truth, and in faith in historical progress remain wedded to the mythic structure of modern rationalism. As we will see, while some versions of postmodernism leave ample room for social criticism and political change, the postmodern turn in criticism and the arts abandons modern notions of the subject, the work of art, and political change. On the whole, the postmodern turn in the arts reacted against what was seen as both the decay of an institutionalized high modernism and a failed avant-garde. Some critics, however, mourned the passing of modernism while others celebrated its demise. In 1959, Irving Howe lamented the end of the modern in his "Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction" (1970). A sad eulogy was given by Harry Levin in his 1960 article "What Was Modernism?" (1967). For both Howe and Levin, postmodernism was a symptom of decline; it represented the appearance of a new nihilism, an "anti-intellectual undercurrent" (Levin) that threatened modern humanism and the values of the Enlightenment. In 1964, by contrast, Leslie Fiedler wrote two key articles, "The New Mutants" and "The Death of Avant-Garde Literature" (collected in Fiedler, 1971), which celebrated the flowering of a popular culture that was more playful, exuberant, and democratic, challenging the opposition between high and low art and the elitism of academic modernism. In the same vein, Susan Sontag published in 1967 an influential collection of essays entitled Against Interpretation, which attacked the elitism and pretentiousness of modernism and promoted camp, popular culture, new artistic forms, and a new sensibility over the allegedly stale, boring forms of entrenched modernism. Whereas modernism denigrated "kitsch" and "mass culture," those who took the postmodern turn valorized the objects of everyday life and of commercial culture. Moreover, against what Sontag considered an abstract hermeneutics practiced by modernist critics, she affirmed the immediate, visceral experience of art and form over content and interpretation. In 1968, Fiedler made an explicit appeal to "Cross the Border-Close the Gap" (Fiedler, 1971), and this exhortation to break down the boundaries between high art and popular culture became a rallying cry of the new postmodern attitude. Generally speaking, the postmodern turn in literature was carried out against the canonized forms of high modernism that had emerged as dominant in the United States in the 1950s. Modernist writing sought the innovative, the distinctive, and the monumental. Modernist writers like Kafka, Hemingway, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound sought their own distinctive styles to articulate their unique visions. For postmodernists, the aesthetic of high modernism had run its course and depleted its possibilities; the notion of the artistic work as a hieroglyph understood only by experts was rejected for a more accessible, populist writing style; and the concept of the author as an expressive unitary consciousness was dismantled to place the writing subject within a dense, socially constructed, intertextual discursive field. Apocalyptic references to the "literature of exhaustion" and the "death of literature" proliferated, along with corollary references to the "death of the novel" and the "death of the author." These moods elicited conflicting responses ranging from calls for a new "literature of replenishment" (Barth, 1988), which would revitalize traditional modes of writing, to calls for altogether new forms of writing and culture. A wide range of writers who were developing new experimental modes and styles of "surfiction" or "metafiction" were labeled "postmodern," including John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, John Hawkes, and Robert Coover. These styles employed self-reflexive and nonlinear writing that broke with realist theories of mimesis, depth psychology and character development, and views of the author as a sovereign subject in full command of the process of creation. Its "characters" are typically empty, depthless, and aimless, embodying "the waning of affect." Moreover, as in Alain RobbeGrillet's work, moral, symbolic, or allegorical schemes are often abandoned in favor of surface meaning, or the depiction of the sheer "meaninglessness" of random events and fractured "narration." Where modernist novels still assumed some order and coherence in the world and, despite moral uncertainties, aspired to project schemes of redemptive vision, postmodern fiction took a more nihilistic stance in portraying the random indeterminacy of events and meaningless actions, projecting an epistemological skepticism later articulated in postmodern theory. Crucially, postmodern writers implode oppositions between high and low art, fantasy and reality, fiction and fact. Spurning "originality," postmodern writers draw on past forms, which are ironically quoted and eclectically combined. Instead of deep content, grand themes, and moral lessons, ludic postmodernists like Barth, Barthelme, and Nabokov are primarily concerned with the form and play of language and adopt sportive, ironic, self-reflexive, "metafictional" techniques that flaunt artifice and emphasize the act of writing over the written word. Of course, some of the stylistic techniques of postmodern literature were defining features of modernism itself, motivated by its revolt against bourgeois realism-leading many critics to see postmodern literature as continuous with modernism rather than as constituting a radical break or rupture. But one could twist the argument that almost all conceivable stylistic inventions were made by modern and avant-garde artists to lend credibility to the postmodern sense that there is nothing new for a writer to accomplish. All the postmodernists could do, then, would be to push these modernist moves further, to be more radically anti-realist and anti-narrative. Postmodernists, consequently, deployed language to turn in on itself with a new energy. The intense selfreflexivity of postmodern literature thus leads to a constant interruption of narrative, an untiring reminder to the reader that he or she is reading a text, language, a fiction, and not viewing a world without mediation. This is, of course, a technique that Brecht developed in the form of the "alienation effect" of his modern drama in order to break emotional identification between the spectator and the play and to awaken critical reflection instead. Having arisen in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the trends of postmodernism in the arts quickly spread through literature, painting, architecture, dance, theater, film, and music, spilling over into philosophy, social theory, and science by the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast to the differentiating impetus of modernism, postmodernism adopts a dedifferentiating approach that willfully subverts boundaries between high and low art, artist and spectator, and among different artistic forms and genres. To return to Habermas's (1983) scheme, the dedifferentiation process that characterizes postmodernism began the moment the autonomous distance between art, science, and morality started to collapse, once science and money, as vehicles of social power, increasingly encroached on the autonomy of other social spheres in a process that Habermas terms the "colonization of the lifeworld." Once commodification dynamics had advanced to the point that modernism itself was assimilated to the market, the "shock of the new" had been defused, and avant-garde art became a sound investment. In the 1913 Armory Show in New York, European avant-garde art made its shocking debut in the United States; five decades later, it was hanging on the walls of bank lobbies, it provided background for advertisements, and it adorned the clothes and bedsheets of bachelor pads and middle-class homes. At the same time that high art proved itself safely cornered and sanitized, popular art forms based on radio, film, television, advertising, and comics thoroughly saturated U.S. culture. Rather than snobbishly dismissing these "low culture" forms, artists of the 1960s embraced them as a refreshing alternative to high culture and assimilated their forms into their work. Where modern artists were typically insular, obscure, and idiosyncratic in their work, postmodern artists began to speak in the most available, public and commodified languages, such as exemplified in Warhol's use of media images or Venturi's desire to "learn from Las Vegas." By the 1960s, there was a widespread feeling that novelty and innovation in the arts had been exhausted and that all that could be done had been done. The painting White on White by the Russian suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich, which features two barely discernible white squares superimposed on one another, was a clear indicator that in this field, for example, certain formal limits had been reached, and there was talk of "the end of painting." The search for new beginnings that characterized modernism gave way to a "sense of ending" (Kermode, 1967). All that was left for the postmodern artist to do, it was thought, was to play with the pieces of the past and to reassemble them in different forms. Hence, rather than bold innovation and originality, postmodernists deployed eclecticism, pastiche, and parody. As the postmodern architect Venturi put it: "Creating the new means choosing from the old." The modern quest for the new was informed by a belief in the artist as a unique, expressive self. Modern art was one with modern philosophy in its belief in a transcendental self outside of space and time. Contrariwise, postmodern artists, articulating the same anti-humanist themes of poststructuralist and postmodern theory, abandoned the belief in a self, author, and creative genius. The artist is no longer the originary and unique self who produces the new in an authentic vision but, rather, a bricoleur who just rearranges the debris of the cultural past. Rather than expanding on the themes of selfhood, authenticity, originality, and liberation, postmodern artists parody them. Rather than inventing new materials, postmodernists quote what's already around and combine fragments in a pastiche-as Robert Rauschenberg pastes texts from newspapers and images from classical paintings onto his canvases, or as rap artists "sample" riffs from past songs. The postmodern turn is well exemplified in the work of Andy Warhol, who boasted he could produce as many works of art in a day through mechanical reproduction as Picasso could in a lifetime. The attack on the modern ideology of creativity and authenticity is also present in the work of the New York "artist" Mark Kostabi, who signs his name to works conceived and created by a crew of struggling painters who are paid paltry wages for works that fetch thousands of dollars, or in the work of Jeff Koons, who pays groups of artisans to produce "his" environmental sculptures and other works of "art." Hence, the modern concern for monumentality, for great and original works, gives way to the postmodern theme of irony, and modernist seriousness passes over to postmodern play. The postmodern sensibility thus carries out the death of the author and the end of the great work. As Benjamin (1969) analyzed it, the "aura" of the artwork as something singular, sui generis, is corrupted and destroyed through the technology of mass reproduction, particularly in electronic form. Once the "original" is endlessly reproduced, a Baudrillardian state of hyperreality takes effect such that the original becomes indistinguishable from the copies and no more real than its reproductions (see Chapter 3). The lack of aura of the mass-reproduced object and the belief in the end of the expressive self leads to another important contrast between modern and postmodern art: their respective emphases on depth and surface. The modernist focus on psychological and affective depth is related to the modernization processes. Where the capitalist experiences modern subjectivity as freedom from economic constraints, the artist experiences it as a distance from social conventions and the objective world and as a focusing inward. Just as rationalists like Descartes and empiricists like Hume grounded their new epistemologies in the isolated, experiencing self, so modern artists draw their creative resources from an exploration of their interior emotional worlds. The goal of exploring and processing experience was given ever-fresh stimulation through the dramatic changes overtaking modern society in the 19th and 20th centuries, leading to intense individual experiences and passionate, frenzied expressions of subjectivity and anxiety, such as are paradigmatically represented by Edvard Munch's The Scream. In contrast to the expressive power of modern art, some forms of postmodern art display a "waning of affect." The term, coined by J. G. Ballard and popularized by Jameson (1991), suggests that the neurasthenia of the modern condition has given way to a widespread feeling of emptiness and blankness, as though the modern mind, addicted to cocaine, had taken massive doses of lithium to come down and cool out. Coolness, blankness, and apathy become new moods for the decelerating, recessionary postmodern condition in an age of downsizing and diminishing expectations. According to Jameson, the alienation of the subject in the modern era, which required depth of feeling and a critical distance between the subject and the objective conditions of its life, has been absorbed, as expressive subjectivities mutate into fragmented selves devoid of psychological depth and autonomy. Although advocates of the postmodern like to champion it as a break from the modern, there are very few "postmodern" elements that are completely new or innovative. While postmodern discourse renounces originality and the celebration of novelty and innovation characteristic of modernism, it also continues the experimentalism of modernism and the avant-garde. Like these movements, it is committed to formalism, self-reflexivity, ambiguity, and a critique of realism. Against modernism and the avant-garde, however, postmodernism declares both the death of the author and of the work, replacing the former with the decentered self or bricoleur and the latter with the "text." In the poststructuralist lexicon, "text" refers to any artistic or social creation that signifies and can be conceptually interpreted. Thus, not only are artworks like novels and paintings "texts" but so too are buildings, landscapes, and cities. The shift from "work" to "text" is meant both to broaden the category of objects for critical interpretation and decoding and to suggest that the meanings of the text are usually multiple and conflicting, requiring new methods of interpretation that are multiperspectival and that decenter the "authorial voice." Despite the heterogeneity of the various postmodern turns in the arts, they share key concerns and family resemblances. We believe this is the case because there are broad and sweeping changes occurring throughout the culture in general, and these same "epistemic" elements are being articulated in similar ways by various artists and theorists in different fields-an argument that we develop in Chapter 6. In fact, it should be no surprise that postmodern developments appeared first in the arts and only later in criticism and social theory as an explicit movement, since cultural changes are typically explored first phenomenologically, as experiences and moods, and only later reflexively, as theories. Yet, as we will see, the postmodern turn in the arts involves unusual intimacy between theory and culture, with developments in the arts influencing theory and movements in the arts illustrating trends of postmodern theory. One key general characteristic that unites the various postmodern movements in the arts is that they are implosive and dedifferentiating. This is to say that they renounce, implode, deconstruct, subvert, and parody conventionally defined boundaries such as those between high and low art, reality and unreality, artist and spectator, and among the various artistic media themselves. These implosive tendencies are reactions against forms of modernist purism that seek unified or pure aesthetic styles defined according to a strict set of genre rules, as well as responses to the sociological conditions of media culture forms that are saturating culture and society. The implosion of well-defined boundaries means that postmodern cultural forms are typically eclectic and combine a host of different forms, often in playful and ironic ways. Such play with different styles suggests yet another crucial characteristic of postmodern cultural forms: the rejection of structure, order, continuity, and cause-effect relations in favor of disorder, chaos, chance, discontinuity, indeterminacy, and forces of random or aleatory play. These motifs can take the form of an attack on narrative structure in literature, music, dance, or the willful combination of conflicting styles in architecture. John Cage (1961), for instance, made the postmodern paradigm of indeterminacy the organizing principle of his music, using what he called "chance operations" to organize sound in an aural collage that often picked up and delighted in accidental sounds from the environment or from electronic devices. Cage also undid the boundary between music and all other forms of sound, imploding music into sound, making all sound-including silence-a form of music. Cage's collaborator, Merce Cunningham, likewise broke with theme and variation in dance, similar to the way Cage renounced theme and melody in music. In their collaborations, Cage and Cunningham produced their music and dance sequences separately, working within an agreedupon time and structure, and thus were among the first to exhibit a dissociation of music and dance and the effects of an indeterminate chance juxtaposition. Just as Cage absorbed a wealth of sounds in his music, Cunningham absorbed a large repertoire of movements into his dance collages, including clumsy gestures, stillness, and habitual actions of everyday life previously excluded from dance. Like Cage, Cunningham spurned expressive dance and signification, rejecting the notion that were was an underlying idea or meaning in his work. Cunningham claimed that each of his dances produces a unique atmosphere and invites the spectator to interpret the significance, as he or she likes, just as Marcel Duchamp and Cage insist that the spectator produces the meaning of the artwork (see the discussion in Tomkins, 1965). Because so many different elements work together in the postmodern text, postmodernists are typically multiperspectival in their sensibility, believing that no single perspective, theory, or aesthetic frame can illuminate the richness and complexity of the world of experience, or the "text." Postmodernists are also acutely self-conscious about their implosive play with formal elements, and they typically foreground the formal, semiotic, or linguistic nature of their art in a way that calls attention to the process of aesthetic creation as fictive, constructive, and artificial in nature. Just as language came to the foreground of theory in ways that saw words as constituting rather than reflecting reality, so in the arts postmodernists abandon realist principles, which allegedly reflect the world as it is without mediation, and emphasize the medium of language or form itself, a technique also employed by modernists like Brecht. Such an approach characterizes the "metafictional" status of postmodern literature as well as the "double coding" of architecture, and both are symptoms of the "linguistic turn" that informs all postmodern forms and practices (see Chapter 6). As we shall see, some forms of postmodernism play with language, forms, images, and structures, appropriating material and forms from the past, finding aesthetic pleasure in appropriation, quotation, and the play of language, reveling in linguistic and formal invention, puns, parody, and pastiche. Such types of postmodern art are described by Hal Foster as a "postmodernism of reaction" (1983: xii) that is highly historicist, playing with forms of the past and generally affirmative toward the status quo, renouncing the modernist project of critique and opposition. Because of the element of play in this strain of postmodernism, which has its analogue in theoretical discourse, Teresa Ebert (1996) suggests the term "ludic postmodernism," which she and Foster distinguish from a "postmodernism of resistance" (Foster, 1983: xii; Ebert, 1996: ix, passim) that questions and deconstructs rather than exploits cultural codes and "explore[s] rather than conceal[s] social and political affiliations" (Foster, 1983: xii). Ludic postmodernism describes the aesthetic advocated by Sontag, who affirmed the surface, forms, and erotics of art rather than content, meaning, and interpretation. Such an aesthetic finds its precursor in Nietzsche, who anticipates key aspects of the ludic postmodern turn in art, with his emphasis on joy in appearance and on the aesthetic of form and with his renunciation of a depth hermeneutic, writing: "Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously, at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance. Those Greeks were superficial-out of profundity" (1974: 38 and 1954: 683). Consequently, we accept Foster's (1983) and Ebert's (1996) distinction between a ludic postmodernism that indulges in aesthetic play for its own sake while distancing itself from a politically troubled world, or even lending tacit or explicit support of the status quo, contrasted to a "postmodernism of resistance" that acknowledges its self-referential status but also seeks to engage political issues and to change the existing society.7 The less-oppositional postmodernism often plays with contemporary culture, exulting in the profusion of existing culture and society while rejecting modernist tenets and returning to tradition and such things as ornamentation, decoration, and pastiche of past cultural forms. Such a ludic postmodernism thus abandons modernist pretensions to novelty, originality, purity, innovation, and the like and seeks pleasure in playing with the pieces of the past rather than in criticizing the present while envisioing at a new future. Of course, as avant-gardists insisted, challenges to conventional modes of perception in themselves can assume a positive political character, but they can also have depoliticizing effects by limiting themselves to a merely formal level dominated by abstract or ludic functions. Oppositional postmodernists, by contrast, combine artistic and political levels of aesthetic production and employ the formalist inventions of postmodern culture toward political ends, keeping a critical distance and thereby breaking out of the self-referential funhouse of language characteristic of many forms of both high modernism and postmodernism-an argument that we will illustrate later in this chapter through discussion of some oppositional postmodern political artists. On the other hand, such categorical distinctions between modes of postmodernism are only ideal types, and much postmodern culture partakes of both poles, often ambiguously. Thus it is frequently undecidable whether specific forms of postmodern culture are primarily oppositional or conservative, promoting desires for change or a pleasure in the existing order, and are thus "resistant" or "complicit." Indeed, such dichotomies are destabilized by audience reception in which differing audiences receive, use, and deploy various works in highly contradictory and unpredictable ways according to their own gender, class, race, ideological, and other "subject positions." Artworks coded as critical and oppositional may well have conservative effects, while reactionary works can be read against the grain and decoded to generate socially critical insights. Consequently, the categories one uses must be deployed in specific situations and appropriate qualifications made with attention paid to both encoding and aesthetic practice and form, as well as audience decoding and use of the artifact. The Postmodern Moment in Architecture Each generation writes its biography in the buildings it creates. -Lewis Mumford Architecture is the public art. -Charles Jencks Postmodernism began appearing in a variety of artistic fields in the 1960s and 1970s, although it was most dramatically visible in the field of architecture, where it was adopted to describe the new forms of contemporary buildings, which returned to ornamentation, quotation of tradition, and the resurrection of past styles that a more purist modernist architecture had rejected. The rapid dissemination of postmodern discourse and forms in architecture helped to promote it in other aesthetic fields, thus providing concrete substance to the postmodern turn. Indeed, people live in houses, neighborhoods, and social environments, and so architecture is nothing less than the mode of construction of everyday life. Thus, shifts in how architecture is conceived and constructed inevitably produce mutations in the very structure and texture of lived experience and the social environment. The postmodern turn in architecture involves a renunciation of modernist conceptions of stylistic purity, aesthetic elitism, rationalism, and universally based humanist and utopian political programs to beget a new humankind through architectural design. Against these principles, postmodernists like Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, Christopher Jencks, Kenneth Frampton, and Michael Graves renounced the abstract and ahistorical formalism of the International Style, embraced an eclectic mixture of historical styles, pursued an approach that respects both popular and professional tastes, and abandoned the utopian aspirations of modernism in favor of more "modest" goals. Let us, accordingly, engage the modern turn in architecture, examine the postmodern critique, and then explore the forms and theories of postmodern architecture. We shall argue that the turn from modern to postmodern architecture involves a transition from the regime of monopoly capital to a more aestheticized and transnational form of postmodern capital. The Trajectories of Modern Architecture In lieu of cathedrals the machine for living in. -Oskar Schlemmer The bourgeoisie . . . creates a world after its own image. -Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels It is often argued that whereas the lines between the modern and the postmodern are hard to draw in literature, they are particularly clear in architecture. But in fact, the easy dichotomization between modern and postmodern architecture is arrived at only by equating modern architecture with the glass boxes of the International Style, which is just one version of architectural modernism, albeit one that dominated from the 1920s through the 1950s. It is typically ignored, however, that there were a profusion of modern styles, that there was considerable conflict among them, and that many architects of the International Style themselves developed different styles, some similar to the postmodern forms commonly opposed to it. The architectural styles of the modern era include Renaissance (15th century), mannerism (16th), baroque (17th), rococo and neo-classicism (18th), expressionism (19th and 20th), art nouveau (19th and 20th), American industrial style, as in the skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan, and the organic regionalism of Frank Lloyd Wright. Architectural "modernism," however, is said in many standard postmodern accounts to begin with the genesis of the International Style, which appeared in the 1920s, was systematized by the early 1930s, and became dominant throughout the world by the 1950s.8 Our argument in this chapter, however, is that the "modern architecture" constructed by the postmodern polemic is a reductive construct that collapses a great variety of modernist styles into a unitary category of the International Style, thus obscuring important differences. The postmodern turn in architecture is often celebrated and legitimated by a spurious conception of modern architecture that covers over its complexity, diversity, and richness, identifying it tout court with the high modernism of the International Style. We will argue for an architecture that draws upon both modern and postmodern styles to develop a mode that serves human needs and that produces a more livable and sustainable environment. The International Style is largely the product of the Bauhaus School founded in Germany in 1919 when Walter Gropius was appointed director of two schools of Arts and Crafts in SaxeWeimar which he amalgamated, changing the school's name to "Bauhaus," that is, "house of building." The school attracted top teachers and students, but its progressive ideals and plans scandalized the conservative citizens of Weimar, and so the school moved in 1925 to Dessau, Germany, where Gropius designed the edifice that became a prototype for the new style and developed the philosophy that would dominate architecture for the next several decades (Benevolo, 1977: 414ff.). The International Style came to the United States when Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and others emmigrated in the 1930s in order to escape from fascism. They were immediately embraced in the United States as architectural icons. Gropius was appointed head of the Harvard department of architecture in 1937 and Mies was designated director of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1938, designing nearly all of the buildings on the new campus. Their students and followers became active in the major architectural firms in the United States, and their style of highly rationalized and functionalist buildings became the norm throughout the world. The International Style is equated with "architectural modernism" because, like other modernist movements in the arts, it sought to make a clean sweep of the past, to be modern, to use new styles, materials, and technologies, and to advance new ideas. In the words of Gropius: "A breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age in which we live; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling" (1965: 19). The reference to "honesty" is a critical attack on art nouveau, the prevailing aesthetic style that assaulted 19th-century eclecticism, neoclassicism above all, seeking a new "honesty" through imitation of natural forms such as trees and clouds, which it claimed to be the most valid sources of inspiration. Against art nouveau, the International Style asserted a superior "honesty" in the imitation of the geometric forms of the modern machine age and sought to replace nature with man-made environments, or at least to integrate nature into a massive new technoscape of dazzling proportions. Although it presented itself as a break from the past, modernist architecture (hereafter, simply "modern architecture") was dependent upon the 19th-century technological innovations whose iron, steel, glass, and reinforced concrete allowed for innovations in building technique. Modern architecture, moreover, was heavily influenced by the values of dynamism and progress that dominated the 19th century, such as were celebrated in the Crystal Palace science and technology exhibit that opened in London in 1851. Attacking the philosophy of art for art's sake, modern architecture also embraced the utopian and humanist values of the Enlightenment by intending their architecture to contribute to the rationalization of the environment and the liberation of human beings from tradition. The Enlightenment emphasis on universal values was enthusiastically adopted by Bauhaus architects in their quest to construct a global, uniform architectural language that expressed rational values appropriate for the new "universal man." The French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier also expressed the utopian ambitions of modern architecture in his cry of "architecture or revolution," believing that architecture-using new materials, new structural methods, and universal principles of design that were also sensitive to local conditions-could solve the major problems of contemporary urban life, such as housing, traffic, and the organization of cities, in ways that were both efficient and beautiful. Le Corbusier and the new breed of engineer-architects believed that architecture had to be reconceived to realize the new technological possibilities and to respond to the problems of the time. Twentieth-century aesthetic movements also influenced modern architecture. Much of the architectural style of Bauhaus, as well as the work of Le Corbusier, is influenced by cubism, which featured abstract, geometric shapes. Like futurism, which concocted powerful images of the new machine age in excited motion, cubism expressed the dynamic aspects of the modern age through a multiperspectival method of representing various dimensions of objects simultaneously. Early in his career, Le Corbusier produced numerous paintings in the cubist style of Picasso and Georges Braque. He applauded the breakthrough of such painters in creating new forms that he believed had something to teach architecture: "Today painting has outsped the other arts. It is the first to have become attuned with our [industrial] epoch" (quoted in Blake, 1996: 23). Indeed, the cubist influence is vividly evident in the various homes that Le Corbusier designed in the 1920s and is consummately realized in his Villa Savoye (in Poissy, France, 1931), a rectangular boxlike house raised off the ground by concrete stilts, and his Weekend House (1935), comprised of diverse geometrical forms that Le Corbusier described as a form of painting in space. In both his paintings and architecture, Le Corbusier followed the lead of cubism in the spatial arrangement of abstract geometric forms such as cylinders, cubes, and cones that signified nothing but their own formal qualities. Yet Le Corbusier felt that cubism had not completed the formal revolution it began. As Peter Blake put it: "Cubism had cleared the air by removing the most distracting elements of realism from painting, but it had . . . degenerated into a sort of playful, decorative movement" (1996: 28). In response, Le Corbusier and fellow painter Amédée Ozenfant produced a manifesto calling for a return to the geometric foundations of cubism and created a movement within the cubist tradition that they baptized "purism." In October 1920, Le Corbusier and others published L'Esprit nouveau, a magazine dedicated to organizing all the arts around "l'esthétique de la vie moderne." In 1923, Le Corbusier-hitherto known by his birth name of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-decided to focus on the architectural realization of his vision and resurrected himself as Le Corbusier, "the architect," and proceeded to revolutionize the discipline. Both Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus were also influenced by the avant-garde movement, which wanted to use art to transform everyday life, to devise an entire new modern world. Le Corbusier designed his first plan for an ideal city, une ville contemporaine, in 1922, and in 1925 he presented a plan to remake Paris, the Plan Voisin. He produced a housing complex at Pessac in 1925, and some decades later he designed a cityscape in Chandigarh, India (1952-1956). The avant-garde aesthetic influences overlap with a crucial philosophical influence on Bauhaus and the International Style, namely, the utilitarian and functionalist ethos of capitalism and the modern machine age that it absorbed. Capitalist values of standardization and mechanization were embraced as liberating, with the result that architectural production became a factory assembly-line process: "We are approaching a state of technical proficiency when it will become possible to rationalize buildings and mass-produce them in factories by resolving their structure into a number of component parts" (Gropius, 1965: 39). Gropius calls for the transformation of architecture, once a trade subject to the seasons, the site, and "the arbitrary reproduction of historical styles," into "an organized industry" that prefabricates identical materials and standardized parts. This "will have the same sort of coordinating and sobering effect on the aspect of our towns as uniformity of type in modern attire has on social life . . . every house and block of flats will bear the unmistakable impress of our age" (40). Such mass manufacture, Gropius insists, will allow sufficient range for architectural variety and free expression. Gropius rigorously trained a legion of students in the fundamentals of modern technique and design, encouraging them to take their place within the machine age, but the homogeneity of the International Style suggested that the pupils of Bauhaus did little but imitate their masters. Indeed, industrializing processes were so pervasive, so profound, that modern artists could not possibly ignore them. Every architect in particular felt compelled to respond to the machine age; this influenced how they built, what they built, and the philosophies informing their visions of architecture. They were intoxicated with the possibilities of the new technologies and in awe of the problems besetting the design of new urban environments. Despite these technological, philosophical, and aesthetic continuities with the past, modernist architects generally sought to break from the history of architectural form, specifically the ornamental style that prevailed in Europe. They perceived such forms as the Gothic to be aesthetically unpleasing and bound up with authoritarian domination and social hierarchy, and they saw art nouveau as a slavish imitation of nature in contrast to the new industrial designs. For the Bauhaus theorists, massive churches, imposing government buildings, and public monuments projected power and authority, constructing testimonials of might for reactionary forces. Gothic cathedrals in this vision expressed the power and majesty of the church, and not just its aspiration for the divine. These insights are supplemented by Foucault (1965, 1977) who shows how mental institutions, hospitals, schools, and prisons helped construct the social space of modernity, a categorizing, separating, and incarcerating space that confines individuals who refuse to conform to existing norms and practices. This process produced a normalization of subjects through socially constructed definitions of "normal" and the "abnormal," in which individuals are classified and situated according to how they fit into the modern order. On this perspective, the construction of carceral and disciplinary space is a key aspect of the development and trajectories of modern societies. For modernist architects, the reconstruction of space and the construction of a new type of architecture thus constituted an important part of a revolution against the past. For these modernists, architecture should free itself not only from tradition but also from the natural environment, in order to create its own utopian worlds of glass, steel, and concrete. Rather than integrating architecture with nature, a principle Frank Lloyd Wright adopted from art nouveau, many modernists argued that architecture should stand in bold contrast to the natural world. Modern architects sought a new, austere style that abandoned symbolism, ornamentation, and decoration in favor of unity, simplicity, and purity of form, paring down line and space to their bare essentials. In the words of Mies, "Less is more," and Adolph Loos even denounced decoration as "a crime." Whereas historicist values and a plurality of historical styles and unique architectural personalities, such as Antonio Gaudi, flourished before the Bauhaus and would be recaptured afterwards in the movements leading toward postmodernism, the architects of the International Style intended to reduce this eclecticism and plurality to a single new style that they sought to make dominant throughout the world. The prototype for the new International Style was Gropius's design for the Bauhaus compound built in Dessau, Germany, in 1925-1926. The site is made up of a series of rectangular buildings joined together at perpendicular angles. In typical International Style, the design is uniform, geometrically precise, devoid of ornamental detail, and completely standardized, resembling a warehouse or prison yard. This minimalist style was duplicated, with equally uninspiring results, by Mies in his buildings at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the building boom after World War II, the International Style high-rise skyscrapers came to dominate the urban environment throughout the world (although they are now being pushed out by new postmodern buildings). Buildings such as the tall glass and steel towers of Lake Point Tower, Lake Shore Apartments, the Federal Center, and the IBM Building in Chicago, and the Seagram Building in New York, all designed by Mies, exhibited the triumph of the International Style. These phallic prisons, embodiments of Max Weber's iron cage, represent the ultramodernist philosophies that informed them. For the postmodernists, highmodernist architecture strives for purity of form and function, generally ignoring principles of communication (semiotics) and beauty. Aesthetic "beauty" is an obsolete principle that is jettisoned by many modern architects in favor of sheer functionality, whereby, in the words of Louis Sullivan, "form follows function." Beauty is superfluous when the emphasis is on utilitarian values, replicating the same bottomline approach of capitalist society. Architectural modernists fetishized functional values and the technological culture that produced automobiles, highways, and factories. Except for futurism, no other modern art movement has been so conditioned by technological ideology and the modern mechanist worldview as International Style architecture. But the standard postmodern narrative occludes the variety and diversity of architectural modernism. Certainly, not all architecture from the late 1920s to the 1950s had the look of the International Style. Not all modern architects were strict functionalists, and many sought aesthetic inspiration in machines and abstract shapes. The most striking exceptions to the International Style were the inventive modernist constructions of Le Corbusier and the poetic works of Frank Lloyd Wright, most notably the magnificent houses he designed throughout the United States, such as the Kaufmann House, Falling Water (Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 19361937), or Taliesin West (Phoenix, Arizona, 1938), each of which revel in the play of diverse forms and levels coherently linked. Wright, in fact, detested the International Style, Gropius's work in particular, for he witnessed how it came to dominate architecture in the United States and elsewhere, pushing out a diversity of more interesting styles, such as his own Japaneseinspired approach. Other high modernist architects, most notably Le Corbusier, rejected the straitjacket of the glass box to produce highly interesting and innovative buildings. Le Corbusier's Church of Ronchamp (near Belfort, France, 1950-1953), his monumental series of governmental buildings at Chandigarh, India (1952-1956), and his Exhibition Hall (Zurich, 1967), show bold departures from the International Style. Le Corbusier's famous statement that the house is a "machine à habiter," that is, "a machine for living in" is thus misleading and masks his fundamental concern with beauty and the transcendental qualities of abstract forms. "I compose with light," Le Corbusier said, as he meticulously broke up solid planes, on both exterior and interior surfaces, so as to absorb and reflect light and create mood. Le Corbusier speaks of his architecture as "poetry and lyricism brought forth by technics," thereby abolishing any rigid opposition between art and technology. He insisted that architecture "goes beyond utilitarian needs" such that the architect's passion can invent "drama out of stone" (quoted in Blake, 1996: 31)-as is vividly clear in his best works. Moreover, Le Corbusier explored tensions, ambiguities, and paradoxes that subvert oppositions such as those between machine and biology, between mathematical measure and lyricism, between engineering and aesthetics. He willfully combined mechanistic and biological metaphors; thus, his "machine à habiter," whether a house or a city, was composed of various "organs," and so he transcended merely mechanistic or formalist-functionalist conceptions. Yet with the appointments of Gropius and Mies to major architectural chairs, the International Style literally became institutionalized and dominated the global scene, entrenching itself in Europe and the United States as a rigid orthodoxy that few architects dared to challenge if they wanted to work. Most, however, such as the Yale architects, produced endless variations of a highly limited form, seemingly unable to comprehend the possibility of color, locality, or irregular forms. An important incentive to remain within the orthodoxy was that International Style buildings, or so it was thought, were the most cost effective to produce. Those architects who did venture outside of the ideological limits and stylistic parameters of the glass box were condemned, ridiculed, and ostracized, and their designs were often prevented from being realized. In fact, the modernist emphasis on change, innovation, and artistic autonomy was betrayed with the rigidification and repetition of the International Style. But modern architecture was not just formalist; it had a political content and philosophical vision that sought the rational transformation of human beings in conjunction with egalitarian values. The humanist and utopian values of modern architecture were most evident in its attempt to build a suitable form of mass housing for workers, the middle class, and low-income families. Yet these values were grossly belied when the housing projects became prisons befouled by drugs, crime, and graffiti. Apparently, the architects of these compounds presumed that the units were best designed as barren, small, and cramped. Many featured ceilings not to exceed eight feet in height, thin walls devoid of molding, casing, or baseboards, and narrow hallways. In contrast to other contemporary designs organized around patterned variety, such as those by Bruno Taut and Ernst May in Germany, Bauhaus-influenced designs in the United States were homogenized and oppressive. Indeed, in Europe many more successful examples of workers' housing and planned urban environments were carried out by socialist governments. Ironically, Bauhaus architecture was originally conceived of as a socialist architecture, designed to meet the needs of working people. But the International Style became largely a corporate architecture, providing monuments for capitalism and housing units appropriate for its underclass. The utopian and egalitarian aspirations of earlier modern architecture were thus subverted in the capitalist appropriation of modern architecture to aggrandize capitalist corporations and to produce public housing designed more for social control and ghettoization than for creating new forms of democratic life. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer erected the first major skyscraper in 1890 with his World Building in Lower Manhattan, which arose as the largest building in the world. It was soon surpassed by the Metropolitan Life Tower of 1909 (700 feet), the Woolworth Building of 1913 (792 feet), the Chrysler Building of 1930 (1,046 feet), and in the early 1930s the Empire State Building (1,250 feet) (Paul Goldberger, The New York Times, August 4, 1996: H30). Thus, whereas urban skyscrapers like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were appropriate monuments to an earlier era of competitive capitalism, the glass and steel monoliths of the International Style are fitting emblems of a later stage of monopoly and state capitalism. The earlier urban skyscrapers designed by Louis Sullivan in Chicago and the first great high-rise buildings in New York expressed the architectural visions of their creators, with each having a distinctive style and look. Moreover, the spectacle of the earlier skyscrapers, with each striving to surpass previous heights, represented the ethos of a highly competitive and individualist capitalism. The skyscrapers paid homage to the entrepreneurs who dominated the early stage of market capitalism, generating the great economic fortunes and empires. Temples of the heroic stage of capitalism, icons of the market that made possible the amassing of great fortunes, these impressive and individualized edifices produced hieroglyphics of a competitive capitalism in which "Manhattan's great buildings were always happy enough to affront each other in a competitive verticality, the result of which is an architectural panorama in the image of the capitalist system: a pyramidal jungle, all the buildings attacking each other" (Baudrillard, 1983a: 135).9 High modernism in architecture fit perfectly with corporate capitalism and provided a useful ideology for its legitimation. The demand to restructure the environment, to destroy all obstacles in the path of modernization, was a perfect ideology for a relentless capitalist development. Small wonder that the movers and shakers of corporate capitalism were taken with the International Style. In a way, the avant-garde project of destroying tradition unwittingly abetted the agenda of a modernizing capital which itself was negating tradition and obliterating the past and thrived on the creation of perpetually new products and needs. The modernist project of abstraction in some ways furthered the capitalist project of abstracting from concrete human needs, tradition, and culture to promote its obliteration of traditional values and personality and creation of new subjectivities in the transition to consumer capitalism. Moreover, as Tafuri argues (1976), the formalist project of the avant-garde and the International Style was parallel to Nietzsche's and Weber's demystification of the world, producing an ideology that could attack any obstacle in the way of capitalist expansion. Avant-garde formalism, which carried out an eradication of substance, individuality, and subjectivity, was parallel to the capitalist project of reducing the world to the pure stuff of domination (i.e., the worker as pure automaton, the citizen as object of manipulation). The avant-garde thus covertly aided the process of capitalist domination and massification in the production of a new regime of mass production, consumption, and culture no matter how much it attacked bourgeois culture and society. Indeed, the later postmodern turn to individual feeling, to aestheticization, to pleasure and indulgence, and difference and fragmentation, advances the contemporary capitalist agenda of generating a more aestheticized and eroticized world that will promote more individualized consumption, more segmented markets, with new choices, pleasures, and services, thus, once again, serving the agenda of capital that requires a new ideology convincingly served up by postmodernism. The more restrained functionalism of the International Style, by contrast, is the proper representation of a state monopoly capitalism in which individuals submit to corporate control and their uniformity and homogeneity corresponds to the staid, ascetic, conformist, and conservative world of corporate capitalism that was dominant in the 1950s, with its organization men and women, its mass consumption, and its mass culture.10 The International Style was thus appropriate to a homogenizing regime of capital that wanted to produce mass desires, tastes, and behavior. But the glass and steel high-rises of corporate capital can also be seen as monuments to their global power, with the same corporate style appearing everywhere, signifying the triumph of the giant corporations and their ability to remake the world in their own image. The spectacle of high modernity was thus the U.S. corporation, the demiurge and progenitor of a new stage of global capitalism. The high-rise monoliths of the International Style were the temples of the megacorporation, the embodiment of the corporate vision, of the triumph and hegemony of global monopoly capital. Its imperatives meshed with those of modern architecture and its project to beget a new world that is clean, functional, efficient, and universal. But the modern city combined efficient and well-organized centers with regions of disorder, ugliness, violence, and chaos. The ideological abandonment of the modern project thus represents realist insight into the failures of the modernist-capitalist ambitions for a well-organized and functional corporate world and signals the transformation from modern to postmodern architecture, from the hegemony of the International Style to the eclecticism and pluralism of postmodern populism. The shift from modern to postmodern architecture is thus not merely a mutation from one architectural style to another; it is, rather, a sign of a shift to a new regime of capital, a new social order. The fashionable postmodern architecture meets the needs of a transnational and global capital that valorizes difference, multiplicity, eclecticism, populism, and intensified consumerism. Thus, postmodern architecture, shopping malls, and spectacle became the promoters and palaces of a new stage of technocapitalism, the latest stage of capital, celebrating the postmodern image and consumer culture. Perhaps the emergent cyberspace of the Internet will be a new privileged domain of the infotainment society on the horizon. Following this logic, the spectacles of postmodern architecture are more appropriate to the contemporary forms of a highly aestheticized global consumer capitalism, as we shall see in the next sections.