The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

1IntroductionJonathan Raban's Soft city, a highly personalized account of Londonlife in the early 1970s, was published in 1974. It received a fairamount of favourable comment at the time. But its interest to mehere is as a historical marker, because it was written at a momentwhen a certain shifting can be detected in the way in which problemsof urban life were being talked about in both popular and academiccircles. It presaged a new kind of discourse that would later generateterms like 'gentrification' and 'yuppie' as common descriptors ofurban living. It was also written at that cusp in intellectual andcultural history when something called 'postmodernism' emergedfrom its chrysalis of the anti-modern to establish itself as a culturalaesthetic in its own right.Unlike most of the critical and oppositional writing about urbanlife in the 1960s (and I here think primarily of Jane Jacobs, whosebook on The death and life of great American cities came out in1961, but also Theodore Roszak), Raban depicts as both vibrant andpresent what many earlier writers had felt as a chronic absence. Tothe thesis that the city was falling victim to a rationalized andautomated system of mass production and mass consumption ofmaterial goods, Raban replied that it was in practice mainly aboutthe production of signs and images. He rejected the thesis of a citytightly stratified by occupation and class, depicting instead a widespreadindividualism and entrepreneurial ism in which the marks ofsocial distinction were broadly conferred by possessions and appearances.To the supposed domination of rational planning (see plate1.1) Raban opposed the image of the city as an 'encyclopaedia' or'emporium of styles' in which all sense of hierarchy or even homogeneityof values was in the course of dissolution. The city dwellerwas not, he argued, someone necessarily given over to calculatingrationality (as many sociologists presumed). The city was more like a